WEEKEND COLUMNISTS 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.
The second museum, the museum of the Atayal people in the attractive Taipei spa-suburb of Wulai, probably features on very few tourist itineraries. Hardly anyone outside this island – which is known in the west mainly for its manufacturing output – seems to be aware that Taiwan has 13 recognised aboriginal peoples. Pretty much exterminated by the Han and later Japanese settlers, they have somehow managed to keep a precarious presence and, culturally at least, are making something of a comeback under Taiwan’s nascent democracy and de facto independence.
The Atayal heartland covers a big, mountainous chunk of north-central Taiwan. Here these Austronesian people lived a life that the Han, the Japanese and the Christian missionaries considered barbaric. The Christians objected particularly to the practice of head-hunting, which the Atayal conducted sporadically. But as the museum guide (in English as well as Mandarin) comments, can we really call head-hunting more barbarous than the global warfare of the 20th century, not to mention such Maoist initiatives as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution?
Atayal culture, as far as one can judge, was not especially concerned with great leaps forward or permanent revolution. If there were fish in the rivers (speared with wooden harpoons) and deer and boar in the forest (hunted with exquisitely made lances), if there were bamboo and rattan from which to construct simple houses and weave beautiful cloth, all was well with the Atayal.
“The Han have always considered themselves superior,” comments my geneticist friend Chien Song. “And we industrial societies think ourselves advanced. But maybe these people lived in a less violent way, with a lighter footprint on the earth.” His son Xiao Huan leads me to the display of hunted heads.
But it seems that head-hunting, and hunting generally, carried complex meanings in relation to the commerce between the daylight world and the spirit one. Atayal warriors expected to meet again in the spirit world those they had hunted: whatever else these forms of hunting meant, they did not betoken genocide and the extinction of species. Suddenly, and disorientatingly, it is the small, modest museum that has more to say to us than the treasure of 5,000 years.
The National Palace Museum collections (there are a mind-boggling 654,000 items, of which only a tiny proportion can be shown at any one time) transcribe a great arc of Chinese culture, from the Liang Chu culture of the Yangtze around 3,000BC through the zenith of the Tang and Song eras towards the long decline and decadence of the Ching dynasty. The collection’s proud literature is probably right to describe this as the world’s longest-lived and greatest civilisation. But there is no escaping the evidence of its later decline, in art that prizes opulence over simple utility and graceful elegance.
Of course, China is on the rise once more, its culture severely purged after the great rejection of the past that Mao instigated under the name of Cultural Revolution, cut off from direct contact with its ancient poetry by the replacement of the old complicated characters (fantizi) with the new simplified ones. But China’s economic miracle, according not just to western environmentalists but to the country’s own deputy environment minister, Pan Yue – quoted in Mark Leonard’s new book What Does China Think? (Fourth Estate) – “will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace”.
One of the most thought-provoking films I’ve seen recently, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, set around the Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangtze River, shows people struggling to keep their bearings as 2,000-year-old cities are obliterated and a landscape at the heart of Chinese poetry is drastically rearranged. Rather than threatening the small island across the Taiwan Strait with 900 ballistic missiles, the Chinese authorities would do well to heed the lessons of the Atayal and the other peoples who have lived in Taiwan for so many thousands of years with the minimum of environmental damage.
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