The National Palace Museum and its greedy fish

As it was raining on Chinese New Year Day (it's raining since weeks!!!), we visited the National Palace Museum in Taipei. This museum exhibits the world's finest collection of Chinese Art. If you are interested, then we recommend you to have a look at their outstanding homepage, where you can learn a lot about Chinese culture and the exhibitions offered in the museum.

www.npm.gov.tw/en/home.htm

We did not take any fotos inside the museum as firstly, it's restricted, and secondly, you can buy a wonderful catalogue with magnificent photos of the items, with a quality of the photos, which you can never achieve on your own. But in order not to finish this posting without some pictures, we show you some taken just outside of the museum and from the Chih-te Garden.

In front of the museum, a pair of imperial guardian lions, also called Fu Lions, is watching the entrance. These statues are believed to have protective powers and traditionally stood in front of Chinese Imperial palaces, temples, offices,... The female stands on the left and the male on the right. The male lion has his right paw on a ball. The female is essentially identical, but has a single cub under her left paw.

(And these guardian lions are also the solution of our last picture riddle. The particular picture was a close-up of the mane of a male lion guarding a bridge in the Taroko Gorge. Here he is in his full majesty:)

The lovely Chih-te Garden is situated next to the museum. Although small, it is nicely designed, with little winding paths, wooden arcades, open tea houses, waterfalls and goldfish ponds.


And in these fishponds, we found the most greedy goldfish we have ever seen.


They are really big fish - the largest being more than half a meter long - and are either black, white, yellow, orange or speckled in all possible color combinations. And feeding them is a really funny entertainment! While greedily ripping open their mouths, one has a peculiar view even into the deepest part of their stomachs!

And we close this posting with two more pictures from the garden and the rain.