An exhibition featuring nearly 150 historical artefacts from France’s Palace of Versailles and the Forbidden City in Beijing highlighting “mutual fascination” between the two cultures opens on Wednesday in Hong Kong and is expected to draw 200,000 visitors.
The show, “The Forbidden City and the Palace of Versailles: China-France Cultural Encounters in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, marks the first time collections from the two UN World Heritage sites are to be juxtaposed in the same exhibition.
Laurent Salome, director of the National Museum of the Palaces of Versailles and Trianon, said on Monday that the exhibition had its origins in 2014 and that it was important to show how artisans learned from each other back in the day.
“The show [offers] new ways to discover those two cultures, which have felt a mutual fascination for each other for centuries,” he said.
“You’ll see how complicated this is – it goes both ways and you can trace the stories and the influences through the objects on display.”
The exhibition will be held at the Hong Kong Palace Museum as one of four shows at the West Kowloon Cultural District in 2024 to celebrate 60 years of Sino-French diplomatic ties.