National Palace Museum: art nerds rejoice, all others plz skip if desired

I really picked the best outfit for lots of photos at the classy art museum, didn't I?

The National Palace Museum of Taipei is a legitimately incredible collection of artifacts. In mainland China, art pieces, craft items, and other treasures were collected for generations, as tax payments, gifts to the emperor and foreign acquisitions. After the KMT was fleeing mainland China to Taiwan after the cultural revolution, they ransacked the Hidden City's storehouses and took as many valuable and artistic items as they could, in wooden crates called coffins. Lots of the items remain in the Forbidden City, but LOTS of them are on display in this museum and other banches of the museum elsewhere in Taiwan.

SJ and I knew we could not see everything there or even everything we wanted to, due to the constraints of time and our energy. But we set off on Tuesday morning to go to the museum! It was my last day in Taipei before I headed down south to eventually get to my class, so I brought all my stuff with me, and we left it in a locker in the Taipei Main Station, where I ate the incredible breakfast of some sushi (this was $4 USD!) before taking the Red line Northward and then riding a bus to the location of the musuem.

The outside of the museum had a traditional Japanese garden to one side, and an impressive plaza/ceremonial staircase set up leading up to the entrance. The cost of the entrance was about $12USD and there were people EVERYWHERE speaking lots of langauges.

The first exhibit we went to was a display of artifacts of "The Story of the Stone/The Dream of the Red Chamber." The story is popular, and was important to SJ in their experience of learning history and Chinese, and it was a great piece of literature to use to show off artistic home items. In the story, the main character, who is clearly a stand in for the author, is reminiscing about his family's glory days before their fall from wealth and power. There's a lot of detail about the items in their house and how the are made and what they mean to the various family members. So for me as an outsider, this was a great introduction to the level of crasftsmanship present in wealthy Qing daily life. These pictures are of a chopstick rest, a small teapot, small storage vessels, a set of nesting bowls, a utensil box, and a "snack box" for storing sweets and prepared foods. This was all dreamy to me as a meal prepper.

The next exhibit was of craftsmenship techniques. I guess that these were mostly beautiful objects. I included photos of this incredible coral, this intricate ivory carving of a tower, as well as several artistic ink stones, calligraphy brushes, and some brush stands and brush washing pots

These are more from the Craftmenship exhibit- such detail on the pottery!

This exhibit was all about inkstones, their development, technology and artistic qualities. I especially love the ones in the first and second photo that have the little columns/divots in the inkstone space- this is a natural feature in the stone that was preserved in making the stone. I thought this was so cool and could imagine having a meditative time watching the ink run down around them.

This area was of Buddhist sculptural art. I especially like the 4th photo with the three Buddha's in various postures- I love the expressiveness of their bodylanguage and how you can see the core strength of each one.

This exhibit was all about jade crafting- which has always been very labor intensive, requring grinding processes that drove forward technological development.

I briefly spent time looking at an exhibit about ancient weapon development, which overlapped with the info about jade, as many early blades were made of similar stones.

The museum had some interesting "modern musuem cultural" stuff going on. Firstly, this Jadite cabbage has become incredibly popular over the last few years for reasons SJ and I can only really marvel at. It is so popular that it is stored in a special room with a line and timed access to get to it. SJ and i were not interested enough in it to wait iin line, but we did enjoy seeing people flock around a similary popular item- a stone that looks like a piece of pork belly! It used to be stored next to the cabbage but there was too much crowding so they had to move the cabbage. The cabbage, by the way, is now the mascot of the museum and is featured on all their promo material in cartoon form, and you can also buy so many cabbage themed tchokes and prints, etc.

We also liked this exhibit that involved some Manga elements (speach bubbles, storytelling) overlayed on traditional artwork depicting historical events.

After 3 hours in the museum we started to get a little loopy (when I start imitating stone lords, its time to get me out of there), so we went up to the museum restaurant for lunch. This was definitely the "fanciest" meal I've had so far in Taiwan and it was delicous! And you can see the strage coffins making up part of the upper walls of the museum.

Then we hit the gift shop and skipped out of there!