National Palace Museum

Last Wednesday, I visited the National Palace Museum in Taipei. It is THE must-see destination for any art lover. Asianart.com describes the historical treasures residing within the Gugong Bowuguan as:

"The works of art in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, are classified as national treasures; some have been passed down from dynasty to dynasty since the Northern Sung period (960-1127), the era when the foundation of the collection was amassed. The greater part of the Museum's vast collection entered the Palace during the reign of the Ch'ien-lung emperor (reigned 1736-95), and many of the objects, especially those in jade and bronze, are intimately connected with state rituals. Others have served as symbols of sovereign power such as the Emperor's jade seal, which in China is the equivalent of the crown of a European king.

Following the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the eventual expulsion of the last emperor from the Forbidden City in 1924, the Palace Museum opened in Peking in 1925. With the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the imminent danger of an assault on northern China, the government took measures to safeguard the treasures in the Palace Museum. A large group of the finest objects was carefully placed into wooden crates and shipped south, beginning a 30-year odyssey that took the art over thousands of miles by train, boat, truck, and even hand towed barge, usually under the most adverse wartime conditions. At war's end, the nearly 20,000 crates, which had been divided into several shipments to avoid detection, were reunited in Nanking for a brief period before Chiang Kai-shek moved a selection of them containing more than 600,000 pieces to Taiwan in 1949. It was another 16 years - during which time the collection was stored first in sugar warehouses and then in specially constructed tunnels, before the National Palace Museum, Taipei, opened in 1965 and the public was again able to see this legacy of Chinese civilization."

The centrepieces of the museum collection: Jadeite cabbage & Jasper stewed pork

I was in awe of the thousand-year old treasures and it dawned on me how advanced and sophisticated Chinese civilization really is. The evidence stretches from the early jade pendants of the Zhou Dynasty to the celadon porcelain of the Sung dynasty to the calligraphy of the Qing dynasty.

Which is why I find highly amusing that the centrepiece of the prized collection is a cabbage and a hunk of stewed pork! At the end of the day, everything still revolves around food. How very Chinese! Now, I know where my love of food really comes from - my genes :-)