The National Palace Museum

As part of a recent trip to Taipei, my colleagues and I visited the National Palace Museum, probably the best-known museum in Taiwan. Basically, all the good stuff from Mainland China was sent to Taiwan for protection, and when Taiwan became independent, they kept all the goodies, at the National Palace Museum.

The Museum was very impressive, and positively huge. The collections were entirely Asian, which was interesting for me, and the exhibits were mostly chronological, which didn't tap into the collection's potential in my opinion. However, I was thrilled to see that the wall text was bilingual, if not trilingual, Chinese, English and sometimes Japanese. It made me think for a moment about how cocky it is that the national museums in the US only use English. They are, after all, a huge tourist pilgrimage location.

The tour was tough-- millions of years in an hour, on a very crowded holiday. But overall, it was a typical museum tour. I think we made something like twenty stops, which made my head spin, and by the end I was one of the awful learners singing and dancing in the back of the tour group. (Ok, it the docent was explaining how scholars were judged partially by how good their inkwells were, and would attract followers by having good inkwells. That somehow needed to become "My inkwell brings all the boys to the yard..." with a dance.)