TAIPEI >> Taiwan’s national museum will display a torn 660-year-old Chinese landscape painting by bringing together its two pieces that have been kept separate in China and rival Taiwan.

The main portion of the 20-foot-long “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains” by revered Chinese landscape painter Huang Gongwang is stored in Taipei’s Palace Museum.

It will be reunited with the other part shipped from China’s Zhejiang Provincial Museum at an exhibition opening June 2, said Palace Museum Director Chou Kung-shin.

The Yuan Dynasty painting was split into two parts some 300 years ago as a private collector burned it as he was dying, but a relative quickly saved it from the flames, Chou said.

“Huang finished the scroll at 81 when he was already a master painter,” she said. “It is an important work in art history, and has changed hands among many noted collectors.”

One part was among some 600,000 treasures moved from China to Taiwan in the last stages of the Chinese civil war more than 60 years ago that are now on display in the Taipei museum or stored in its vault.

The 40-day exhibition is widely seen as a gesture by the Chinese government in support of Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou’s three-year efforts to engage the mainland and reduce political hostilities.

Taiwan and China split amid civil war in 1949, and China still claims the self-governing island as part of its own territory.

China has long said the art at Taiwan’s Palace Museum rightfully belongs to Beijing, but has encouraged museum exchanges amid the rapidly warming ties.

The Palace Museum and its counterpart in Beijing held their first joint exhibition in Taipei in 2009.