Pakistan, Jan. 16 -- While visiting Beijing some 18 years ago, we had toured the Forbidden City. It was a massive palace with 9,999 and a half rooms, walled and surrounded by a moat. While the Changing of Guards ceremony was awesome, we had discovered that several of the imperial masterworks which were originally housed in the Forbidden City had been sent to the National Palace Museum in Taiwan to survive the destruction being wreaked by the civil war between China's Nationalist and Communist armies.

That was reason enough to visit Taipei. So in December, we flew there from Hong Kong. The drive from the airport went over a really long causeway that must have been a feat of engineering when it was built.

The next day, we visited the impe...