Spring Break 2010: Singapore, Taiwan, Singapore, Tokyo (Day 4 Part 2)

Our second big target for the day is the National Palace Museum, the primary repository for Chinese cultural artifacts on earth. When the previous government of China (currently in charge of Taiwan) was getting its ass kicked by the commies (currently in charge of mainland China) after WW2 they evacuated most of the treasures in the Forbidden City storehouses to Taiwan, along with other choice tidbits. The commies then destroyed most of their remaining historical artifacts during the Cultural Revolution, making the Taiwanese collection far more important and rare. Or at least this is how I remember it from classes in high school - the short version is, if you want to see historical Chinese stuff, the National Palace Museum is the best in the world, and probably nobody else is in the same tier. Only 1% of the total collection can be displayed at the same time - they rotate it every few months. It takes more than ten years of regular attendance to see everything.

Anyway, we took the subway most of the way there and then had to change to a cab for the last leg as it is well outside the city proper. We were running a bit later in the day than we wanted to be getting there, because it normally closes at 5PM and seeing even the 1% on display takes hours. Fortunately, we just happened to go on Saturday when they turned out to be open until 8PM, so we had time to see everything we wanted to, which was pretty much everything on display.

From prehistory until the beginning of the 20th century. Incidentally, I don't think the Chinese says the same thing as the English. I read it as something more like "Eight Thousand Year Long History" and don't see anything likely to be related to treasures or items of value. Andrew Tsai, correct me?

This picture was taken after we left the museum at the end of the day. It has several imposing entrances before you actually get to the door.

Pictures are understandably totally forbidden inside the building as the public never managed to actually turn the flash off until after they've set it off several times. Thus, I can't show you the things we saw very well, and descriptions aren't going to go far. I recommend you go to their website and look at the pictures they've taken of parts of the collection here. Go to Collections and then Selections. We especially enjoyed the bronzes, ceramics, and carvings. We spent probably five hours going between exhibits, hitting ones we were most interested in, circling back around when one area was too crowded, and generally getting lost in the intertwined exhibits.

One thing we mention as especially cool was reading Chinese characters from 2600BC - they are many that of course are not used in Japanese or even in Chinese any more, but some are clearly recognizable. I don't think we read any sentences but it was cool to pick out words here and there amongst things four-thousand-odd years old.

Tour groups comprised the majority of people visiting the museum and they were a real hazard - flying wedges zooming around the museum, following really loud people with bullhorns. Watching two going around a room in opposite directions was kind of funny; you'd expect bodies to fly when they met. The plus side of having these large ornery organisms trampling around was that when they weren't there, the place was pretty much empty. So when they showed up we just shifted to where they weren't and I don't think we missed much because we just kept doubling back later after seeing other stuff. I really, really enjoyed some of the exhibits (The bronzes! Amazing aesthetic and craftsmanship!) and would count the whole trip to Taiwan worth it for this visit alone.

We stayed much later at the museum than we had originally intended to because of the opportunities afforded us by the extended hours, and we totally and deliberately blew our dinner reservation in order to stick around. Finally, though, we'd seen everything we wanted to and were starting to get hungry. When we researched where to eat in Taipei we read a lot of recommendations before picking one place that didn't have anything to do with Chinese cuisine. It's called Yuma and it is full-on Tex-Mex in downtown Taipei. We went and had absurd nachos and really, really good BBQ ribs, and fajitas and Sprite and friendly English-fluent service and everything had portion sizes I would account large by American standards. It was fantastic, and even cost less than it would have at home. They didn't seem to mind that we were hours late for our reservation either (they had open space), though we apologized anyway.

You could feed a three-generation Japanese family for a week on those nachos!

Came a looooong way for this BBQ and I would challenge anyone not to enjoy these ribs. Maybe not the best I've ever had, but I did not expect them to be exceptional, which they were. If I wasn't totally stuffed I'd have ordered another round and eaten them with eyes-rolling-back ecstasy.

I felt a little bit guilty about not taking this opportunity to eat someplace serving Chinese in China, and we'd read about one particular Peking duck restaurant that caught our attention, but I can't be too sad about it in the end because we really enjoyed eating there and got things we won't eat again until August at the earliest. We'll try to do better when, at some point, we make it to China proper. Plus, I ate leftovers from Yuma the whole rest of the time we were in Taiwan. There was that much left, and they meticulously (to the point of humor) wrapped it up for us in carefully separated and secured individual packages for each little item. We considered going out and doing something more after finishing dinner, but with so much food in us and an early morning the next day, we just bought some supplies for the next day and hit the sack.