4.6 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 28 June 2024
⏱️ 14 minutes
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0:00.0 | We're in Taipei, Taiwan, in the halls of the National Palace Museum. |
0:08.0 | There's people all around us holding their audio tour headsets up to their faces. But the crowd all seems to be moving in one direction |
0:17.9 | towards this one gallery. In fact we're going to have to wait in this line before we can go inside. |
0:24.6 | The line's all bunched up around one particular case. People are standing shoulder to shoulder, |
0:30.8 | holding their phones above each other's heads, all just trying to get a good picture. |
0:35.0 | Finally, we get to the front and in the middle of this glass case is a cabbage cabbage |
0:46.0 | but this cabbage is incredible. |
0:50.0 | It's carved from a piece of jadite, |
0:52.0 | a white and green stone. It has this long white stalk and these |
0:56.0 | frilly green leaves and it is so shiny and so translucent. The cabbage looks like it's glowing from the inside. I am going to go out on a limb here and say |
1:07.0 | this is the most beautiful cabbage in the world. |
1:18.0 | I'm Doolinthearis and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. |
1:22.0 | In this tiny stone cabbage has a huge backstory. |
1:27.0 | Today, we follow it from the treasure-laden halls of Beijing's forbidden city |
1:32.0 | through a harrowing wartime escape to its prize place at the National |
1:37.1 | Palace Museum in Taiwan. |
1:40.3 | We take that journey after this. This piece definitely one of the most popular pieces in our museum and for us is quite unusual |
2:09.0 | not only because it's the most popular piece but also because the material is so unusual in Chinese culture. |
2:18.6 | This is Dr. Shoyyouin U. She's an Antiquities expert at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan. |
2:25.0 | When we talk to Shaoyen, she had this PowerPoint, |
2:28.0 | ready with slides of the cabbage from all different angles. |
2:32.0 | She points out how the artist has taken advantage of the |
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