China (the free one) has many things worth seeing, but one thing worth going half way around the world to see: the National Palace Museum just outside Taipei—simply the finest display of Chinese art in existence. The collection is huge—over 600,000 pieces; the museum, thankfully, is not. Every three months the exhibits in its four comfortably sized stories are rotated. It takes ten years to show everything. But the Chinese are patient; after all, they’ve been assembling the collection for a milennium.
Most of the museum’s art comes from the old imperial collection (hence the “palace” in the name). The first emperor of the Sung dynasty was a dedicated patron, and his brother established a gallery in a.d. 979. Successive emperors commissioned new pieces and sought out old ones. When the Empire collapsed in 1911, the Republic inherited the country and the art. The Nationalists ultimately lost the country, but kept the art out of the clutches of the Japanese and the Communists. (One can imagine what
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