National Palace Museum in Taipei has a rival in Forbidden City Museum – the backpacker’s choice
- Little-known museum in suburban Luzhou houses more than 10,000 statues, screens, teapots, swords and warrior hats from Beijing’s imperial palace
- Its collection is a fraction the size of the palace museum’s, but that means visitors can get a personalised tour from its owner and curator
Taipei’s National Palace Museum feels as grand as its name. After scaling a broad column of steps, visitors line up for tickets. Old Chinese scrolls and lacquer ware, among the museum’s 690,000 relics, sit inside glass cases with their own expertly arranged lighting. Tour groups from all around Asia file through the air-conditioned galleries.
Then there’s the backpacker’s alternative.
It smells of structural decay in some places, and fans stand in for air conditioners. A parrot lives in a jungle-like yard guarded by stone lions. With just 100 visitors per day, volunteer guides can give everyone a customised tour.
This little-known suburban Taipei site called the Forbidden City Museum houses more than 10,000 statues, screens, teapots, swords and warrior hats from the Beijing imperial palace from which the museum’s name comes.
About 1,000 relics are displayed at any one time, the rest warehoused elsewhere in Taiwan. The museum’s 77-year-old owner-curator, Wang Liang-chuan, either bought them intact during the Cultural Revolution, a period from 1966 to 1976 when it was relatively easy to acquire them, or collected enough pieces to rebuild them. Some he sculpted himself according to Forbidden City specifications.
