Nov. 26-29
Monday we took a cab to the National Palace Museum.
It’s about six or seven miles from the hotel. We probably could have used the metro, but the trip involved a few blocks’ walk at the end, and it was raining.
We only saw a bit of the museum, which is housed in two large buildings. And they can only show a small fraction of the complete holdings at any one time.
One of the ladies at the hotel had recommended three objects not to miss. According to the museum guide, they’re all on the third floor.
But we encountered some curious sights before we made it to the elevator.
We passed a scroll illustrating a work by an ancient poet, about a trip to a river valley with a few friends. The scroll itself was hard to see. A wall-size video monitor carried a very graceful computer-animated reproduction.
One of the treasures on the must-see list was a bronze cauldron more than 3,000 years old, the Mao Gong Ding. A ding, Joanna told me, is a three-legged ritual urn, and this one is named for Duke Mao.
The inscription inside it runs about 500 characters and is the longest extant bronze inscription from Chinese antiquity.
It outlines the changes a new ruler wants to make because he is taking over during a period of disorder in the kingdom, a lot of “do nots” and “the king orders.”
The text also says Duke Mao is now in charge of running the kingdom’s daily affairs.
The most fascinating part of this exhibit is the inscription itself. The archaic characters are reproduced on a wall. These are the ancestors of today’s Han characters.
The contemporary ideogram appears like a footnote next to each old character. Often the connection is clear. At other times, not so much.
The Han character representing wine or liquor is called “tsau” in Cantonese. It is the character for “sai” (pronounced “sigh”), “west” with a few extra strokes.
In the ancient script, it is a drawing of a wine jug.
The second treasure is an illusion in jade from the Qing Dynasty. A naturally layered piece of stone was slightly altered to look exactly like crispy pork. It is shining. The skin is a lovely brown. The meat looks so tender. But it’s stone.
There was one disappointment. A magnificent cabbage carved from jade was represented only by a few photos.
The original, which usually occupies the same room as the jade crispy pork, had been removed to a temporary exhibit somewhere else in Taipei.
A small gallery is devoted to contemporary fool-the-eye pieces. Many are groups of cylinders that may have been 3-D printed. They sit in cases with mirrors behind them, and the reflections seem to be of different objects.
A half dozen hollow cylinders, for instance, cast a reflection that make them appear square.
This is hard to describe, so I’m sending it as the photo of the day.
The trick is created by the shaping of the top rims of the cylinders. They are not level but instead rise and fall. A three-dimensional object converted to a two-dimensional reflection becomes something very different.
Tuesday Joanna stopped at the calligraphy shop to buy the magic sheet sheet and brushes for her grandchildren.
Then we came across two shops across the street from each other offering beef noodles. Joanna asked a cop who was parked on his motorcycle which he recommended.
Very low, so as not to be overheard, he confided it was the one on the other side. He told Joanna that it’s famous.
So we went there, and the food was good. This was different from the version we had in the alley shop. And I may have I liked the first one better.
This was a little sweeter. In no way bad, but I preferred the more savory version.
I may have mentioned that we are in the tony neighborhood.
We walked a few blocks to the presidential office building. It is open to the public for a few hours a day. We didn’t care so much to go inside, and so weren’t disappointed that we had missed the day’s window of opportunity.
We walked around the block that the building occupies. We snapped photos now and then. None of the soldiers standing at the entrances fired his machine gun at us, so I guess photography’s considered OK.
There was a curious sight at one of the intersections. Workers were setting up in the street. Instead of flashing lights, they stood a life-size dummy, complete with reflective vest and hard hat, in the road.
It has two mechanical arms that wave red flags.
We continued toward Carrefour to pick up breakfast food and beer. The route took us to a place called Little South Gate.
We didn’t see a gate but a metro station named for it, Xiaonanmen, in Mandarin.
We passed the gate later, but didn’t know it. It is on an island in the middle of a traffic circle not far from the station, but it isn’t labeled Little South Gate. Instead, the characters read “Chung Hei Gate.” Joanna’s not sure what that means.
A sign by the station pointed us to the botanical garden.
The garden is a pleasant walk with a lotus pond, a garden of plants named in literature, and specimens of trees, including banana, which we’ve seen only a few times before.
We went back to Cha for Two for dinner. We had pork dumplings and pig nose soup.
The soup isn’t made with a pig’s nose. That’s the nickname for part of a lotus flower that is sliced and added to the soup. We had seen the original in the lotus pond at the botanical garden.
In the soup, the flower is white and has the consistency of perhaps a turnip. It has large holes where seeds once grew. They look like pig nostrils.
Wednesday we went back to 228 Peace Park to learn more about its history.
On the way, we stopped at a restaurant.
