AFTER A STRETCH ON THE MAINLAND, WHICH IS WHAT Taiwanese called China, Taiwan felt like an oasis of order and tranquillity. It started as soon as I got to the airport in Shanghai. While the gates for domestic flights resembled Shanghai’s subway platforms, the passengers for Taipei queued and boarded without pushing or shoving. The flight landed in Taipei late, but everyone waited in their seats and spoke to each other or on their phones in hushed voices. Bins full of fake DVDs and displays explaining why fake handbags were prohibited greeted us in the baggage area. Cartoon characters and bubbly script dominated the public signage.

I had come to find Liu Pei Yu, the third “sister” in my grandmother’s generation (though actually a cousin), and whom I called by the kinship term San Yi Po. According to my grandmother, San Yi Po had helped bury my great-great-grandfather’s porcelain and might still have some pieces. Uncle Lewis, who was friendly with the family, had arranged for my visit. The Taipei scrolling past the taxi window on the way to San Yi Po’s apartment didn’t appear to have changed much since my first and only other trip to Taiwan. I was fifteen years old, annoyed at having to spend the summer away from my friends, and I complained nonstop about the food, the heat, the humidity, the noise, and the Chinese people. Any hope of making a connection with the country where my parents grew up vanished when, a few days after arriving, I contracted a virus and spent the rest of the month feverish and shitting myself in my sleep.

Much of modern Taipei’s architecture, largely constructed in the 1970s and 1980s with little sophistication in aesthetics or design, looked even more weatherbeaten and haphazard than Shanghai’s. Neon signs crowded the city’s long avenues, protruding from buildings as if trying to wave down a bus. There were so few traces of colonial-era Taiwan, let alone old Taiwan, that filmmakers making a movie set in 1940s Taiwan had to shoot it in Thailand. Even the city’s iconic piece of architecture, the Taipei 101 building that for a moment had stood as the tallest in the world before Shanghai’s World Financial Center surpassed it in 2007, seemed incongruous. Rising above the drab city like an obelisk, it only underscored how unremarkable the rest of the place was.

Lacking Beijing’s primacy or history, Shanghai’s modernity, or Hong Kong’s internationalism, Taiwan’s capital of “only” about two million people felt sleepy and undistinguished. Most of Taiwan’s tourism came from mainlanders or Japanese visiting their former colony in the tropics, the way the Dutch might check out Indonesia. The infrastructure wasn’t geared toward Westerners, and it was hard to find good Western food. The level of English was often little better than that on the mainland, and the Taiwanese were just as shy about speaking it, leading to plenty of Chinglish and awkward translations (“tuna floss” for dried, shredded fish; a law firm named “Primordial”).

But where China’s modern cities were rank with sewage, rotting garbage, and industrial paint, Taiwan’s tumbledown alleys and narrow side streets were perfumed with tea, incense, and beef noodle broth that began simmering at dawn. There was such an emphasis on green space that park benches were even tucked into road medians. The bus drivers exchanged waves when they passed one another. And while the buses in China had weapons-grade air horns under their hoods, the horns in Taiwan were governed to beep like scooters’. Taxi drivers insisted I wear my seat belt. Without fail, cashiers and customers greeted and thanked each other during transactions. The subway platforms had painted lines to show where riders should line up, keeping the doors clear for passengers to exit first. In the stations, standers and walkers obeyed invisible barriers, and no matter how crowded a train might get, which they often did, no one intruded on my space or touched me without apologizing. One afternoon on a packed train, an exiting schoolgirl said, “Excuse me, pardon me for a second, could you please let me by, I’d like to get off the train,” to every single person she encountered on her way to the doors.

I ARRIVED AT San Yi Po’s apartment around noon, leaving my shoes at the door while her eldest daughter, whom I called Da Biao Yi, searched through a stack of house slippers for a pair big enough for my feet. San Yi Po lived in a three-bedroom apartment in a high-rise complex in Taipei’s Songshan district, a particularly charmless area of the city. The apartment had been provided by the military for San Yi Po’s late husband, a high-ranking officer in Taiwan’s air force, and it demonstrated that for all the differences between Taiwan and the mainland, their aesthetic sensibilities remained similar. The floral print sofas in the living room, sitting on glossy tile floors and arranged around a large flat-screen television, wore cheap bamboo seat covers. Clutter grew on table surfaces like mold. Though all the Liu girls had attended missionary schools, only my grandmother had emerged as a devout Christian, and the religious symbols in San Yi Po’s apartment were Buddhist ones. A glass cabinet took up one wall, full of knickknacks, military citations, and dusty bottles of brandy. If San Yi Po had any of my great-great-grandfather’s porcelain, as my grandmother had suggested, she didn’t have it on display.

San Yi Po was eighty-seven years old and had recently broken her leg, confining her to a wheelchair. She lived with Da Biao Yi, who was six months older than Uncle Lewis, never married, and had worked for the national television company until her retirement. They shared a bedroom, sleeping side by side in separate beds. Da Biao Yi and her five siblings, most of whom were born on the mainland during the war years, spoke to each other in a pidgin Mandarin, Jiujiang, and Sichuan dialect, the product of having grown up in juan cuns, or military dependents’ communities, all over China. “Our speech has grown confused,” she laughed. “Our Mandarin isn’t correct, our Sichuan dialect isn’t correct, and if you asked me to use a correct Jiujiang accent, I wouldn’t be able to.”

I presented San Yi Po with a bag of fruit and a stoneware dish purchased from a boutique selling contemporary ceramics. San Yi Po, whose tastes apparently ran counter to mine, barely glanced at the dish before setting it down on a side table, where the clutter immediately swallowed it up. Her live-in ayi, a young Indonesian woman, prepared a simple lunch served directly from the old pots in which they were cooked.

San Yi Po was the oldest daughter of Ting Geng, my great-great-grandfather’s middle son, a civil engineer who died of tuberculosis during the Sino-Japanese War. I had a hard time seeing any resemblance to my grandmother; San Yi Po’s chubby cheeks, doughy body, and slouched arms gave her the look of an overfed, elderly orangutan. Despite what my grandmother had said about her health, San Yi Po was as energetic and talkative as my grandmother was reserved. She gossiped about everyone, including my grandmother, whose devout Christianity had long puzzled her; she described my grandmother as having been too religious for her own good. It was nice to find a family member who liked to dish.

As a child, San Yi Po was the compliant granddaughter. She was the one my great-great-grandfather took with him when he inspected his fields, whom he taught how to settle harvests and accounts with the sharecroppers and keep accurate financial books. Cong Ji might have been the heir, but San Yi Po was who my great-great-grandfather envisioned would operate his empire when he was gone. So even though San Yi Po was only eleven years old when the Imperial Japanese Army reached the confluence of Poyang Lake and the Yangtze, she knew the complete story of my great-great-grandfather and his porcelain because she had helped bury it.

“Let me tell you, when we were fleeing, we were really pitiful,” she said. “We’d hide under trees and sleep during the day, and when dusk came, we started walking and didn’t stop until dawn.”

“Were you scared?”

“What use was there being scared?” She swiped the air as if back-handing a mosquito. “There were so many refugees. We saw dead people all the time on the roads.”

During the war, San Yi Po remained in Chongqing until she finished high school at the relocated Rulison school, where San Gu taught. Tired of the itinerant life of a refugee and eager to attend college, she made arrangements to enroll in her top choice, Soochow University. Then one day San Gu told her she needed to go to Guizhou, where her mother and younger sister, Pei Ke, were living with Pei Fu.

“Why?” San Yi Po asked.

“They want you to help take care of your mom and Pei Ke,” San Gu said.

What San Gu didn’t mention was that my great-great-grandfather had arranged for San Yi Po to marry. He’d selected her husband, Dai Chang Pu, a junior officer in the army’s special operations corps, on the basis of having seen him sew a button, figuring such a man would be a capable provider for his granddaughter. Dai happened to be a Jiangxi native and a graduate of Tong Wen Academy, Rulison’s brother institution, and recognized my great-great-grandfather’s name. Stationed far from home and eager for company, he agreed to the marriage.

“But what about college?” San Yi Po asked San Gu.

San Gu replied that Grandfather had lined up a teaching job for her, too.

“But I can work somewhere else and send them money and support them that way,” San Yi Po said.

“Pei Fu works all day, so someone has to be there to take care of your mom and sister,” San Gu said. “Besides, you don’t have a choice. Grandfather’s waiting for you.”

San Yi Po relented. When she got to Guizhou, Pei Fu told her of the marriage agreement. “Who the hell is getting married?” San Yi Po demanded.

“You,” Pei Fu said.

San Yi Po, ever the obedient granddaughter, married Dai Chang Pu on Christmas Day 1941, just a couple of months after their introduction. “I couldn’t disobey my grandfather,” my grandaunt said. “But it turned out okay.”

Dai Chang Pu was just a captain when they married, but he was tapped for the air force’s zheng zhan—political warfare—department and rose through the ranks. When I asked Uncle Lewis, who like all young men in Taiwan had completed two years of compulsory military service, what zheng zhan meant, he explained that it was the equivalent of the military police, tasked with rooting out subversion, especially Communist sympathizers. Dai Chang Pu was nominally the second-in-command wherever he was stationed, but everyone knew he was really in charge. Running afoul of him could at the very least make a soldier’s life difficult, or even result in his execution, which meant that zheng zhan officers were despised as much as they were feared. “They were the people in the army in charge of brainwashing you,” Lewis said. And just in case it wasn’t clear, he added that these people were “assholes.”

Dai Chang Pu retired in 1958 and died in 2001. “They say no affection in a marriage is a bad thing,” San Yi Po said. “But it can also be a good thing. Everyone compromises with each other. Our temperaments were total opposites. He liked to put on a good face and host all these important people. Me, I was very casual. He could be so annoying, saying I had to wear these clothes and behave this way. But we made it through sixty years. Long ago that was your whole life—get married, have kids, live your life. We were pretty good, actually. Pretty harmonious.”

THE DISTANCE FROM China to Taiwan was only eighty miles, less than Cuba was from Florida, yet I couldn’t have felt farther from the mainland. Shop floors and streets were remarkably clear of litter. People took their waste home with them, where they sorted it and then delivered it to recycling trucks that made rounds in the evening like ice cream trucks, complete with jingles blaring from their speakers. Seemingly humble eateries became hubs where Chinese of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds gathered. Drivers stopped for pedestrians; the first few times I let cars pass in front of me, their operators smiled and waved thank you. The old factories in the overgrown hills had displays reporting the day’s air particulate concentrations, and construction sites posted all the same notices as in Western countries: the developer’s information, the phone numbers for questions or complaints, and the running total of incident-free workdays.

Taiwan felt like the mainland with polished edges, even down to the language. The Taiwanese accent was a soft drawl, and the manner of speaking was hushed. They ended their sentences with a breathed “oh,” a bit like the Canadian “eh.” But the differences in syntax and diction between Taiwan and the mainland, similar to British and American English, resulted in a different kind of Mandarin. In Taiwan avocados were e yu li, or “alligator pears,” while on the mainland they were niu you guo, “butter fruit”; Australia was Ao Zhou instead of Ao De Li Ya; and bicycle was jiaotache (“foot step vehicle”) instead of zixingche (“self-powered vehicle”). Other mistakes could be more fraught. Chewing gum, or kou jiao on the mainland, meant “blow job” in Taiwan. Requesting a wake-up call, or jiao chuang, from the hotel receptionist was actually asking for morning sex. Every time I spoke, I cringed, hoping I wouldn’t be taken for a mainlander.

A cynic like Andrew might have pointed out that the cleanliness, efficiency, and courtesies that I adored were influences from Japan, Taiwan having been a Japanese colony from 1895 to 1945, when it was returned to China as one of the conditions of the Japanese surrender in World War II. Most elderly Taiwanese spoke Japanese and didn’t bear the same animus as mainlanders did toward the people that had made a host of educational, economic, and public policy modernizations on the island; many street and business signs still contained Japanese characters. Whatever its origins, Taiwan struck me as the ideal China, both a reminder of its cultured past and an example of what it could become: a functioning democracy with a free press, universal health care, and a strong middle class. Though little of Taiwan’s infrastructure was truly old, its sights, scents, and sounds budded from ancient, authentic Chinese roots, and the people seemed to have found a way to participate in a global culture without sacrificing their own.

And the best thing about Taiwan’s culture was its food. While the obsession with eating here was no different from on the mainland, and food remained the primary social organizer, it had been refined to place added importance on quality, cleanliness, and freshness. I could see why my ABC friends always returned from trips to Taiwan noticeably heavier. I normally couldn’t stand Chinese breakfasts but could eat a fried you tiao and a dan bin every morning, washing it down with chilled, freshly pressed soy milk. Though I had not grown up with Taiwanese beef noodle soup and the side dishes commonly served with it, it still somehow triggered nostalgic comforts. Taiwan’s famous night markets offered dozens of drinks and snacks both sweet and savory; I could graze for a week without eating the same thing twice. Around the corner from San Yi Po’s apartment was the world’s best shop for fengli su, flaky pineapple cakes. I made trips across town just to get a cup of xingren doufu, a chilled dessert resembling an almond milk flan topped with fruit cocktail that I could have eaten by the gallon and that had the most Proustian associations of all.

And of course, there was the fruit, which flourished thanks to the island’s volcanic soil and varied terrain. I used the markets as a marathoner would water stations, snatching a fistful of fruit every time I passed one. Peeled, sliced, and bagged mango; a creamy, sugary custard apple, best eaten with a spoon; a box of juicy local pineapple chunks; or my favorite, crisp ruby-red wax apples, tasting faintly of rosewater.

One afternoon outside the Chiang Kai-shek mausoleum complex, Taiwan’s answer to Tiananmen Square, I wandered over to a large booth advertising wild strawberries. But instead of baskets of fruit, I found young volunteers handing out pamphlets for the Wild Strawberries, a protest movement. The name was a reappropriation of the pejorative nickname for Taiwanese born in the 1980s, having grown up in prosperity that their parents couldn’t have imagined, and stereotyped as being indulged, selfish, apathetic, and “easily bruised.” With its multiple security checkpoints, CCTV cameras, undercover police, and labyrinth of barricades, you’d be tackled in Tiananmen Square before you got your sign out of your backpack. To witness a large group of Chinese people perform an act of protest, on the founding father’s memorial site, no less, was both jarring and emotional. For the first time since moving to China, I felt proud to be Chinese.

BUT TAIWAN’S CIVILITY, democracy, and progressiveness didn’t come easily or perhaps even naturally. When the Communists ended the Republic of China in 1949, they also cut short one of the most intriguing what ifs in history. The same zeitgeist that had led to the revolution in 1911 had also nurtured free-floating intellectuals who eschewed the imperial civil service system and grew disillusioned with traditional Chinese culture, which they blamed for China’s precipitous fall from power and inability to keep up with Japan and the West. This self-examination coalesced on May 4, 1919, when thousands of students massed before Beijing’s Forbidden City in one of the largest mass demonstrations in Chinese history, a thousand-year storm of intellectual exuberance that pushed China into a national renaissance. In what became known collectively as the May Fourth Movement, Chinese intelligentsia criticized Confucianism, agitated for new scholastic traditions and moral values, and sought practical solutions for coping with Western countries, such as establishing a civil, academic society.

As the country attempted to sort out its very Chinese-ness, every strand of its social fabric was reconsidered: science, engineering, philosophy, political science, economics, architecture, literature. But this “new culture” movement wasn’t so much a call to embrace the West and Western democracy as it was a break from the old while the new was still being formulated, and ideas ranged far and wide. Chen Duxiu, one of the leaders of the May Fourth Movement and the dean of Peking University, cautioned that establishing a constitutional democracy in a country with thousands of years of feudalism and imperialism would be nearly impossible without first changing the Chinese character. Chen would later gravitate to the left and cofound the Communist Party. By 1920 the strands of the Communist Party’s genetic material had begun to braid.

For all the progressive ideas on Chiang’s platform, he was a failure on the mainland. Today’s Chinese revile him as much as they revere Sun Yat-sen. Chiang’s government lasted only from 1912 to 1949, most of which he spent trying to legitimize his party’s tenuous rule amid natural disasters, uncooperative warlords, Japanese incursions, and the Communists. I had always thought of Chiang Kai-shek’s obsession with defeating the Communists as a principled, noble pursuit. The charitable portrait of Chiang—Christian, pro-West, pro-democracy—was that he played a losing hand as well as he could have. He lost China but saved Taiwan, which developed into one of the economic “tigers” of Asia. And he preserved the National Palace Museum’s collection—China’s most precious hoard of art—from possible ruin.

But to his many detractors, Chiang was the very straw man—wealthy, powermongering, corrupt—that galvanized the Communists. He was a bigamist, a fair-weather Christian, a crook who diverted tens of millions of dollars from the American government, earmarked for the war effort against the Communists, into his own pockets, and the thief who stole China’s treasures. During the Sino-Japanese War, he was so obsessed with defeating the Communists that his own military officers had to kidnap him and threaten him with execution before he agreed to engage the Japanese.

When Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang loyalists—including my grandparents and their young children—retreated to Taiwan in 1949, they intended to regroup and organize as a “government in exile” for the inevitable failure of Mao’s grand social experiment. “The sky cannot have two suns,” Chiang told an aide. Chiang, of course, underestimated Mao’s deftness as a nation builder. As Mao created a country of peasants with no ties to any historical or foreign influences, the thread of Chinese history that gave rise to the May Fourth generation continued with the Chinese enlightenment in exile. As a result, this tiny island became the world’s repository of Chinese culture.

But the Taiwan that I reveled in didn’t just spring forth fully formed. While the Kuomintang cast Mao as a despotic thug, Chiang was the one with ties to crime syndicates, and the Kuomintang was stricken with corruption. The Chiang-led government in Taiwan could be as brutal as Mao in purging dissent. Thousands of Taiwanese were killed, imprisoned, or disappeared in the “228 Massacre” (a Tiananmen-like crackdown on protests against carpetbagging Kuomintang officials in Taipei on February 28, 1947) and the “White Terror” (the forty years of martial law and suppression of political dissidents) that followed. As recently as 1995, it was taboo to even speak of the 228 Massacre in Taiwan, which might have explained the pitch of my parents’ after-dinner discussions.

That same year a tsunami of protests spurred the government to apologize, erect a monument to the 228 victims, and enact political reforms that led to the island’s first direct presidential election, in 1996. Then in 2000 the opposition party, known as the Greens to the Kuomintang’s Blues, crushed the incumbents by an almost two-to-one margin, leading to the first peaceful transfer of power in five thousand years of Chinese history. The result was an atmosphere where the right to vote was cherished and voter turnout approached 80 percent.

In 2011 Taipei opened the 228 Memorial Museum, in the 228 Peace Memorial Park, located on a wide, quarter-mile-long road that was once called Long Live Chiang Kai-shek Road but was later renamed after the Ketagalan aborigines who originally inhabited the Taipei area, to “celebrate liberation from authoritarianism.” The museum’s purpose seemed to be both “never forget” and “celebrate freedom,” two phrases that appeared frequently in the exhibitions.

Taiwan took pride in confronting its ugly history and in having built a society that blended the best of traditional Chinese culture with new Chinese ideals, and I was proud of them for it. Whenever the topic of the mainland came up, the Taiwanese I met sighed and politely said that Taiwan had been a mess twenty years ago, too, but look at where it was now. But it was increasingly looking as if the mainland’s culture would subsume Taiwan’s and not the other way around. After developing independently of mainland China for so many decades, China’s economic might had made the two governments cozier. Travel restrictions had been lifted for Chinese travelers, airlines could fly directly between Taiwan and China, and mainland brides were in vogue on the island. After decades of holding on to the Wade-Giles romanization system as a matter of cultural pride and national independence, Taiwan finally relented to mainland Chinese pressure and adopted pinyin as its official system in 2009, a move that angered many citizens, who took it as another step in Taiwan’s assimilation into China.

AT SAN YI PO’S insistence, I checked out of my hotel and moved my things into her spare bedroom, which was anything but spare, with boxes piled to the ceiling. Once I was settled, San Yi Po told me that she had found a shoebox with a small stack of black-and-white photographs. The one box was all she could find. “Oh, I’ve thrown away so many photos,” she said. “They wore out, so I tossed them.”

Many of the photographs in the shoebox were pretty worn out themselves, and San Yi Po couldn’t always remember where they had come from or who their subjects were. But they provided some of my first real glimpses of my family’s history, including my grandmother’s early life. The oldest were a group of photographs of the Rulison school campus from the 1930s before the war: San Yi Po and classmates whose names she couldn’t recall relaxing on a green, or sitting on a long brick walkway lined with trees and manicured lawns, the portico of one of the school buildings peeking from neatly trimmed hedges. A young boy and girl standing in front of a beautiful neoclassical building with arched columns, which could have come straight from the campus of an American school of the same period. A ghostly group of girls wearing white dresses, white leggings, and white flowers in their hair, their images faded to the point of transparency, performing outdoors on the Rulison campus. A tiny, blurry photograph of what appeared to be my grandmother in high school, dressed for a school production in an elegant white Chinese gown and holding an open fan over her breast. Another thumbnail-size photograph of a smiling young woman who looked like my grandmother, wearing a traditional qipao with daisy print. Or it might have been San Gu. San Yi Po didn’t know for sure.

We found a photograph of San Yi Po and Dai Chang Pu at their wedding, she in a white, sleeved dress and he in a three-piece suit, holding a fedora in his left hand. And a studio photo of my grandmother and grandfather holding my mother and Lewis on their laps, probably taken in Chongqing around 1945. Then a family picture of my grandmother, grandfather, mother, Lewis, and Richard standing in front of their small Japanese-style house in Taiwan during the early 1950s. San Yi Po’s husband standing with Chiang Kai-shek on one of the islands in the Taiwan Strait in 1959. A few images of my grandmother, San Yi Po, and another Rulison alum with one of their former English teachers, a white-haired woman named Laura Schleman from Ohio, reunited in Taichung, Taiwan, in the 1960s. My grandmother wears a long qipao under a white cardigan with the top button fastened, looking preppy-Chinese. Finally, my grandmother in middle age, her hair swept up into a bun and wearing horn-rimmed glasses.

For the rest of the week, I explored Taipei during the day and after dinner sat with San Yi Po and Da Biao Yi in the living room to hear their stories. As the widow of a high-ranking Kuomintang officer, San Yi Po’s loyalties were clear. In her recollections, the Kuomintang were the noble heroes, while the Communists were “red bandits,” “ghouls,” “thugs,” or “bastards.” The Communist sympathizers in the family were “traitors,” and she gave dates, as most Taiwanese did, in “the nth year of the Republic of China.” Unlike the older generation on the mainland, many of whom were nostalgic for the Mao years, San Yi Po preferred the current era of Communists. “Before, they were all gangsters and bullies,” she said. According to San Yi Po, my great-great-grandfather was even more wealthy, educated, and generous than I had heard, a man who let his sharecroppers keep seven, not six, bushels of every ten. (By now, I had met enough Chinese descended from landowners to know that if every landlord was as kind and generous as their families remembered them—just as families of American plantation owners always claimed their forebears treated their slaves well—the Communists would never have taken power.) As for his porcelain collection, well, it was as massive as it was peerless.

“My grandmother said you still have some porcelain from Jiujiang,” I said.

“Not anymore,” San Yi Po said. “If I’d brought any porcelain out with us, we’d be rich. It was antique and would have been worth a lot.”

“You should have,” Da Biao Yi said.

“But if we’d taken them, they probably would have broken,” San Yi Po said.

“Well, you should’ve taken some small things, then,” Da Biao Yi said. “That would have been worth it. You know how hard it is to find imperial porcelain from Jingdezhen now?”

“Aiya, we could barely even carry clothes!” she said, closing her eyes and rubbing her forehead with the palm of her liver-spotted hand. “How were we supposed to take porcelain?”

Da Biao Yi shrugged. San Yi Po leaned toward me. “There was a set of bowls, let me tell you, they were like glass, they were so thin and transparent,” she said. “These bowls, you couldn’t stack them or they’d break. They all had imperial seals on the bottom.”

“Do you know what happened to all the porcelain?” I asked.

“The first time, when we returned from Chongqing, there was a portion of our things left,” San Yi Po said. “The good porcelain, the furniture, most of that was gone. The second time, after the Communists, there was nothing. The house was gone, the field had become a workers’ commune.”

“How did you find out?” I said. By the time the Communists took Jiujiang, San Yi Po and her family had gone to Taiwan.

“Andrew’s father, the first time he went back to the mainland, I told him, ‘When you get back there, here is where this stuff was, and here was where that stuff was.’ He found some people and tried digging but didn’t find anything. Nothing left at all. Even the house was gone. Just a vacant lot.”

“Really?” I said. I couldn’t imagine Uncle Lewis neglecting to mention having looked for the porcelain.

“He went by himself to Jiangxi. I told him what was where and where to dig. I joked with him, ‘Don’t worry about those plates and bowls. See if you can find the money.’ Pei Fu was still alive then. He got her family, her son and others, to go dig. I drew him a map. Pei Fu took one look at it and remembered.”

Then San Yi Po rolled her wheelchair away, switched on the television, and cranked it so loud the entire building probably heard it. She did this every night at eight p.m. on the dot, without the assistance of any timepieces, and would spend the rest of the night watching Chinese serials, inches from the television, until she fell asleep.

SAN YI PO didn’t think anything would come of my going back to Xingang to look for the porcelain, though she didn’t discourage me. “Our house isn’t even there anymore,” she said the next day as we sucked on brown sugar lollipops with sour plum centers. “How do you expect to find anything when it’s all been changed?”

I asked if she could describe any of the buried objects in more detail. She couldn’t, but repeated, “It was all from the imperial kilns in Jingdezhen.”

“How did Grandfather get it?” I said.

“My grandfather’s middle son worked in Jingdezhen as the county commissioner,” she said. I found it curious that she didn’t just say her father, but I had her write down his name.

“Those kilns used to make imperial stuff, and they’d let him have the leftovers,” she continued. “The six girls living at home all got a set of porcelain. It was mostly Qing, some Republican, some others. We never really used it.”

“But you don’t remember what it looked like?”

“How can I remember all the stuff in there?” she said. “I don’t know. But the ground was completely full of porcelain when we buried it. Big cisterns, small cisterns, little figures. Just one dining set might have a hundred pieces.”

“Do you think there’s anything left in that hole?”

“You can’t even locate the hole! The house, the land, it’s all been changed. The Communists used the house to run a cotton plant and a pig farm. It’s all gone.

“What you should really do is try to find that villa on Lushan,” she continued. “That’s worth something, and if you found it, we might be able to get it back.”

I had heard of Lushan only as a resort for foreign missionaries and Kuomintang elite. Did our family really have a villa there? Who had bought it?

“Your grandmother’s family was the big landowner,” Da Biao Yi said. “They had money. Why wouldn’t they have a house on Lushan?”

San Yi Po said that it had been her father, Ting Geng, who bought the house, and she described it with all the vivid detail that her recollections of the porcelain lacked. The villa was across the creek from Chiang Kai-shek’s residence—known as the Meilu Villa and technically belonging to his wife, Soong Mei-ling. Two roads ran on either side of the creek, He Xi Lu and He Dong Lu (West Creek Road and East Creek Road). The house had two floors and four bedrooms, along with a living room, a dining room, a library, and a servant’s room. Outside was a flower garden. “The Chiangs were on He Dong Lu, we were on He Xi Lu,” San Yi Po said.

“Have you been to Lushan yet?” Da Biao Yi asked me.

“No.”

“Then hurry and go see if it’s still there!” Da Biao Yi said. “Soong Mei-ling’s house is still there, I know that. Our house was across from hers. Just find He Xi Lu and see if it’s there.”

I promised that I would try. “If I wanted to see the kind of porcelain your family used to have, where could I see it?” I said.

San Yi Po shrugged. “Maybe Jingdezhen would have it,” she said. “But even in Jingdezhen you can’t see what they used to have.”

BETTER YET, I could go to the National Palace Museum. Built into the mountains north of Taipei, the sprawling NPM was home to the world’s preeminent collection of antique porcelain. The serenity of the setting ended at the main entrance hall of the museum, thronged with noisy tour groups from the mainland. As I stood in line to buy a ticket, volunteers ran from one knot of shouting mainlanders—far louder than any museumgoers I’d ever seen and easily identified by their volume, their smell, and the behavior of their children—to another, holding up signs bearing reminders to keep their voices low and refrain from taking photos. One volunteer told me this system was intended to avoid confrontation, but it didn’t make a big difference. “People who don’t care about proper behavior aren’t going to care about these signs,” she said.

I spent the day gazing at the porcelain displays, arranged chronologically and accompanied with informative English texts. I walked from early earthenware to the subtle monochrome Song wares to the early blue and white of the Yuan, through the beginning of color in the Ming to the explosion of vibrant colors and exotic styles of the Qing, wondering if my great-great-grandfather had owned any similar objects.

There were actually two Palace Museums, one in Taipei and one in Beijing, both claiming to be the original institution. In the nineteenth century, as reformist Chinese scholars traveled to the West, they became exposed to the idea of museums as civic centerpieces. The museum as an institution for the public to appreciate hitherto private collections of cultural artifacts had great appeal to Chinese literati like my great-great-grandfather, with their long traditions of treasuring antiquities and their reverence for education.

After the 1911 revolution, though there was no royal family residing in the Imperial Palace, there remained the issue of who the imperial collections belonged to, what they signified politically, and what to do with them. The continued presence of the abdicated “last emperor” Puyi fostered the possibility of a return to dynastic times. So the impetus for the Palace Museum, to be housed in the Forbidden City, was as much about occupying palace space to thwart any restoration of the monarchy as it was about preservation or culture.

With the creation of a museum came the challenge of filling it. The royal collections were scattered all over the country. Puyi, the abdicated royal family, and the court eunuchs who resided in an area of the Forbidden City had continued to regard the collections as their personal property and they regularly filched items, either by claiming to send out objects for repair or presenting them as payment. In 1913 the imperial family even tried to sell the entire palace collection, “including pearls, bronzes, porcelain, etc.,” to J. P. Morgan for $4 million. But Morgan died just a few weeks after his staff received the telegrams, and the collection remained in Beijing. In 1923 Puyi announced an inventory of the Qianlong emperor’s collection, sending the eunuchs into a panic. The building housing the collection was suddenly and conveniently burned to the ground, and only 387 items were recovered from the 6,643 inventoried. Puyi expelled one thousand eunuchs, who opened up antique shops outside the front gate of the Forbidden City, and their counties of origin were suddenly flooded with imperial antiques.

After Republican officials converted the Forbidden City’s halls into museum space, they put a stop to the thievery. Over the next few years, officials were able to recover more than 200,000 objects (including forty-three live deer) from the various royal collections and move them to Beijing. As the collection continued to grow, the staff also began to address the preservation and conservation of antiquities, the preservation and restoration of the buildings of the Forbidden City, and academic research and publication. The Palace Museum opened its doors to the public in 1925 and became so entwined with national identity that when Chiang Kai-shek assumed power, he appointed himself to the museum’s board.

The bifurcation of the two Palace Museums, like my family’s, began during the Second Sino-Japanese War. As Chiang’s government focused on exterminating the Communist threat, a matter complicated by powerful warlords, corruption, and crippling self-interests (a trio of Chinese legacies that survives to this day), the Japanese attacked Manchuria in 1937, an area in northeastern China they envisioned as their future breadbasket. China offered little resistance while the Japanese rolled inland, taking cities with ease and prompting my great-great-grandfather to bury his porcelain and flee.

