National Palace Museum

The National Palace Museum's hillside site in Shilin District, designed by architect Huang PING-HO and completed in 1965, presents a low building of traditional Chinese architectural forms that reads as deliberately modest beside its extraordinary contents: the collection inside represents one of the world's great accumulations of Chinese art and material culture.

The permanent exhibition spaces on three floors move chronologically from Neolithic jade through Zhou bronzes, Qin and Han ceramics, Tang sancai and Song dynasty Ding ware, to Ming and Qing court paintings. The famous Meat-Shaped Stone (dongpo rou) and the Jadeite Cabbage (cuigong cao) are displayed in separate temperature-controlled showcases and draw the largest crowds, but the rest of the permanent collection rewards patient attention in equal measure. The bronze ritual vessels of the Shang and Zhou dynasties on the first floor are particularly notable for their epigraphic inscriptions, which provide primary source material for reconstructing early Chinese political and religious systems.

The most celebrated pieces include the Mangdang Mountain brush pot, a Baroque-sized piece of Su Po-Ning's huanghuali furniture, and a set of Spring in the Han Palace paintings by Zhu Yuanzhang that survived the journey from Beijing intact. The Qing dynasty Qianlong Emperor's personal collection of curiosities occupies an entire wing on the third floor. The third-floor galleries also display imperial seals from successive dynasties, including the Qianlong Emperor's famed series of seals, many of which were made from precious materials such as jade, soapstone and crystal.

The building's own architecture incorporates a curved roof in blue-grey tile, marble steps and deep eaves that recall Ming and Qing palace structures, but the interior was designed for modern museum display with controlled lighting and seismic isolation. The attached Liang Gong (Good Valley) Courtyard Garden offers a contemplative outdoor space with scholars' rocks and a running stream.

A major northern expansion wing was added in 2005 and doubled the exhibition space, allowing more of the 700,000-piece collection to be shown simultaneously. The museum's semi-underground design for the expansion minimised the visual impact on the hillside site while providing state-of-the-art storage and conservation laboratories below the exhibition floors.

The museum shop stocks high-quality reproductions and publications, and the affiliated SunDialogue restaurant offers Sichuan and Cantonese cuisine in a setting overlooking the mountains to the north. A direct shuttle bus runs from the MRT Shilin Station to the museum entrance every fifteen minutes from 09:00 to 17:00, with last return at 18:00. The museum is closed on Mondays; an afternoon arrival after 14:00 offers the thinnest crowds on the permanent galleries.

It holds the world's largest collection of Chinese art, with objects spanning five millennia, most relocated from Beijing's Forbidden Palace during the Chinese Civil War.

The range of media — jade, bronze, ceramic, lacquer, enamel, painting and calligraphy — is unmatched outside mainland Chinese institutions.

The building's design, by Huang Ping-HO, is a considered modernist exercise in Chinese architectural vocabulary.