Taipei Museums

I had a Spring break this past week and went to a few museums in Taipei. There are the big name museum and art houses but this time i went to the smaller places.

The Suho Paper Museum is small and good. It traces the history of paper making, from being invented by the Chinese about 100 A.D. to modern day. Paper can be made from different sources and all aspects of paper making are shown. Unfortunately they didn't allow photography, you'll just have to go their yourself.

The Taipei Astronomical Museum was fun, it looks like I went with my evil twin.

I saw both the Imax movie(the Green Contract) and the 3D movie(Dinosaurs of Patagonia).

They had an early replicate of an earthquake detection device. The shaking ground would dislodge a metal ball into the mouth of a waiting frog. This way you would know which direction the shaking came from.

But the coolest display was the real time detection of cosmic particles. As in this movie.

The Taiwan Postal Museum was good. A nice history of Chinese/Taiwanese Posts. It also had a good story about Postal Systems from around the world.

The Taiwan Folk Arts Museum in XinBeiTou was OK but it was a strenuous walk up the mountain for me. Again there was no photography, but I shot one picture of the migrations of people from China all the way to New Zealand. The legend gives the following dates:

4000 B.C. Taiwan
3000 B.C. Philippines
2500 B.C. Borneo, Malaysia
1200 B.C. Sumatra, Java, Bali(Indonesia)
200   B.C. Micronesia
300   A.D. Hawaiian Islands, Easter Islands
800   A.D. New Zealand

No wonder the indigenous art of Taiwan and Bali have so much in common. ( I've since tracked down the source for this migration, it's written up in Scientific American, July, 1991. There's a copy in the NCKU library. )