"Oh, it is Taiwan you must come to for the treasures," says Judy Chan, my guide, who speaks excellent English and is dressed in a demure, Chinese-style qipao dress, her hair tucked into a neat bun. In recent years, she has visited the real palace, the Forbidden City in Beijing, but was underwhelmed. "You go to Beijing to see the buildings, but they have nothing inside. We can't compare with all of mainland China in terms of quantity of old pieces, but this is where you will find the very best imperial work."

Chou Kung-shin, the National Palace Museum's poised new director, tells me that she is now advising experts from the mainland on curatorship and museum management. The daughter of a mainland China–born doctor, she studied French in Taiwan, then went to Paris and got her Ph.D. in art history at the Sorbonne. Wearing a silk high-necked Chinese dress clasped at the throat with a brooch, Chou tells me how the museum has blossomed over the last decade, along with democracy. "It's not enough to just think about conservation," she says, slipping easily between Chinese and En-glish. "You have to consider your audience." Chou has transformed the once unwelcoming museum with an array of educational programs and extended weekend hours. She is hoping to set up a center for incubating young local designers.

Although Beijing and Taipei aren't officially on speaking terms, on an unofficial level there have been many exchanges over the past fifteen or so years. A decade ago, mainland experts told Chou that they were depressed at having lost a decade during the Cultural Revolution, leaving a huge gap in their knowledge. "I said, 'No problem—we can help fill in the gap,' " she remembers. "We know Chinese culture, and we know the world. My aim is that we can be a model for all of China."

As the world rushes to do business with Beijing, that may be hard to imagine. And yet in many ways, the island embodies the best of China—a place where ancient traditions coexist with freewheeling thinking and free elections. After all, in a country that counts its culture as five thousand years old, six decades of Communist rule is hardly the final chapter, and Taiwan democracy has added a dynamic new plotline to the cross-strait Chinese rivalry. A trip to Taiwan provides not only a hint of what China might have been if the Nationalists had won the war but a glimpse of where—with a lot of luck—China may one day be going. The island's development—and particularly its transition to a modern democracy—is the untold other side of China's story.

A controversial claim made by many Asian food cognoscenti: Taipei's Chinese food is arguably the best in the world. Hong Kong may have the world's most delicate Cantonese dim sum, and Beijing may serve the most succulent Peking duck (though that's debatable). But in Taipei, restaurants serving food from different provinces—from the simplicity of Hangzhou-style sautéed shrimp to the earthiness of Beijing pulled noodles and spicy Szechuan orange-peel beef—stand side by side. Locals, of course, believe that the ingredients used in Taiwan's restaurants are of a higher quality than you'll find anywhere else in the world. Whether or not that's true, it's virtually impossible to have a bad meal in Taipei. Chiang brought with him the best chefs from all over China, and those mainlanders who joined him wanted to eat authentic dishes from their hometowns.