A Walk Down the History Lane

A Walk Down The History Lane

        “If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree” – A well said quote by Michael Crichton, an American writer. This quote pretty much represents my feelings when I walked through the halls of National Museum of History, Taipei earlier last week. This museum is the first national museum in Taiwan since 1949 and has been a home to more than sixty thousand pieces of artifacts and art works, which 5 of them has been designated as national treasures and 42 as important ancient artifacts.

        This museum is one of the most beautiful museum that I’ve ever visited so far, mainly because of the oriental building design and botanical garden beside it which consists of more than 2.000 plant species. Its soothing atmosphere and green sceneries has made it a peaceful sanctuary place in the middle of busy Taipei city, and when summer comes, you can see the beautiful lotus flowers bloom in its huge lotus pond as the main attraction.

        Moving on to the inside part of the museum, it presents numerous of exhibitions that dates back to the Neolithic period, the ancient Chinese dynasties, to the contemporary area like Zisha wares of Yixing, the lacquered painting, graphic arts, ink paintings, and pictures of the world. In our visit, we are accompanied by the museum tour guide who spoke English. He guided us through the main collections of the museum, the historical and artefacts section. In this section, we were able to study the archaeological findings of bronze and jade artifacts from Henan, the tri-color pottery from Luoyang area, coins and ingots of various dynasties, and many more. It’s very impressive that every piece of artifacts have their own story and took us back to the ancient times.

        As impressive as the historical and artifacts may be, personally I’m not very interested about the modern and contemporary art. This section consists of a large collection of paintings. Surely they’re beautiful in their own way, the colors are brilliant and eye-popping, but sadly I’m not able to understand their unique curves and strokes. Just like the sayings, “everything has its own beauty, but not everyone can see it”.

        This museum also has one unique concept which is a mobile museum. A huge container was remodeled into a mini museum hall and regularly taken into scheduled destinations around the country to propagate cultural and artistic education in the nation’s remote areas. This effort has provide residents of remote area with an opportunity to become acquainted with national caliber historical artifacts and art objects.