Miniatures Museum of Taiwan

The collection is assembled into themed displays, mainly dollhouses showing the inside and outside of whole buildings, roomboxes recreating individual rooms in detail, and imaginative themed pieces. Subjects range from Roman ruins of 2,000 years ago, showing the grandeur of the Roman Empire, to the comfortable life of ladies and gentlemen in a 1990s million-dollar apartment in the United States, Venice, Italy's city of water, the British Queen's Buckingham Palace, a slum in London's East End, and Snow White from the fairy tale. Miniature art began among the German court nobility in the 16th century and has spread across Europe and North America. The pieces, from whole buildings down to a key on a desk, are made strictly to scale, with 1:12 the main standard worldwide. They are copied from real life: apart from living people and animals, a 1 cm bottle holds real brandy, a stamp-sized painting is real oil paint, and cabinets, chairs, bed linen, porcelain, glass, metalwork, wallpaper and chandeliers, as well as a mini television showing cartoons, are all scaled-down replicas of real objects. When the museum opened, it focused mainly on European and American works, because miniatures of museum standard could not yet be found in the East. It also focuses on modern works, which it considers finer and more fully detailed than antique pieces, and so more worth seeing and studying. The whole collection is private: some pieces came from collectors in the United States and Canada, and the rest were commissioned from well-known European and American makers for the museum.

Translated and shortened by DealTaipei from Taiwan's national tourism database. Sources are on the terms page.