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.
March 24 to March 30 When Yang Bing-yi (楊秉彝) needed a name for his new cooking oil shop in 1958, he first thought of honoring his previous employer, Heng Tai Fung (恆泰豐). The owner, Wang Yi-fu (王伊夫), had taken care of him over the previous 10 years, shortly after the native of Shanxi Province arrived in Taiwan in 1948 as a penniless 21 year old. His oil supplier was called Din Mei (鼎美), so he simply combined the names. Over the next decade, Yang and his wife Lai Pen-mei (賴盆妹) built up a booming business delivering oil to shops and
Indigenous Truku doctor Yuci (Bokeh Kosang), who resents his father for forcing him to learn their traditional way of life, clashes head to head in this film with his younger brother Siring (Umin Boya), who just wants to live off the land like his ancestors did. Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟) opens with Yuci as the man of the hour as the village celebrates him getting into medical school, but then his father (Nolay Piho) wakes the brothers up in the middle of the night to go hunting. Siring is eager, but Yuci isn’t. Their mother (Ibix Buyang) begs her husband to let
The Taipei Times last week reported that the Control Yuan said it had been “left with no choice” but to ask the Constitutional Court to rule on the constitutionality of the central government budget, which left it without a budget. Lost in the outrage over the cuts to defense and to the Constitutional Court were the cuts to the Control Yuan, whose operating budget was slashed by 96 percent. It is unable even to pay its utility bills, and in the press conference it convened on the issue, said that its department directors were paying out of pocket for gasoline
On March 13 President William Lai (賴清德) gave a national security speech noting the 20th year since the passing of China’s Anti-Secession Law (反分裂國家法) in March 2005 that laid the legal groundwork for an invasion of Taiwan. That law, and other subsequent ones, are merely political theater created by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to have something to point to so they can claim “we have to do it, it is the law.” The president’s speech was somber and said: “By its actions, China already satisfies the definition of a ‘foreign hostile force’ as provided in the Anti-Infiltration Act, which unlike
RSS