A Chinese masterpiece split 360 years ago is to be restored and displayed in TaiwanBy Clifford Coonan in Taipei.

The 660-year-old scroll, Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, is considered one of the masterpieces of Chinese painting, an elegant depiction of a slow-moving river, laden with Tao Buddhist symbolism. But now the painting by Huang Gongwang, who lived at the turn of the 14th century, has taken on another meaning, becoming a powerful symbol of how China is dealing with its past, and emblematic of a growing closeness between mainland China and its bitter rival, Taiwan.

For decades a crucial section of the scroll has been sitting in a museum in mainland China, while the majority of the painting is on display at Taiwan's National Palace Museum. Next week, the museums on both sides of the Strait of Taiwan will bring the sections of the scroll together for the first time in 360 years.

On Thursday, the National Palace Museum in Taipei will display all surviving sections of Huang's masterpiece, which is from a school of painting known as the Four Yuan Masters.

"Huang finished the scroll at 81 when he was already a master painter," says Palace Museum director, Chou Kung-shin. "It is an important work in art history, and has changed hands among many noted collectors." The art historian is passionate about this painting, one of about 650,000 treasures moved from China to Taiwan in the last stages of the Chinese civil war that are now on display in the Taipei museum or stored in its vault.

But the tale of the painting's division stretches back further than the creation of modern-day Taiwan.

Huang Gongwang was a late starter, beginning his painting career at the age of 52. He started Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains aged 78, completing it three years later.

"It's a literary type painting from the Yuan dynasty. It was split into two parts some 300 years ago as a private collector, Wu Hongyu, ordered it burned after his death, but his niece quickly saved it from the flames," Ms Chou said. The scroll nevertheless suffered fire damage – you can see the areas where it has been repaired – and was separated into two sections.

The first part of the scroll – The Remaining Mountain, which measures 51.4cm – has been on display in the Zhejiang Provincial Museum on the mainland. The latter section, composed of six joined pieces of paper and measuring 636.9cm, entered the Qing imperial collection in 1746.

When the Japanese invaded in 1931, the then-ruling Kuomintang (KMT) government ordered the Qing collection to be moved in 13,000 boxes. The collection went first to Shanghai and Nanjing, then to Sichuan and Guizhou in the west. By the end of the Second World War the collection had spent 16 years criss-crossing China on trains with machine-gun nests to fight off Japanese troops, communist guerrillas, and bandits.

The KMT took some of the greatest cultural artifacts – including paintings, calligraphy, porcelain and rare books – with them on their retreat to Taiwan in 1949 led by Chiang Kai-shek. They shipped some 654,000 pieces of jade, scrolls and pottery in 3,000 crates when they fled. While China has long said the art at Taiwan's Palace Museum rightfully belongs to Beijing and the Taiwanese are reluctant to lend items in their collection to their mainland counterparts, the exhibition next week is a gesture by the Beijing government in support of Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou's three-year effort to defuse tensions and engage the mainland.

There are now two million Taiwanese living in mainland China and China has replaced Japan as Taiwan's biggest trading partner. The Taipei museum is full of tourists from the mainland, part of a wave of visitors from China taking advantage of scores of daily direct flights to Taiwan. More than 1.5 million Chinese tourists visit each year.

Despite growing closeness, China still considers breakaway Taiwan a renegade province, an inviolable part of its territory since the KMT lost the civil war with Chairman Mao Zedong's Communists and fled across the Strait in 1949. President Ma says he has brought peace to a regional flashpoint in Asia, although he stands firm on the self-ruled island's sovereignty. "Over the past 20 years, mainland China has changed its economic and cultural policies, but it has never changed its political approach to Taiwan. We are doing everything we can to minimise the threat of China and maximise the opportunities," Mr Ma said at a recent briefing in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan.

Although tensions are slowly thawing, it's not all been smooth sailing – China suspended defence ties last year with the United States after Washington announced more than £3.7bn in weapons sales to Taiwan. And only yesterday Taiwan's top intelligence official claimed to have uncovered details of Chinese spies posing as tourists to infiltrate the nation. National Security Bureau director-general Tsai De-sheng, speaking to lawmakers, said expanding cross-strait traffic had been a boon to Chinese espionage attempts on Taiwan.

But for now, artists are happy that their beloved painting has been reunited, and hope politicians will take inspiration from the serene and moving river scene at the centre of the scroll.