Cabbage and Red Envelopes

Today we visited the National Palace Museum, which houses pretty much all of the historical artifacts not only from Taiwan but also from all of mainland China. Basically, when things started getting scary for the royalty over in China, they began shipping their precious goods to safe places out of the cities, and it turned out that the safest place to protect all this stuff from wars and communism and everything else was Taiwan. The collection is really stunning, including everything from pre-historic jade discs and carvings to some of the most beautiful and intricate pieces of art I've ever seen, from the 18th century-ish. Some of them were truly mind-blowing, including a fan made of woven ivory (yes, woven ivory!), an ivory carving consisting of about five intricately carved concentric spheres inside of each other, and Roger's and my favorite, a jade cabbage! This cabbage is apparently extremely famous in China, kind of like the Mona Lisa, except that it's a cabbage. There were many cabbage-themed items in the gift shop, including pens, magnets, pendants, a stuffed animal, and some extremely expensive replicas. This needless to say cracked us up a lot, though I'm sure we should have been more respectful to the cabbage, it being a national treasure. It even has its own wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jade_Cabbage.

Aside from the cabbage, there is one other notable tradition I think y'all should know about. It seems that it is traditional in Chinese families for the elder members of the family to give red envelopes to the younger members, in which envelopes are large sums of money. However, the parents of the youngsters don't feel comfortable receiving that much money from generous relatives, so whenever one appears, an epic battle ensues, complete with shouting, shoving, forcing said envelope into unwilling hands or pockets, repeated entreaties on one side and refusals on the other, until the receiving party finally gives in and accepts the envelope. It doesn't end there though; the receiving family will usually keep only a small portion of the money and regift the rest to the children of the relative who gave them the envelope in the first place. Brilliant! These battles about money seem to extend to other areas too, including arguing over who pays for meals, ordering way more food than the party can eat (at dinner tonight we had about fifteen dishes for eleven people!), giving extravagant gifts, etc. It's been very interesting to observe, and I'll update with clarifications/more observations as they come my way.