Taipei: National Palace Museum

My father and I took the high speed railway out of downtown Taipei today to go to Taiwan's National Palace Museum. The museum is nestled in the city's rolling hills where natural landscape is beautiful. There are so many hills they look like ripples in an ocean of lush, green trees. Every now and then the green is punctuated by a building or two, but mostly it is breathtaking nature.

National Palace Museum

The museum was crowded with school children and tour groups from mainland China and Japan. The Chinese tour groups were the largest, loudest, and most pushy; it was best to avoid them if possible, but usually it wasn't. There were three floors to the museum; Dad and I decided to work are way from the third floor down.
The museum was arranged by artifact type instead of chronologically. For example there was a Jade exhibit that contained Jade artifacts from all periods of Chinese history. Other notable exhibits included bronze, carvings, porcelain, calligraphy, paintings, and furniture. My three favorite exhibits were the jade, bronze, and paintings.

Jade
I did not fully appreciate the significance of jade in Chinese culture until I saw this particular exhibition. The minerals commonly knows as true jade include neprhite and jadeite, and are common to many areas in China. Other minerals that are sometimes called jade include serpentine and chalcedony, although these are not considered genuine jade. Because of the plenitude of these stones, the Chinese began using jade for a variety of purposes more than 5000 years ago during the late Neolithic Age.
I was especially struck by the religious uses of jade throughout China's history. Arcs and circles were prevalent motifs in the ancient times, and artisans carved these shapes out of green, thin jade. It's impressive to see how well crafted these delicate, translucent pieces are and how well they've held up over the millennia. The beauty of jade translates even to the tools that were carved out of the stone. An ancient axe head in the exhibit was a smooth sea-green, polished to a shine by its owner's grip; it's rounded edges shined under the display lights and looked more like art than tool. Today the Chinese still love their jade, except now it's significantly more expensive than it was during the Neolithic times. We went to the Rich Jade jewelery store, and admired the highly polished stones of green, clear, and black jade. The pieces really were beautiful, but, costing thousands of US dollars, too expensive for us. My mother had told me when I was younger that the more you wear jade the greener and lovelier it becomes. I'm not really sure if that's scientifically possible, but I think I understand now how precious and revered jade is in Chinese culture. I'd like to get some true jade if I can on this trip, but it maybe be too expensive. I'll settle for some serpentine or chalcedony knockoffs too as it seems that jade as a symbol is just as valuable as the stone itself.

Bronze
I am not an expert in all the different metal ages, but the museum had a bronze exhibition which I found fascinating. I had never given bronze much thought before; in my mind it was a medal awarded to the third place winner in an athletic competion. However, I realized at the bronze exhibition that bronze is not just some simple metal found somewhere in the earth's crust, but that it is a copper and tin alloy and requires much human manipulation before reaching its final identity as bronze.
My favorite part of the exhibit was learning how bronzes of different copper to tin ratios were created for different purposes. Objects such as swords and toll bells required a greater degree of strength than the bronze mirrors and decorative cauldrons.
Incredibly, the technology for extracting, smelting, and casting bronze established thousands of years ago are more or less the same techniques still used today.

Paintings
Chinese paintings have a serene, melancholy feel to them; most are of misty mountainsides or forlorn looking ladies wearing floaty robes. My favorite painting in the museum exhibit was called Mt. Qixia painted by Zhang Hong. It was a misty mountain painting, but I thought it had a skillful balance of detailed and unfocused scenery. When the eye looks at a scene, some parts of it are in focus while the peripheral areas are less noticed. A skilled artist works with the way the eye hits the canvas, and the end result is an aesthetic and natural painting. Of course all the paintings displayed in the museum were noteworthy, but I am not enough of an art connoisseur to give any meaningful critiques. The other artists included Shen Zhou, Wen Zhengming, and Chang Dai-Chein.