Which Way Home?
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re halfway through our time in Melbourne. Tuesday is Anzac Day, which is like Memorial Day I think, except more specific to the disaster that was the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. There will be services of remembrance, but apparently there will also be special croissants?? I will report back.
Which Way Home?
In 1949, toward the end of the Chinese civil war, Chiang Kai-Shek fled mainland China. He was the leader of the Nationalist forces, and after twenty years of trying to solidify his own power, he realized that Mao’s Communist forces were finally going to take full control of the country. He retreated to the island then known as Formosa, and established the Republic of China, which eventually (after many more years of internal conflict, growth, and change) became the country we now refer to as Taiwan.
When the Nationalists evacuated from the mainland, they took with them much of the contents of Beijing’s Forbidden City. I was not aware of that fact when we visited Beijing in 2018; I spent a whole day wandering around the Forbidden City complex (which is massive), wondering why it felt so weirdly, vastly empty.
Turns out most of the stuff is in Taiwan.
So of course, I spent the subsequent years wanting to know when we were going to Taiwan. I wanted to see the stuff.
When we got settled in Taipei last December, I made a beeline for the National Palace Museum. It’s well-organized and well-explained, with plenty of signage in English. There are symbolic works of art, historic documents, and cultural artifacts that trace the growth and development of China’s ancient, sophisticated culture. It’s also quite large—I was there for hours. At first I read all the labels, paying close attention to the historical significance of so many artifacts my head began to swim. Then I gave up on the historical context, and just absorbed how beautiful many of the items were. The memory that stands out now is a huge set of rosy pink tableware that would have been absolutely perfect in the home we lived in for so many years in North Carolina. Except that they were about five hundred years old. They were pristine—the whole set looked as if it had been handmade last year by a small artisanal producer, precisely on trend.
I pulled out my phone to take a photo of them, hoping I could capture the exact shade of fully saturated, slightly-iridescent pink, given the low lighting of the exhibit, only to discover that my phone was frozen. Nothing worked. I couldn’t take photos, but I also couldn’t see the map, or text, or check the article I had carefully saved that tells how to reboot a frozen iPhone.
So I put my phone back in my purse and went back to wandering around the museum.
When it closed at 5 pm, my phone was still frozen, and I was now on the far side of a massive city at rush hour, with no clue how to get home. I knew the name of the metro station nearest our hotel, and I knew I’d need to take a bus to get to a metro station, so I went to the information desk and asked where the nearest bus stop was. The two women working the desk snapped into action and were incredibly helpful. While I was standing there asking, the bus they wanted me to take drove past, so they decided, apologetically, that I’d need to walk a long way then wait for a while. I memorized the name of the stop where I was to get off the bus, as well as the name of the metro station I was connecting to, then I left the museum, hoping for the best.
When I got off the bus, it took me a bit of searching and retracing steps to find the metro station, but eventually I did. The ticket agent spoke perfect English, and told me exactly which line to take in which direction, and where to change. After about an hour of feeling as I was moving through the city with no map and no safety net, I made it back to our hotel. I’m actually damn proud of that effort.
I have three take-aways from this situation:
When I first sat down and thought through the situation, I realized I could grab a taxi on the street if I couldn’t figure anything else out, so I didn’t see any reason to panic. We almost never take taxis, because Uber is usually easier (putting the destination into an app is WAY easier than trying to tell someone who may or may not speak English), but in a pinch, taxis work.
I have now memorized the trick for restarting a frozen iPhone. It is firmly etched into my brain. I do not intend to forget.
The worst part was not getting any photos of those gorgeous pink bowls.
From my writer’s notebook:
Last July, the National Palace Museum began holding its first evacuation drills, designed to protect the collection in case of a Chinese invasion or attack. The museum’s director, horrified by what he saw happening in Ukraine, realized that the Taiwanese collection, which is the main repository of several thousand years of Chinese culture, would be under significant threat if war breaks out on the island. In the article I read on CNN.com, he is quoted as saying, “War has brought these artifacts to Taiwan … It falls on us to protect these legacies that are invaluable to human civilizations.”
When you think about it, the big looting and theft of human art and culture over the centuries is almost always a function of war, rather than smaller-scale burglary or even organized crime. Will we ever learn?
Take care,
Lisa
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