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The Cultural Palace of Nationalities, one of the Ten Monumental Buildings built in 1959 in Beijing to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), is considered a ‘political building’ in that it brings together ethnicity, architecture, art, technology and, most importantly, representations of the Party-state’s policy on the unity of the many different nationalities in China. A careful examination of the history of the Palace’s construction and its exhibits reveals two unsettling problems: the Chinese Communist Party’s manipulation of official images of national minorities, along with the Party’s difficulties in dealing with ethnic nationalism, regional separatism and local identity in the first decade of the PRC. These same thorny issues continue to cause the current government a major headache. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]