The National Palace Museum Heads South

  July 23, 2016 

     I wasn’t paying attention when my wife said she made plans to visit the new Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum after we got back from Alishan. I was wondering why we took the HSR instead of the Taiwan Railroad to Chiayi as we had done in the past. She explained that the new museum was a ten minute shuttle ride away from the HSR but over a half hour ride from the main line which was closer to the Alishan road. After a day and a night in Alishan Park, we rode back to the Chiayi HSR station and took a shuttle bus to spend a pleasant afternoon in the museum. 

  The Southern Branch of the Palace Museum, built far from Taiwan’s cultural center in Taipei, is in the most out-of-the-way place you could imagine in central Taiwan. There are no restaurants or buildings between it and the HSR train station; only huge, empty boulevards, such as you've seen in 'ghost' cities popping up in China. Sugar cane plantations remain on the land not appropriated for the museum grounds. 

The Palace Museum website says the reason the Southern Branch was built in Taibo City, Chiayi County, was "to achieve cultural equity between the Northern and the Southern regions of Taiwan, and to drive the cultural, educational, social, and economic development in both regions.”

The entire construction budget of eight billion Taiwan dollars ($250 million) for the museum, which finally opened in January after an eight year delay, and then was delayed again because of bad construction causing rain water leakage, is not worth all the time and effort put into it. 123 acre of empty parkland, a man-made lake with a footbridge surrounds the fancy black museum drenched in scorching subtropical Taiwan sunlight, the planted trees barely larger than twigs at this point. It will take dozens of years for the trees to afford any shade on the long walk from the parking lot and bus stop to the main entrance of the building.

The Palace Museum’s “attempt to drive the development of cultural tourism in Central and Southern Taiwan” and “include unique cultural elements of Taiwan” is a little too far-fetched at this point and smacks of cultural chauvinism, especially considering how most of the people in Taiwan, south of Taipei, would prefer promotion of their own island history and culture, independent from cultural affinity with Mainland China. There is clandestine political socialization going on here, the only kind available to the Chinese ruling class now that there is no martial law to enforce it heavy-handedly.

 A survey by the Tourism Bureau of the Ministry of Transportation and Communication done in 2013 showed that 70% of visitors from China went to Taipei to see the 700,000 artifacts at Palace Museum brought by the KMT to Taiwan when they lost the civil war to the Peoples’ Republic of China in 1947. The National Palace Museum was opened in 1965 with Qing Palace artifacts (thus the name Palace Museum)  from the imperial family consolidated over thousands of years.

   I am guilty of breaking a rule at the Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum: I took a photo of the promenade outside the galleries. Dozens of docents strolling through the beautiful new museum were told that, to keep it that way, they had to assist patrons looking for exhibits, or fumbling with the self-guided tour devices or prevent patrons from looking for trouble by holding a stick with a round white sign with a symbol reminding patrons not to smoke, talk, or take photos. In all fairness, I was not the intended target of the ‘no photo’ rule, even in the promenade. For sure, there are tour groups itching to take group photos in the museum. 

From Taipei, travel to the museum takes more than four hours by bus, train, or car, and ninety minutes by High Speed Rail (HSR) which has a station fifteen minutes away by shuttle bus. I wonder how many tourists, 70% of the Chinese or otherwise, would bother taking a lengthy ride down south. They could pair the tour with a trip to Alishan Mountain, also accessible from Chiayi, but that would take another three hours travel in the other direction up a winding, dizzy road. 

 However, there is a good reason to head south: the Southern Branch offers exhibits you cannot find anywhere else in the world. My favorite is the wonderful  occasion predestined: Unveiling the Kangxi Kangyur, original first-hand documents in the Manchu Archives, written and sealed 347 years ago, in 1669, thanks to the urging of Kangxi Emperor's grandmother, who had a deep appreciation of Tibetan Buddhism. 

It will not soon be creating an appeal that will rival that of the Louvre Museum or “encourage visitors to Taiwan to visit both museums” as predicted in their mission statement. Their “objective of making Taiwan a global cultural hotspot with a macro perspective” is a smokescreen for bringing Taiwanese closer to China; not a bad idea, anyway.

One of the first temporary exhibits in the Southern Branch of the Palace Museum is about Emperor Jiaqing who, although never visiting Taiwan, more than two centuries later, this emperor’s legend is exploited in the National Palace Museum collection Taiwanese folklore “offering audiences an opportunity to gain a new understanding and appreciation of the Jiaqing emperor through a dialogue between legend and fact, thereby opening a new chapter of awareness on the life and art-related activities of this long-neglected ruler in the Qing dynasty.” Obviously, the museum is either hedging its bets against tourists visiting this remote museum or hoping to attract more China fans from Taiwan’s independence-minded south.

     There is a hotel being built across the boulevard from the grounds, and a few condominiums going up in the distance, but for the time being, there is nothing else but sugar cane plantation and vacant lots in the fifteen minute shuttle bus ride from the High Speed Rail Chiayi station, itself in the middle of nowhere, far from downtown Chiayi and local civilization. 

     The people of Taiwan have a lot going for them in their island culture mix of aboriginal tribesmen, Dutch colonists, brought Hakka and Ming-Nan settlers, Japanese imperialism and American commercialism, an exodus of mainland refugees after the civil war, an influx of  Southeast Asians, Buddhist and  Muslim culture brought over with foreign brides and contracted laborers. But, first and foremost, the tie that bind Taiwan with its predominant Chinese ancestors, is the cultural influences. Chinese culture is welcoming to Taiwanese of all origins.  The Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum  spent dozens of years, hundreds of painstaking hours of research, and a quarter billion dollars to make a connection between Taiwan and Chinese Culture in Central Taiwan.