National Palace Museum

Interesting facts

With 21 of the fewer than one hundred known pieces, the museum holds the world's largest collection of Ru ware, a rare Song dynasty court ceramic.

A tiny boat carved from an olive stone by Chen Zuzhang has opening windows, eight figures and a 300-character poem engraved on its underside.

Before reaching Shanghai in 1933, the Forbidden City treasures were packed into 13,491 crates and moved south in five separate convoys.

In Taiwan the crates were first stored in a railway warehouse and a sugar mill, then hidden for over a decade in the mountain village of Beigou near Taichung.

A small hall at Beigou, opened in 1957 with help from the Asia Foundation, could show only about 200 objects at a time.

The Taipei museum first opened on the centenary of Sun Yat-sen's birth and was originally named the Chung-Shan Museum in his honour.

Its rare books number more than 200,000 volumes, among them copies of the Yongle Encyclopedia and the vast Qing compilation Complete Library of the Four Treasuries.

The museum lends major exhibitions abroad only to countries that have passed laws protecting loaned art from judicial seizure.

In 2014 the museum staged the three best-attended exhibitions in the world, including a show of works by the Ming painter Tang Yin.

The museum also cares for the former Taipei home and garden of the painter Chang Dai-chien, donated after his death in 1983.

Why it is worth it

Few museums hold so much of a civilisation's art in one place. The National Palace Museum in Taipei keeps around 700,000 objects spanning some eight thousand years of Chinese history, from Neolithic jades to bronzes, ceramics, calligraphy, painting, rare books and archives, at their core the imperial collections assembled by the Ming and Qing emperors. So large is the holding that only around one per cent is on view at any time, with displays changing while the rest waits in climate-controlled vaults.

The collection's journey is part of its story. The Palace Museum was founded in Beijing's Forbidden City on 10 October 1925, shortly after the last emperor, Puyi, was expelled from the palace. As the Japanese threat grew, the treasures were packed into crates and sent to Shanghai in 1933, then moved further west along several routes, staying ahead of the war until Japan's surrender in 1945. As the Chinese Civil War turned against the Nationalist government, its most prized pieces were shipped across the strait to Taiwan between December 1948 and February 1949: 2,972 crates, only about a fifth of those that had left Beijing, but chosen from the very best. The present museum in Taipei, designed by the architect Huang Baoyu, opened in 1965 in Shilin District.

Visitors often seek out a handful of small objects that have become famous in their own right. The Jadeite Cabbage, carved from a single piece of green-and-white jadeite, hides a large and a small grasshopper among its leaves. The Meat-shaped Stone is a piece of banded jasper carved and dyed so convincingly that it looks like a slice of braised pork belly. The Mao Gong ding, a bronze cauldron of the Western Zhou period, carries the longest inscription known on any surviving ancient Chinese bronze. Alongside them hang masterpieces of Chinese painting from the Tang dynasty onwards. A Southern Branch, set in a park with a lake and an Asian-style garden, opened in Taibao, Chiayi County, in 2015.

Getting there

The museum is in Shilin District in northern Taipei, Taiwan. The nearest airport is Taipei Songshan (TSA), about 4 km away and mainly used for domestic and regional flights; most international flights use Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport (TPE) to the west of the city.

National Palace Museum

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

On these lists

From the encyclopaedia