The National Palace Museum is a museum located in Taipei and Taibao, Taiwan. It has a permanent collection of nearly 700,000 pieces of ancient Chinese imperial artifacts and artworks, making it one of the largest of its type in the world. The collection encompasses 8,000 years of history of Chinese art from the Neolithic age to the modern. Most of the collection are high quality pieces collected by China's emperors.
The National Palace Museum and the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City in Beijing, mainland China, share the same roots. The National Peiping Palace Museum in Peiping split in two as a result of the Chinese Civil War, which divided China into the two entities of the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan and the People's Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland respectively. In English, the institution in Taipei is distinguished from the one in Beijing by the additional "National" designation. In common usage in Chinese, the institution in Taipei is known as the "Taipei Former Palace" (臺北故宮), while that in Beijing is known as the "Beijing Former Palace" (北京故宮).