After seeing that jade piece in the National Palace, I was craving crispy pork. OK, no problem with that.
We also wanted something less conventional. We were eager to try the green beans with large intestine.
But they were out of that. More popular than I’d expect.
How about the steamed taro cake? Out of that too.
We settled for sauteed cabbage, which was terrific. Joanna says Taiwan cabbage usually is. She can’t buy it at the Asian markets in New Jersey.
The 228 Peace Park is beautiful. Small herons roost on rocks in the pond. There are several small colorful pagodas.
We found a display at the far end, which we didn’t reach the other day, about the indigenous people,. They have been pretty much dispossessed by the influx of Han Chinese refugees after the Civil War. A recent demonstration by one group protested an effort to deny them the right to own property.
The current president was elected on a campaign that pledged to help aboriginal minorities regain their rights.
One of the exhibits is a map that shows the distribution of almost a dozen languages on the island that are not Chinese. It also shows the prevailing theory of how those languages spread from Taiwan in all directions during more than 2,000 years to reach as far away as Micronesia, Easter Island, and Madagascar.
Nearby is a monument to victims of the White Terror, the 40-year period after Feb. 28, 1947, when many Taiwanese were killed and as many as 140,000 people were jailed for opposition to Chiang Kai Shek and the Kuo Min Tang.
There are folders with reproductions of news stories from the time, a wall covered by ribbons with names and prayers, and a gallery of photos printed on plexiglass. There’s a flavor of Cambodia about it.
The National Museum is next to the park, so we stopped there. One exhibit is devoted to elephants. Taiwan has at least two areas that are rich in fossils of early elephant species.
There are mastodon teeth, tusks, jaws, and a nearly complete skeleton.
The museum also has skeletons of three elephants that became famous as zoo attractions after they were rescued from the Japanese at the end of World War II.
The third floor is devoted to native animals and indigenous peoples. There were headhunters in the hills a hundred years ago.
The Japanese did a lot of field work to record the various cultures. There are artifacts—a carved wooden shield, garments, carved wooden door posts—and several photos of remote villages.
On the way back from the park, we stopped at the bar attached to the Oxygen hostel. They had bottles and taps of craft brew. One, whose name may be One, is an excellent pale ale that may hold its own when compared to the archetypal American pale, Sierra Nevada.
I had a second pale from a bottle. It was good, but not up to the quality of the first. The bottled one was all right, but a little thinner than the draft.
The bartender asked Joanna where we were from. He thought I was English.
Many foreigners think that—the guys in the bar in Luzern, for instance, and even one of Joanna’s cousins in San Francisco. I was once talking to a lady in northern England, and it took her at least five minutes before she stopped and asked, “That isn’t a British accent, is it?”
To myself, I sound like somebody from South Jersey, because that’s where my accent comes from.
Joanna asked the bartender where he was from. He was born in Taipei and considers himself Taiwanese rather than Chinese.
I asked if he spoke Mandarin at home. I speak Chinese, he said.
He didn’t recognize the term. Joanna used a Cantonese term that he recognized.
Just about everything having to do with language is fascinating here.
Thursday we went back to Hong Kong.
We had a late flight, 7:30 p.m., so we found a historic neighborhood called Bopiliao that has been preserved. It’s about one block long and dates to the 18th century.
A museum devoted to traditional education and to the history of the neighborhood is in a house that once belonged to a doctor, who used it as a clinic.
We came across another striking bit of nostalgia for Joanna. The educational exhibit had examples of traditional materials used for childhood education.
I was across the room when I heard Joanna exclaim, “This was my first book.”
It was an introductory reader, a kind of Dick and Jane in Chinese. She read bits of it aloud with the rhythmical repetitions of words.
There was a religious observance on the street. A tent had been put up for the purpose. But Joanna wasn’t sure what it was for.
On the way back to the hotel, we stopped for bowls of congee, advertised as Canton style. It may be the best cheok I’ve had so far.
It was savory without being overly salty. It had preserved egg and conventional chicken egg and bits of pork. The chives, though, really made the dish.
They even have craft beer at the Taiwan airport. I had two rye IPAs before we went to the gate.
We had brought along some goodies from a bakery and ate them with the beer. One was a lotus seed cake, with a paste made from the part of the pig nose that wasn’t in yesterday’s soup. The other cake was made with pineapple.
Both were excellent with the bitter combination of rye and hops.
We reached the hotel sometime around 11 p.m. and went out for a snack at a bar near the hotel. We had duck tongues, which were tangy, and smoked duck breast that tasted like ham. Both very good.
They had Stella Artois and Boddington’s on draft.
That brings me up to yesterday. There’s so much going on that I can’t keep up.
Love to all, and to all a good night.
And if you're in doubt, test your meat with a chopstick before you bite.
Harry
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