When the Chinese Civil War was conclusively turning against the Nationalists in the late 1940s and they fled to Taiwan, they looted as much of the country as they could get their hands on, including most of the cream of China’s museums. With the Red Guards subsequently destroying as much of Chinese civilisation as they could get their hands on twenty years later, this has in retrospect turned out to be a wonderful act (although I feel the KMT shouldn’t get more credit than they deserved at the time) and has left the National Palace Museum in Taipei as a slightly displaced Greatest Hits of mainland Chinese material culture.

It is also easily the most annoying place in Taiwan to reach on public transport.* After breakfast at Gan Mei Alley (pork and peanut butter buns, egg rolls with Chinese basil, Hakka “pounded tea” and a surprising number of very tame swallows flitting around outside) we had to take two metro lines (including the rubber-tyred French mistake of the Wenhu line) and a bus just to get within fifteen minutes’ walk of the place. This was further complicated by many Taipei buses not having route numbers – “er, the bus that starts with that character that looks like two branches”.** But said walk took us through a lovely (apart from the grey-with-pollution water) empty Chinese garden, and a fantastic uphill path (taxis swishing past on the nearby road constantly; obviously everyone else was struggling to make the public transport work too) on which a great big red and black millipede poked up from one hole and marched purposefully towards another.

The museum has expanded several times since its establishment. Its current incarnation is a set of huge palace structures (all with matching tiles) on the side of a valley north of the city centre. We started with the top floor and the Meat-Shaped Stone, a piece of jasper crafted to look like a lovely bit of pork which is the most popular and beloved item in the museum (which says good things about Taiwan’s priorities).  Next an exhibition on inkstones: ink for traditional Chinese writing comes in solid sticks which need to be ground and mixed with water using a specialised tool, these tools ending up as varied, tasteful and beautiful as you can imagine a beloved accessory of a trend-chasing scholar class for millennia being, although I could have used a video showing one being used (like this one.)

Bronze and jade are both hard-wearing materials capable of being made into enduring and beautifully detailed objects, which people in China have been doing for at least 4,000 years. An excellent gallery of the bronzes – pots and wine jugs and knobbly bells, various vessels of a completely alien looking aesthetic which resembles literally nothing in any modern style, some shockingly early crossbow mechanisms, knives and battle-axes with built in rattles (jingling as you kill someone…?) was matched by an infinity of jades and, critically, a short introduction to jade-working.

Jade – I hadn’t really appreciated – is an incredibly hard stone and needs to be worked with soft tools plus mineral abrasives; distinctive shapes result from various (string, bamboo, wood, iron) tools, which really helped you appreciate the sheer hard work involved in an overwhelming gallery of white nephrite and, later, green jadeite, delights. Trends changed over centuries as new tools and sources of jade emerged, with earlier centuries tending towards paler nephrite and mannered proportions, later towards green jadeite and more elaborate carving. The 18^th century*** Qianlong Emperor in particular was an opinionated snob about “trendy” jade in his period while also – the curators pointed out with satisfaction – falling regularly for fake antiques. There was also for some reason an archery minigame, which Fran fluffed and I avoided doing because I would also have fluffed it.

We were getting museum-feet so went to the fourth floor restaurant seeking a restorative cuppa and cake. The museum’s website brags about the place’s “unique, tradition-oriented service process” which seemed to mean the staff ignoring us and the dozens of other people waiting while half the tables were empty, so we went downstairs to an extremely cheerful little caff in the lobby instead. Heading back in we started with the Very Best Of gallery: truly bonkers cloisonne enamels (including a famous duck), fab ceremonial tinderboxes that Manchu rulers carried to remind themselves of back when they didn’t have millions of servants for this, ivory pagodas and one of those deranged sphere-within-sphere*10^8 things, cabinets of curiosities, palace furniture, things made of kingfisher feathers. During the Qing dynasty (1630s-1910s) you start to see a lot more European curios: at the same time as blue-glazed Chinese porcelain becomes ubiquitous in high-end European collections, painted enamels of horrible bewigged Louis XIV looking things and witless court scenes start popping up in their Chinese equivalents.

