Tucked into the rolling green hills of Taipei’s Shilin district, the National Palace Museum rises like a vision from an imperial dream. Its grand entrance gate—flanked by sweeping eaves, red columns, and the quiet dignity of classical Chinese architecture—sets the tone for what awaits inside: not just a museum, but a sanctuary of civilisation.
With over seven million artefacts, this monumental repository ranks among the top five museums in the world. And yet, of this overwhelming collection, only a sliver is displayed at any given time. The oldest piece on view? A solid jade necklace and a pair of loop earrings—dating back more than 8,000 years.
The “Emperor Dynasties” gallery offers a mesmerising first encounter. Bronze vessels crafted during the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties offer more than artistic achievement. And no journey through Chinese civilisation is complete without a pause at its highest artistic expressions: painting and calligraphy. In quiet, temperature-controlled galleries, towering scrolls and silk-mounted compositions line the walls. Yet it is the calligraphy, surprisingly intimate in scale, that holds the deepest humanity. And then, porcelain: delicate, translucent, impossibly refined. Among the rarest gems lies Ju ware—an 11th-century porcelain with a milky-blue glaze so rare, so mysterious, that only 70 pieces are known to exist today.
Still, even among such treasures, two pieces remain the undisputed icons of the museum’s collection. The first is the famous Jadeite Cabbage—a whimsical yet masterful carving of a napa cabbage head in gleaming green-and-white jadeite, complete with a hidden grasshopper perched among its leaves. Beside it sits the ‘Meat-shaped Stone’—a piece of jasper rendered to resemble a slice of braised pork belly. Glazed in rich reds and browns, complete with marbled “fat,” it straddles the line between art and illusion.
The National Palace Museum isn’t just a vault of history—it’s a feast for the imagination.