This is the famed jade cabbage (Ch'ing Dynasty), one of the most beloved of the treasures in the National Palace Museum. 
Taipei's undisputed "must-see," this huge museum is the cream of the collection of the Chinese emperors, celebrated as the greatest collection of Chinese art anywhere. (It's also amazingly well- traveled. As things fell apart in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, the collection - in nearly 20,000 crates - was shipped all over China. Eventually the most precious objects were sent to Taiwan to protect them from Mao and his thugs, where they've been carefully recatalogued, rehoused, and await the reunification of China. The map below shows the movements of the Palace collection, and - in green - other treasures from a museum started in Nanking in 1933.) Just between you and me, I was a bit under- whelmed. Conditions were perhaps inauspicious - the place was overflowing with tour groups (many Japanese), 
the emperors seem to have collected little religious art, and the newly refurbished wing which will show paintings and calligraphy was closed. But the epiphany I was hoping for never came. With the exception of a few scroll paintings and the falanges on some Shang bronzes, Chinese art has never really stirred me (except at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, whose collection gave me the impression of finally "getting it"). I thought the National Palace Museum would change all that. But the piece I liked best turned out to have been made in Japan. Oops.
What I'll remember from today (boor that I am) is more likely to be the 3-D movie - they gave us cardboard glasses! - in the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines. Video game-like animation introduced the cosmogony of one of Taiwan's indigenous (Austronesian) communities, leading from a familiar sci-fi scene of planets whirling through space to the shooting out of the sky of one of the two suns which were making life on earth unbearable by an Aboriginal huntsman.
(It becomes the moon.) Then we got to meet a young man who'd heard about a giant boar whom he decided to devote his life to killing. When he thought he'd finally found the boar it was a Dutchman in funny clothes he found instead. The Dutchman dropped his gun as he ran away, and our hero picked it up and ran to return it to him, arriving on the coast just in time to see a huge naval battle between the Dutch and the Spaniards. Terrified he headed back into the woods but somehow ended up running through a time tunnel of 500 years of Taiwanese history (it takes ten seconds) and found himself in a baseball diamond, holding not the white man's gun but a baseball bat. He seems to be both pitcher and hitter, and the ball he hits is more than a home run - it flies out, blazing, into space, past planets, along the rings of Saturn, and on and on into the familiar sci-fi scenery. The spirit hunters of the Aborigines live on in outer space. Weird.
But maybe this is the kind of infomercial you need to make to compete with the world-historical claims of the Chinese (who never appear in this film!), making common cause against the great western boar. Pondering which enigma I went to a Starbucks (the belly of the beast!) and worked on my presentation for tomorrow.
Taipei's undisputed "must-see," this huge museum is the cream of the collection of the Chinese emperors, celebrated as the greatest collection of Chinese art anywhere. (It's also amazingly well- traveled. As things fell apart in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, the collection - in nearly 20,000 crates - was shipped all over China. Eventually the most precious objects were sent to Taiwan to protect them from Mao and his thugs, where they've been carefully recatalogued, rehoused, and await the reunification of China. The map below shows the movements of the Palace collection, and - in green - other treasures from a museum started in Nanking in 1933.) Just between you and me, I was a bit under- whelmed. Conditions were perhaps inauspicious - the place was overflowing with tour groups (many Japanese), 
the emperors seem to have collected little religious art, and the newly refurbished wing which will show paintings and calligraphy was closed. But the epiphany I was hoping for never came. With the exception of a few scroll paintings and the falanges on some Shang bronzes, Chinese art has never really stirred me (except at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, whose collection gave me the impression of finally "getting it"). I thought the National Palace Museum would change all that. But the piece I liked best turned out to have been made in Japan. Oops.What I'll remember from today (boor that I am) is more likely to be the 3-D movie - they gave us cardboard glasses! - in the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines. Video game-like animation introduced the cosmogony of one of Taiwan's indigenous (Austronesian) communities, leading from a familiar sci-fi scene of planets whirling through space to the shooting out of the sky of one of the two suns which were making life on earth unbearable by an Aboriginal huntsman.
(It becomes the moon.) Then we got to meet a young man who'd heard about a giant boar whom he decided to devote his life to killing. When he thought he'd finally found the boar it was a Dutchman in funny clothes he found instead. The Dutchman dropped his gun as he ran away, and our hero picked it up and ran to return it to him, arriving on the coast just in time to see a huge naval battle between the Dutch and the Spaniards. Terrified he headed back into the woods but somehow ended up running through a time tunnel of 500 years of Taiwanese history (it takes ten seconds) and found himself in a baseball diamond, holding not the white man's gun but a baseball bat. He seems to be both pitcher and hitter, and the ball he hits is more than a home run - it flies out, blazing, into space, past planets, along the rings of Saturn, and on and on into the familiar sci-fi scenery. The spirit hunters of the Aborigines live on in outer space. Weird.But maybe this is the kind of infomercial you need to make to compete with the world-historical claims of the Chinese (who never appear in this film!), making common cause against the great western boar. Pondering which enigma I went to a Starbucks (the belly of the beast!) and worked on my presentation for tomorrow.
