Inside the main foyer another gun battle broke out when guards from the tunnels broke through the emergency exit and began shouting orders to the crowd. Unaware of the gravity of the situation, they never had a prayer when the Special Forces gunned them down at close quarters. Six of them died instantly, the rest retreated back down to the dark tunnels, which was going to pose a substantial problem for the Chinese.
Ricocheting bullets had already injured four American tourists, one of them a very young boy, age around eight. The four-man medical unit that was integrated into the attacking force was attending the wounded, using their own supplies, and as they worked, the large crowd was slowly exiting the building and moving down to the buses.
At this point, the Chinese moved to secure the museum. Two bigger machine guns, plus ammunition, were brought up to the foyer from the waiting buses. All outside doors were locked by hand, and a dozen sentries were posted. The remaining 28 attackers split into three groups of six, and one of 10, the main assault force that would storm the exhibition rooms where there were still armed security guards.
They hit the one on the upper left first, blasting the door open with machine-gun fire and then spraying the room with 50 rounds, calling for total surrender. A stray bullet shattered a glass case and smacked straight through an early-seventeenth-century Qing Dynasty helmet used by a long-dead emperor for reviewing troops. The bullet cracked open the head of one of the three decorative dragons, split a large ruby in half and probably did about a million dollars worth of damage.
But the helmet survived, and it fared better than a black pottery wine jar, fashioned in the shape of a silkworm cocoon, and dating back to around 300 B.C. This shattered on impact with another Kalashnikov bullet, and joined the remnants of a priceless foot-high, jade Kuei tablet from the early Shang Kingdom, more than 1,000 years before Christ.
A line of bullet holes also decorated the upper reaches of one of China’s most valuable paintings, A Literary Gathering, a massive work exquisitely done in ink on silk for the Emperor Hui-tsung of the eleventh-century northern Sung Dynasty. It still hung, high on the east wall, and might ultimately be restored.
The four cowering guards plainly realized that if the Chinese Special Forces were prepared to inflict millions of dollars’ worth of damage on the contents of these rooms, their own lives were not worth four cents. And they came forward, unarmed with their hands high, and as they did so they heard the thunder of the second machine gun as it obliterated the lock on the door that guarded the room across the wide stone corridor on the upper right.
Again the Chinese Special Forces came in low and hard, the machine gun ripping bullets into the room, from a floor-level position. The two central glass cases were blown apart, glass from the tallest one flying everywhere. But the principal casualty was a large carved ivory Dragon Boat from the Qing Dynasty, again early seventeenth century, perfectly created, right down to the eight oars, the 16 pennants, and the deck canopy, all set in a gold-painted lacquer box. The Russian-made bullets hit it broadside on, reducing it to shards of split white ivory: a destruction of history sufficient to reduce any curator of any museum to unashamed tears.
Two paintings, set high on the west wall, above a colossal stone table, also were raked with machine-gun fire. The large one to the left was priceless, a sixteenth-century work by one of the four masters of the Ming Dynasty, Ch’iu Ying. Entitled Late Return from Spring Outing, it was a world-acclaimed picture, ink and color on silk, executed by one of the greatest artists of the Emperor’s Imperial Painting Academy. The bullets had ripped right across it in two lines, and it would never be restored.
The slightly smaller picture to the left, however, was in ruins, and its demise would be mourned by art historians for years to come. It was a rare and magnificent work by Chao Kan, the tenth-century painter from Nanking, and its title evokes the elegant quality of the landscape: Early Snow on the River. It was a masterpiece by a great master who had trained at the Academy of Art of the southern T’ang court. He had used just ink and light color on silk, outlawing any trace of worldliness, as his fisherman worked the icy river, with a small band of travelers wending their way wearily along the windswept bank. Twenty million modern greenbacks would not have bought one half of it.
Two of the security guards, sheltering under the stone table, were hit and killed; the others begged for mercy and were permitted to surrender. And they trooped outside to join their colleagues with their faces to the wall, hands high above their heads, under the scrutiny of the Chinese raiders.
Room by room, the Special Forces took the museum, the staff was taken prisoner, the last tourists ejected from the building and the machine guns placed strategically on front and rear balconies.
At 1445, the sound of helicopters could be heard, out over the surrounding park. The Special Forces commander, in conference with Major Chiang Lee, knew they must be Taiwanese reinforcements, because the signal had not yet been sent back to the beachhead at Chinsan that the museum was secure.
Instantly they ordered all prisoners out onto the steps with instructions to clear the area, and they radioed Bus 213 to open fire at will on the incoming helicopters. Crammed with special police and the remnants of the Army still in the area, the choppers came clattering in over the trees, and immediately flew into a hail of bullets, from the high front balcony and the area to the rear of the bus.
The lead aircraft took the brunt of the heavy fire from the balcony and suddenly exploded, veering over almost in a full somersault and crashing, rotor first, bang into the green tiled roof. The second helicopter was hit from below and its main engine stopped dead, which caused it to drop like a stone from 100 feet, obliterating itself on the stone forecourt and then exploding, killing 15 tourists and injuring 39 others.
The third one banked left across the trees and flew swiftly back to the nearby Army garrison. Meanwhile Major Chiang Lee sent in the signal to the beachhead that the National Palace Museum was safely in Chinese hands for the moment, save for the underground tunnels and vaults, which still contained resisting security forces of an unknown number.
Twenty minutes later, the first of two waves of Chinese airborne battalions came in over the park, the big helicopters and transporters containing two antiaircraft detachments equipped with QW-1 SAMs. This new modified missile with its 35-pound warhead is equipped with a lethal IR homing device accurate to three miles.
The incoming battalion was also equipped with portable antitank weapons and light mortars, and the troops began to jump out into the park, swarming out of the aircraft onto the wet, green grass below, and forming an instant steel ring around the museum. They tied up with the commandos on the Special Forces that had originally taken the museum, and swiftly moved their missile defenses into position.
The museum was not yet completely secure from attack. But it would need a formidable modern force to break through right now. Taiwan had no chance of recapturing the palace, and only a remote shot at destroying it from the air at this point, because its air force was tragically weak and its missile defenses just about spent.
But the treasure trove of the Chinese centuries was firmly under the control of Beijing for the very first time since Chiang Kai-shek’s 14 trains, bearing the very soul of his vast country, had rumbled down to the east coast ferries, almost 60 years previously.
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