We have visited a range of the cultural institutions in Taipei, which have provided their own interesting perspective on Taiwan and its place in the world. The first was the Chiang Kai-shek memorial, a truly impressive complex with massive buildings in a huge park in the centre of the city. Of course, this includes a larger than life statue of the man himself, at the top of a huge building (more stairs!). The scale of it was pretty awe-inspiring, prompting attempts to take pictures to make sense of the scale. It's not clear that worked so well.
The building has been turned into a democracy museum, which is interesting given Chiang Kai-shek's rule over China, and then Taiwan, lasted for 47 years without an election. Not to mention the relatively recent nature of Taiwan's democracy at all. Despite the revisionist tendencies, there is still a somewhat realistic overview of the rule of the Kuomintang in Taiwan, along with stories of the Japanese occupation. There is a lot of memorabilia in there, as well as an impressive array of original documents. Not to mention every award presented to CKS from countries across the world - there's a serious array of medals!
Further out of town is the National Palace Museum, featuring a collection of museum treasures from the Song dynasty palaces (the last emperors before the revolutions in China). We arrived after lunch, with only about 2 hours to have a look around, which might have been a bit of a mistake. We could easily have spent the whole day there. As it was, we focused on the exhibits that we most wanted to see, with incredible collections of artifacts dating back to the Stone Age, and moving all the way through to the start of the 1900s. The collection includes a fantastic display of pottery that goes through the ages, with magnificent Ming dynasty pieces and explanations of how the development and production was overseen by the Chinese rulers. There were collections of imperial furniture, jewelry and an array of weapons, again charting the development from the Stone Age right through to more modern times. It was an incredible place to visit.
Naturally, once we found out the Presidential Office building was just around the corner and had tours that don't require booking, that was also on the list. It was again interesting to see a Taiwanese perspective (story?) being presented about their place in the world and their role as a bastion of democracy. It's clear enough why that would be important at this point in time in particular, and probably ties in with all the directions to air raid shelters that appear throughout Taipei. The tour was interesting, charting the development of Taiwan's government and civil society. It included a section on indigenous rights - a succession of Dutch, Japanese and Chinese colonisations displaced the original inhabitants who have their own culture and languages. They make up 2% or so of the population today, and the situation has strong parallels with Australia. This is a topic for some future research... Taiwan was also the first Asian country to legalise same-sex marriage, not so long after Australia finally managed it.
In addition to these institutions, we visited a range of temples, which have quite a different feel to those we encountered in Mongolia. Our guess is that this is partly due to the practice of a different strain of Buddhism, but also due to the lack of destruction that comes with the absence of a Communist history. Many temples are located in the middle of night markets, big and small. The most impressive we saw was the Lungshan Temple, one of the most significant in the country. It has an array of beautiful buildings, decorations and statues, and is clearly much more than a tourist attraction, with a wide range of people there to worship. Trying to be respectful while attempting to keep our jaws off the floor and taking some pictures remains a constant challenge.
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