ABSTRACT
The little history of Fontainebleau's Chinese Museum is intimately linked to the "grand" military and diplomatic history of the Empire. The arms and armour—including the famous parade armour of the Qianlong emperor—were sent to the Artillery Museum, located in the Hotel des Invalides, but the empress held on to several pieces that she deemed especially remarkable. At Versailles, Louis XIV had maintained a "cabinet of curiosities and rarities" adjacent to his apartment and Marie Leszczinska-Queen Antoinette, whom Eugenie virtually worshipped, had installed in several rooms of her interior apartment the collection of Japanese lacquers inherited from her mother, Empress Marie-Therese Dolan. In the 1980s, the chateau's curatorial staff made the decision to restore the Chinese Museum and the adjoining rooms to their Empire condition. In the course of 2014, the Chateau of Fontainebleau was visited by over 500,000 French and foreign visitors.
