National Palace Museum

Historic museum with an enormous collection of Chinese artefacts and artworks from more than 10,000 years ago.

The National Palace Museum's collection is huge. It has over 7,00,000 pieces of ancient Chinese artefacts and artworks. These artefacts were actually located initially in the Palace Museum in Beijing, were shifted to Shanghai and Nanjing during the Sino-Japanese wars and then finally the decision was made to send the most important collections to Taiwan, where they sit today. The museum was formally opened in 1965, displaying these collections. The collection is huge, and the artefacts from the Forbidden City aside, the museum has received donations and has made purchases of it's own. The museum contains antique collections, which include extremely important and rare items in bronze, ceramic, jade and various other materials. The collection of artworks is huge as well, covering more than a thousand years of Chinese paintings and also almost 2000 years of calligraphy. The size of the collection means that at a given time, only 1% of the collection is on display and the rest is stored in secure vaults.