Chih-shan Rd., Sec. 2; Shih-lin.
Taipei, Taiwán

The National Palace Museum is an art museum in Taipei, Taiwan. It is the national museum of the Republic of China, and has a permanent collection of over 650,000 pieces of ancient Chinese artifacts and artworks, making it one of the largest in the world.The collection encompasses over 8,000 years of Chinese history from the Neolithic age to the late Qing dynasty.Most of the collection are high quality pieces collected by China's ancient emperors. In 2008, it was the 15th most visited museum in the world. The National Palace Museum should not be confused with the Palace Museum, located inside the Forbidden City in Beijing, capital of the People's Republic of China. Both institutions share the same original roots, which was split in two as a result of the Chinese Civil War. The museum houses several treasured items that are the pride of their collection and famous worldwide. They include: The "Jadeite Cabbage" is a piece of jadeite carved into the shape of a cabbage head, and with a close look at the naked eye, a large and a small grasshopper will appear camouflaged in the leaves. The ruffled semi-translucent leaves attached is due to the masterful combination of various natural colour of the jade to recreate the colour variations of a real cabbage. The "Meat-shaped Stone",a piece of jasper, a form of agate, the strata of which are cleverly used to create a likeness of a piece of pork cooked in soy sauce.The dyed and textured surface makes the layers of skin, lean meat, and fat materialized incredibly lifelike. The "Palace version" of the Qingming Scroll. Even though this is only a copy (the original is in the Palace Museum, Beijing), it is nevertheless regarded as an artistic masterpiece. The "Carved Olive-stone Boat",is a tiny boat carved from an olive stone. The incredibly fully equipped skilled piece is carved with a covered deck and moveable windows. The interior has chairs, dishes on a table and eight figures representing the characters of Su Shih's "Latter Ode on the Red Cliff." The bottom is carved in minute character the entire 300 plus text with the date and the artist's name. The "One Hundred Horses", is a painting done in 1728 by Giuseppe Castiglione by implementing a mixture of western artistic skills and utilizing eastern materials to realize a sense of realism to this native theme.