Walking around waiting for the art museum to open, we found the memorial house of Sun Yat Sen.
Sun Yat Sen
Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese politician, physician and philosopher who served as the first president of the Republic of China and the first leader of the Kuomintang, the Nationalist party. He is widely revered in China and Taiwan as being the Father of the Nation and in the overthrowing of the Qing Dynasty.
In Guangzhou there is a Sun Yat Sen hospital and I had not realized the background of this famous person.Chiang Kai ShekWe also went to Chiang Kai Shek memorial hall. It is impressive. The white building is in the shape of an octagon. The number eight is traditionally associated with fortune and wealth in China.
The blue and red accents, are the colours of the Republic of China. The stairs lead up to the main hall where a large bronze statue of Chiang sits.
The characters behind Chiang’s statue read “Ethics”, “Democracy”, and “Science”, and the inscriptions on the side read “The purpose of life is to improve the general life of humanity” and “The meaning of life is to create and sustain subsequent lives in the universe”.
Chiang is regarded as a controversial figure. He brought China and then Taiwan into the modern age. He, along with Sun Yat Sen, had a major part in unifying the nation and leading the Chinese resistance against Japan. He was known as a dictator at the front of an authoritarian regime who suppressed opponents.
When Chiang Kai Shek was fighting the Japanese, they moved many of the Chinese artifacts from the forbidden city to Shanghai and Nanjing. During the civil war that immediately followed they were moved to Taiwan. Here they were protected from destruction, a tactic used to overthrow regimes and rewrite history.
National Palace Museum
The National Palace museum was created to house these artifacts which is the largest collection of Chinese heritage.
Buddhas
A zither, stringed instrument.
A zither made of pottery. It actually can play music.
Pottery.
Pottery from early history during the warring states period.
My favourite. Cloisonne with dragons.
Cloussone zun vessel in the shape of a bird from the Qing dynasty.
This flower basket is actually carved from a peach pit!
Lapis lazuli carved into a mountain.
Furniture.
Bronze metals.
Look at this one. It is a To water vessel with an animal handle and humans as feet. It is from the Zhou Dynasty.
They had a special collection of jade. It showed how jade can be carved in different ways to show tension, movement, etc.
This is a Zhi cup carved with birds and animals from the Han Dynasty.
A jade screen from the 1940’s that was originally not thought to be made of jade but instead a similar looking mineral. However it is all jade.
Jade had irregularities in colour week died to mimicking something in life. This is a carving of a vegetable. The colours are amazing.
The architecture of the museum itself is a piece of art.
Adjacent to the museum is a cute park. The next post will be about parks and the art museum…