Hillary left early for the airport on my last day in Taiwan, but my flight didn't leave til late afternoon. I decided to head to the National Palace Museum on the last day to check out the 10:00 am English guided tour.
The
National Palace Museum is the national museum of the
Republic of China, and has a permanent collection of over 677,687 pieces of
ancient Chinese artifacts and artworks, making it one of the largest in the world.
The collection encompasses over 8,000 years of
Chinese history from the Neolithic age to the late
Qing Dynasty.
Most of the collection are high quality pieces collected by China's
ancient emperors.
The National Palace Museum and
Palace Museum, located inside the
Forbidden City in
China, share the same original roots, which was split in two as a result of the
Chinese Civil War.
We weren't allowed to take a pictures inside the museum, but I am very happy that I decided to take the tour. The museum was extremely crowded and I never would have had a clue what I was looking at without the guide's help. Ming Dynasty pottery is cool, but when she tells me that "that little blue dish is worth more than the entire museum's collection", now I'm listening. And that tea cup? Yeah, one just like it sold at auction for 1.8 million US dollars. Say what?
A few of the famous artifacts that I saw:
- The "Jadeite Cabbage": A piece of jadeite carved into the shape of a cabbage head, and with a large and a small grasshopper camouflaged in the leaves. The ruffled semi-translucent leaves attached is due to the masterful combination of various natural colour of the jade to recreate the color variations of a real cabbage.
- The "Meat-shaped Stone": A piece of jasper, a form of agate, the strata of which are cleverly used to create a likeness of a piece of pork cooked in soy sauce. The dyed and textured surface makes the layers of skin, lean meat, and fat materialized incredibly lifelike.
- The "Carved Olive-stone Boat":[18] A tiny boat carved from an olive stone. The incredibly fully-equipped skilled piece is carved with a covered deck and moveable windows. The interior has chairs, dishes on a table and eight figures representing the characters of Su Shih's "Latter Ode on the Red Cliff." The bottom is carved in minute character the entire 300+ character text with the date and the artist's name.
I headed back to the hotel, grabbed some lunch and then headed to the airport! A fun week! I would definitely head back to Taiwan to explore the southern part of the country. There is some famous diving in that region.
