The National Palace Museum's (國立故宮博物院) collection of Chinese imperial artifacts is said to exceed 600,000 items, some of which date back to the dawn of Chinese history. Its journey to Taiwan, a trek through war-torn China, is the stuff of legend. Most visitors to the museum see a facade; the museum keeps its secrets behind closed doors, with access to its inner sanctum, the vaults in which the collection is stored, restricted to only a select few.
Over the last two years, the National Geographic Channel (NGC) has taken its cameras into the vaults buried deep in the mountains and into the laboratories where the work of conservation and restoration goes on. They have also interviewed the scholars, scientists and curators who are the beating heart of the museum. This makes Inside: The Emperor's Treasure a must-watch for anyone intrigued by what lies behind the iconic building in Waishuangxi (外雙溪). The show premieres in English in Taiwan on the NGC at 9pm Sunday. A Chinese version will be broadcast on Saturday, Nov. 3 at 9pm.
Joanne Tsai (蔡秋安), general manger of NGC's Taiwan office, said in an interview with the Taipei Times that hammering out the blueprint for telling the story was one of the most difficult parts of the project, which took nearly two years to complete. "They gave us so much material, but we needed to tell a story that would draw people in. We did not want to be a catalog," she said.
According to the NPM's director, Lin Mun-lee (林曼麗), the access granted to NGC is part of a wider museum policy of engagement and strategic cooperation with commercial interests designed to make the NPM more accessible to the younger generation.
Although the museum must ensure the safety of its collection when brought out of the vaults for display to the public, a greater fear, highlighted in Inside: The Emperor's Treasure is that people will stop coming.
While the NPM is unlikely to run out of things to display, providing interactive experiences has posed a great challenge. Now, digitalization, 3-D mapping and virtual reality manipulation, which are often used in research, provide a fresh, hands-on museum experience for visitors.
Inside: The Emperor's Treasure uses a light touch, focusing on the people involved in the museum and reenactments of the Qianlong emperor (乾隆), one of China's greatest collectors of art. By linking up the personalities who make the huge art project that is the NPM, Inside: The Emperor's Treasure presents potentially tedious subjects in a fascinating light.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby