This site is written from Taiwan, and that is not incidental to what it can tell you.
A tradition that was never interrupted here
Traditional characters are the everyday script here — on shop signs, in newspapers, in school. The festival calendar is the working calendar: Ghost Month changes what people schedule, Qingming empties the cities, the lunar new year runs for weeks. Temple practice is ordinary life rather than heritage performance, and the deities have opening hours.
That matters for a reference site because so much English writing on Chinese culture describes it in the past tense, reconstructed from books. A great deal of what I can report here is simply what happens down the road.
Where the objects are
The National Palace Museum in Taipei holds the imperial collection that left the mainland in 1948–49 — paintings, calligraphy, bronzes, and the rare books and archives that came with it. Its open-data programme publishes tens of thousands of high-resolution images for free reuse, and the illustrations on this site come from collections like it rather than from an image generator. When you see a painting here, it is a real object in a real collection, and the entry says which.
What I am not saying
This is not a claim that Chinese civilisation belongs to one government rather than another, and this site takes no position on the political question. It is a narrower observation about sources: on the specific matters this site covers — script, classical text, temple practice, festival observance — Taiwan is an unusually good place to be standing, and I would rather say so plainly than pretend the vantage point does not exist.
