Taipei 3

I'm not a big fan of museums but the National Palace Museum holds treasures of Chinese civilisation the like of which can only be seen in the Palace Museum in Beijing. The antiquities in both were originally from the same collection. It's a long story which might be entitled A Tale of Two Museums. Besides if I didn't go, later people would ask: you what!?

Originally I had planned to visit in the morning, but travel blogs persuaded me that late afternoon was when tour bus crowds, mostly comprising mainland Chinese tourists, thinned out. In the event it was still crowded.

I decided to move to my hotel early in the morning before the day got too humid and leave my backpack with reception. First I got coffee and a waffle at a nearby café. They weren't as good as coffee and bagels the day before. Then I dropped the keys in the return box; nobody was at reception that early.

The hotel was actually just outside Ningxia Night Market, but a 10 minute walk from the nearest train station, which might have made it a little less popular, meaning better value for me. I paid the balance in cash to reduce my holdings.

The picture on the right was actually taken later in the day from one of the elevated stations of the Taipei MTR. Not all stations are underground. Parts of some lines are above ground.

I decided to visit the main Eslite store. Maybe they might have a better selection of CDs to spend money on. While it was as neat as the other one it actually had a poorer selection of goods. So I decided to go back to the City Hall store.

While I was emerging from the building, some marchers in a rally for the upcoming local elections tried to give me a pamphlet, but I told them I was not a local.

When I paid for my CDs the cashier asked if I was a tourist. They gave me a tax refund upon sighting my passport. That meant I had missed out on a tax refund on yesterday's purchases. Didn't amount to much though.

I found a good Vietnamese lunch in the basement food court of the City Hall Eslite store.

By this time it was afternoon and time to visit the museum. It's in the foothills of Shilin, a leafy residential suburb in the north of Taipei. To get there one had to transfer from Shilin station to a bus.

Photography is not allowed in the museum, and at every corner an attendant will be holding a placard stating so, so I have no pictures from there, but you can see many of the treasures on the museum website and elsewhere. Some of them are jaw-dropping such as the jadeite cabbage and the concentric ivory spheres. I particularly liked the porcelain collection.

Impressive as individual museum pieces may be, I realised that the greatest accomplishment of the Chinese has been to maintain an unbroken civilisation for many millennia. The museum seems to agree with this idea with a panel showing a timeline of world cultures. No doubt Confucianism and Taoism, and later Buddhism, have shaped a people and culture which have weathered change and flourished.