Meat-shaped Stone, a signature piece in Taiwan’s excellent National Palace Museum, ought to be more famous. For one, it looks crazy like a boiled piece of salt pork. Two, it shows an earthy little streak in Taiwanese taste.
Meat-shaped stone on gold pedestal. Pic by NPM.
The NPM collection consists of all that the Chinese Nationalists could haul off the mainland in their 1949 retreat to Taiwan. It’s mostly stuff from the Imperials at Beijing’s Forbidden City. Chiang Kai-Shek had packed it up years before to keep it from Japanese invaders and ended by schlepping it back and forth across China until he had to leave.
The museum is mercifully human scale, not a Louvre-size beatdown. A long morning’s meander left me feeling like I’d learnt a lot and done it justice.
The chronological tour starts from the third floor in Chinese prehistory.
See it? Evil horns, eyes, smile?
Remember that villain Aku from Samurai Jack? Yeah, that guy is totally lifted from a bunch of ancient bronzes that remind me of him.->
So the curators picked out like 15 or 20 forms of vessels — like this and that kind of rice pot or wine pot or vegetable server or ceremonial thing and showed examples from over hundreds of years to show how the shape and decoration evolved.
Work your way downward and bronzes give way to pottery and porcelain, same thing, evolution on display.
Everything’s got great English labels — more extensive in Chinese, less in Japanese — so you read enough labels, voila, by the time you get to the mixed collections downstairs, you’ll actually be able to date some stuff with some accuracy. Yowza! That’s clearly a 17th century reproduction of an ancient bronze, y’all!
NPM exterior
Finish your education then check out the theme galleries. Some of ‘em change, like celadon or or puzzle boxes. Some are permanent.
The stone morsel and it’s sister piece, Jadite Cabbage (which looks better and brighter than any pic on the net), are the best in a permanent gallery of small stone carvings of small mountains, other vegetables, monks and whatnot. A sign in the hall points toward Jadeite Cabbage ; Stone-shaped Meat was a surprise.
That gallery is the most heavily watched in the place, the only one where they’re serious about not taking pictures. Two staff were hovering around the room when I was there, especially around the velvet cordon in front of the glass case containing Meat-shaped Stone.
Small side entrance to museum grounds.
Meat-shaped Stone is cool because in all this high-brow, high-falutin’ capital-A Art is just, well, a charming stone that looks exactly like salt pork. Who are the people who create then belove such a display?
It somehow matches the practice of letting out a big appreciative belch to the chef after a good meal. Sounds tacky, unrefined at first; but then, maybe it’s just what your gut would have you do.
Anyway, so, props to the museum for limiting the forms it puts in its chronological display. The chronology is missing religious art and weapons, for example. Good thing too, otherwise it’d be too much.
Downstairs are furlongs of calligraphy, of limited interest to illiterate me. And that’s about the evillest thing I can say about the NPM.
In the gift shop, look for the eight-pack of postcards that include Jadeite Cabbage and Meat-shaped pork, or just do what your gut would have you do and take the single oversized meat card straight to the post office in the building.
A+.
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Next time: Taste Test: Asparagus juice.
Great story. I would like to visit the NMP.
Someone needs to authenticate that meat-like rock. It looks too much like a piece of pork (Chinese style) to be real. I’ll visit the NMP if the Singapore Armed Forces sent me to Taiwan on an all expense paid trip.
Ping you going to try and eat a Ching-dynasty piece of pork?
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