BEIJING – Founded in 1933, the Nanjing Museum was created as a sanctuary for China’s national treasures at a moment of existential danger, housing artefacts evacuated from the Palace Museum in Beijing to keep them out of the hands of invading Japanese troops.

Nearly a century later, that founding mission has come under scrutiny – amid a reckoning that the gravest threat to cultural custodianship may come not from outside forces, but from within.