The National Palace Museum

Today, Devin and I visited the world's greatest exhibition of Chinese art and culture. The National Palace Museum in Taipei has 650,000 individual items; to view them all would take the average person three years. The Museum is widely considered to be one of the world's finest, standing alongside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Louvre.

We loved it. The scope of art and artifacts, dating back to 6,000 BC, is stunning. Classic examples of Chinese culture and history are expertly displayed. Our favorites were an intricate river boat carved out of a one-inch-long olive pit with a 300-character poem inscribed on the bottom, and seven concentric balls carved out of a single piece of ivory (see the short video below for a better explanation). We plan to return to the museum in early October when our friend Toby visits from New York.



Like most things in this strange nation, the backstory of the National Palace Museum is just as interesting as its surface. Chinese emperors gradually assembled the collection in Beijing's Forbidden City starting in the10th century AD. After the imperial system collasped, China's Nationalist government held the first public art exhibition in 1925. But World War II forced the government to pack the collection into almost 20,000 crates and squirrel it away in the Chinese hinterlands. After the war, conflict exploded between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and Chairman Mao's Communists. In 1949 the Nationalists retreated from mainland China to the tiny island of Taiwan. They brought nearly all of the art with them, leaving only 700 crates to the Communists.

Needless to say, China remains incensed over Taiwan's possession of 8,000 years of Chinese history. However, many people contend that Taiwan served humanity by preserving the collection from 1966 to 1976 when China's Red Guards would have destroyed the art for embodying Chairman Mao's forbidden "Four Olds": Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas.

In 2007, I believe that Taiwan is still in a better moral and developmental position to protect this priceless treasure. I trust Taiwan's transparent democracy and modern infrastructure more than the nation that brings us poisoned toothpaste, tainted food, lead-coated toys, the world's worst industrial safety record, unbridled environmental degradation, and a never-ending sea of human rights abuses against Christians, Tibetans, Falun Dafa practitioners, journalists, and internet users. If China swallows up Taiwan, the loss of this art would be a crime against all people.