National Palace Museum Taipei - new database

[peterp]

The National Palace Museum in Taipei contains a large part of the former Qing imperial collection.
In the past years they have made some efforts to make the collection publicly accessible online. Here is the newest link I know:

            https://theme.npm.edu.tw/opendata/DigitImageSets.aspx?lang=2&Key=^^2 
            (in English)  - for searching ceramics

Just input into the field with the magnifying glass to search, ignore that the page is in Chinese, and give ite time to download. It is possible to load dozens, even hundreds of results in one go, if there are that many.
Anyway, not all searches are successfull, but testing showed that both English and Chinese language queries may bring results.
If there are none, always change the wording. For example, if one looks for ceramics made at Ding kiln, the result may differ with search expressions like these: Ding,  Ding kiln, Ding wares, Dingyao, Ding yao, etc.

Many item pictures can be enlarged and the bottom etc. can also be viewed, a progress over many museum collections of the past. You can download the whole batch of a search.
Notable is that despite being the imperial collection, that is top quality when they were made, many of the older items still show clear age signs. Compare these items with what you may have at hand -- with these the chance of encountering a fake are very low.  Many have provenance of several hundred years. Use this resource...

(Please note that this is probably only a part of the collection. In a documentary published a long time ago it said that if they changed the exhbits every three months it would likely take more than a hundred years to exhibit all.)