National Palace Museum

The National Palace Museum in Taipei traces its collection to the Palace Museum founded in Beijing's Forbidden City in 1925. As civil war spread through China, roughly 2,972 crates of the finest imperial treasures were shipped to Taiwan between 1948 and 1949, and the museum reopened in Taipei in 1965.

The museum holds nearly 700,000 objects spanning more than 8,000 years of Chinese history, with only about one percent on display at a time. Its most visited pieces are carved from stone: the Jadeite Cabbage, a jade carving shaped like a cabbage head with two camouflaged grasshoppers, and the Meat-Shaped Stone, jasper carved and dyed to resemble braised pork belly.

The painting collection includes Fan Kuan's monumental landscape Travelers Among Mountains and Streams and Guo Xi's Early Spring, alongside the ancient bronze Mao Gong Ding.