The paintings and calligraphy section was the most interesting and charming because it was also the most human: as well as the lovely depictions of life, cities, animals, mountain journeys and tea-ceremonies in the artworks, the information boards told lots of fun little stories about bros having tea and bringing each other drinks and praising each other’s virtues (and one weird dweeb who forced his staff to clean trees.) Art trades and gifts of pictures with poems seem to have been a major preoccupation of historic Chinese… “intellectuals” is probably the word I’d use, but the museum wasn’t sure either and wavered between “literati” and “erudites”.

I did notice that most of these works were covered in red seal-stamps – I would have assumed just one was the artist’s signature, but some had more than a dozen. I asked one of the many many museum staff wandering around holding up a paddle saying “ask me things!” and he explained (with some great hand gestures) that these were the stamps of the collectors who owned these works and literally wanted to make their mark on them. Our snobby pal the Qianlong Emperor was apparently nicknamed “the killer of art” for his compulsive need to stamp everything in his collection with a red mark bigger than any of his ancestors’.**** We were a bit pressed for time so had to breeze through the final sections, including a slightly inaccessible special exhibition based on the novel “Dream of the Red Chamber” and a sprawl of ceramics whose subtle celadon beauty was largely wasted on us.

Dinner featured kings: first, “Snow King”, an ice cream shop specialising in unusual flavours (a bit like Gelateria del Teatro) founded in 1947 by a fellow named Kao Jih-hsing whose family have now been running it for three generations, which is something you can apparently just do in Taiwan. I went for the pork floss ice cream, which was genuinely good in a Heston Blumenthal way, while Fran tried two based on local fruits: custard-apple and mulberry (also lovely). Then, to the Popcorn Chicken King for popcorn chicken, a deep-fried century egg and pig blood cake (it’s literally just straight black pudding – good but I was hoping it’d be different from something you get in fry-ups back home.) And then, as we bumbled south towards Lungshan Temple, we passed a patisserie called King of Beard (the middle bar of the “King” character was replaced by a moustache).

A real joy of Taipei’s streets is their chaotic diversity: among the tightly packed buildings you genuinely have no idea what you’re about to encounter next: a noodle bar, a police station, a sneeringly grand Western-style hotel full of polished granite and gilt furniture, an Instagram-popular food place with seventy people queued outside, a moped repair shop full of broken washing machines, a Japanese chain restaurant, a pocket-sized shrine with dragons and tigers and incense, a traditional Chinese medicine shop with creepy vegetables in jars, a massage parlour, a flight of stairs up to a shopping centre, a spooky flight of stairs down to an abandoned shopping centre. Here, an old bloke in flip-flops was walking a pig around on a leash outside a colossal temple. Lungshan is joyfully syncretic, with gilt representatives of Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist and local folk beliefs all gathered under its colossal ornamented roofs (the better-polished deities gleaming in the reflected light of thousands of offering LEDs), incense drifting through the air, and an artificial waterfall in the courtyard. It’s only about three hundred years old (materially much younger, as it’s been destroyed a few times and returned Ship-of-Theseus like) but feels properly ancient.

Wandering home, we noticed many Taiwanese running out into the roadside with bags of rubbish, and a yellow bin lorry (merrily playing Fur Elise), at which point we realised we hadn’t actually seen any bins in Taipei and discovered that locals have to give things directly to the bin lorries.

Taiwan 2025
Jiufen and Houtong / Taipei Museums / Taroko Gorge / National Palace, Lungshan Temple / A Brief Interlude / CKS Memorial and Maokong / Dihua Street, Taipei 101 / Anping District and Forts of Tainan / Tainan History / Fenqihu / Alishan

^{* Seriously, Hualien was substantially easier and it’s on the other side of the country.
** I’m learning to read a few Chinese characters! I can read tea, meat, mountain, middle, gate, big, no, king, person and danger. This has been useful already.
*** Most of it, anyway.
**** Also apparently added his own poetry. I didn’t ask if it was good.}