Two museums: one world-renowned, opulent, imperial, the self-styled “treasure of 5,000 years”; the other small, local, modest, vernacular, not making any grandiose claims. Like most visitors to the city of Taipei, I had down as my first tourist call the National Palace Museum, the astonishing collection of Chinese treasures, based on the imperial collections of the Ching dynasty, that the retreating generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek had shipped across the Taiwan Strait in 1949.

Here I knew I would find the world’s oldest and most curious jade objects: the kuei tablets and tsung cubes made 5,000 years ago, and the jade carved 4,500 years later into astonishing likenesses of cabbage and cooked pork; inscribed bronze dishes and censers made before Troy fell; the exquisite pottery of the Song dynasty; the marvellous lacquer boxes of the Ming; matchless brush paintings and calligraphy spanning 2,000 years.