Monday, December 31, 2007

National Palace Museum, Taipei

I visited the National Palace Museum. Here are some facts from Wikipedia.

Taipei's National Palace Museum, located in the Shihlin District, is the pride of Taiwan. It ranks as one of the four best museums in the world, in a class with the Louvre, the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The museum holds the world's largest collection of Chinese artifacts, around 700,000 items in all. Since the museum only has space to display around 15,000 pieces at any given time, the majority of the treasures are kept well protected in air-conditioned vaults buried deep in the mountainside. The displays are rotated once every three months, which means 60,000 pieces can be viewed in a year and it would take nearly 12 years to see them all. Furthermore, the collection continues to grow through donations and purchases.

Some of the oldest artifacts in the collection of the museum are pieces of prehistoric pottery over 5,000 years old. The vast majority of these art objects are from the private collection of China's emperors.

Included in the collection are artifacts made from jade, bronze, porcelain, lacquerware and enamel. There is also tapestry and embroidery, and many priceless documents and books containing excellent examples of ancient Chinese calligraphy.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dear Mr Tan

I have been Taiwan National Museum as well. No doubt it is must visit place place in Taipei. I spent almost one whole day at this place, and yet I could not finish looking all the artefacts.

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