On the surface, Taiwan may not look like a model for much of anything. To be sure, like all modern Asian capitals, it has plenty of chichi discos, Starbucks, and shopping malls. This is also the home of what was briefly the world's tallest building, Taipei 101, whose elevator flies, disconcertingly, up to the eighty-ninth floor in forty seconds. Taipei's best Taiwanese restaurant, Shin Yeh, is on the eighty-fifth floor, and there you can eat shark's fin soup, braised abalone, and oyster omelets while looking out on the twinkling lights of the low-lying city. But unlike on the mainland, where the world's great architects are building wildly creative towers, and in some cases, entire new cities, the growth in Taipei has been organic, steady, and dull.

As a result, the capital is a scrappy-looking gray city that reveals its soul only in the tree-lined back lanes. There, children hang out with their grandparents in small neighborhood parks, where people practice tai chi at dawn and middle-aged ladies do their afternoon exercises. Middle-class residential life—the average income in Taiwan is more than sixteen thousand dollars a year, compared with less than three thousand dollars on the mainland—mixes with chic boutiques and simple dumpling shops, cheek by jowl with Japanese sushi restaurants, 7-Elevens, and eateries specializing in the myriad regional cuisines of China.

The first stop on anybody's visit to Taiwan is usually the National Palace Museum. And so one sunny spring morning, I head to the museum in the hilly green outskirts of Taipei. The late Generalissimo was no fool: When his army fled, they took with them from the Forbidden City three thousand crates of China's most important imperial treasures—almost one-third of the entire palace collection, including the most exquisite pieces, carefully chosen by China's top scholars. In an epic long march, dodging Japanese artillery fire and bombs along the way, the army moved the collection from Beijing, first to Nanjing, then to the wartime capital in Chongqing, Sichuan Province, and eventually to Taiwan.

The museum used to be dark and dusty, with poorly lit scrolls of ink-and-brush mountain scenes and calligraphy hanging in the gloom. There were no guides and little explanation of the exhibits, and it had a stifling feel of oppression about it—a perfect reflection of the politics of the time. Sure enough, in keeping with the island's new democratic spirit, the museum has been renovated and now has interactive displays and good lighting. Last year, it held a historic exhibit of Song dynasty works that attracted Chinese art aficionados from London, New York, and Hong Kong.

Only a few minor Song ink-and-brush scrolls are on display on the day I visit. For preservation reasons, the ancient paintings are shown for no more than three months at a time and then go back into storage for at least three years. But there are plenty of other objects on view, including delicate blue-and-white Ming porcelain vases, eggshell-thin Song celadon bowls and cups, and two-thousand-year-old Han dynasty bronze vessels with detailed engravings, all presented with clear English and Chinese descriptions. Boisterous Taiwanese schoolchildren and a couple of Japanese tour groups crowd around the museum's pride and joy, a large piece of polished multicolored jade ingeniously carved to look like a cabbage, with a locust and a cricket hiding near the top.