In Beijing, Chiang Kai-shek initiated a similar but far grander endeavor, ordering the Palace Museum’s staff to box up more than one million pieces of priceless porcelains, jades, scrolls, bronzes, furniture, and—significantly—thrones for clandestine shipment to Nanjing, the Republic of China’s capital, for safekeeping; other items were shipped to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

This was just the beginning of a six-thousand-mile, sixteen-year odyssey that saved China’s guo bao, or national treasures, from the Japanese, the most extraordinary art preservation effort in Chinese history. With no facility large enough to store the nineteen thousand wooden crates in Nanjing, the collection then traveled to Shanghai. After the Japanese took Shanghai, the collection was separated into three batches that would take different routes west with a military escort. Over the next decade, the dispossessed collection of China’s most valuable art was in constant motion, traveling on trains, trucks, steamboats, hand-towed barges, and the backs of laborers, often just a single step ahead of Japanese bombs, while also contending with floods, warlords, and bandits. It took refuge in bunkers, caves, temples, warehouses, and even private homes. Elderly residents in a host of rural Chinese villages who might never have traveled more than twenty miles from their birthplaces had childhood memories of seeing ancient paintings, scrolls of calligraphy, and books when staffers aired them out on sunny days.

As the story goes, not a single item of the collection was lost or damaged, which speaks to the collective effort of its protection, as well as its cultural significance. But the elegance of that claim, like San Yi Po’s rose-colored memories, was probably more mythology than fact. Since 1991 a joint Sino-American team of archaeologists had been investigating the area around the ancient Song dynasty capital of Kaifeng for predynastic Shang cities. (The Shang were the ones with the oracle bones.) That area also happened to be on the route that one batch of Palace Museum objects took through the Yellow River valley in 1938. On the final day of one recent dig season, a farmer showed up to report the appearance of imperial ceramics in his fields. The archaeologists didn’t have time to make a full investigation but surmised that the museum trucks had rolled through Henan province the same year the Japanese had gained control of all of northern China. Chiang Kai-shek, in what was described as “the largest act of environmental warfare in history,” dynamited levees on the Yellow River, creating a massive flood that he hoped would stymie the Japanese advance. The flood succeeded in slowing the Japanese but also destroyed thousands of villages, ruined huge swaths of farmland, and created several million refugees. By the Kuomintang’s own count, nearly a million Chinese drowned as a result of the flood. The archaeologists in Kaifeng surmised that it was entirely possible that the floodwaters might have also overturned some of the museum trucks, spilling their goods into the fields. And given the chaotic circumstances, some of those treasures might have been left where they fell and remained silted over for decades, just another layer of the local history that stretched back to the beginning of China.

The three Palace Museum shipments eventually rendezvoused in Sichuan province, near the wartime capital of Chongqing. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, they made the trek back to Nanjing, but the civil war between Chiang’s Nationalists and Mao’s Communists had recommenced almost immediately. In 1949, as Chiang was planning the Kuomintang retreat to Taiwan, he called the treasure trucks back to Shanghai, where he cherry-picked more than 100,000 of the collection’s finest (mostly jades and porcelain, which had the best size-to-value ratio) to bring with him, along with most of the nation’s gold and silver supply.

Under the life-size portrait of Chiang Kai-shek in the National Palace Museum’s library building was an English inscription that explained Taiwan’s version of the events: “Under his command, the treasures of the Palace Museum were rescued and shipped to the southwestern part of China. During these tumultuous years, they were saved from war destruction. In the aftermath of the Chinese victory, the insurgent Communists began to create internal strife. The cultural artifacts were therefore shipped to Taiwan, under the direction of Chiang Kai-shek, to protect them from the annihilative reign of the Communists, especially from their catastrophical ‘cultural revolution.’ ”

The Communists viewed Chiang’s act as plunder, and the collection’s value, both monetary and symbolic, remained a flashpoint for the Chinese identity. Though in 1991 Taiwan declared that the Chinese Civil War was over, the combatants have never signed an armistice or peace treaty. The many acts of aggression by China since 1949—shellings, naval blockades, incursions of Taiwan’s offshore islands, and missile tests in the Taiwan Strait—indicating its willingness to go to war rather than lose Taiwan had just as much to do with what was in the NPM in Taipei as it did with politics. In dynastic China, ownership of the imperial porcelain collection had conferred the right to rule, and so long as it remained in Taipei, Chiang’s government could claim that it, not Beijing, was China’s capital.

THE MORNING I left Taipei, San Yi Po was up early, and she told me one last story. When China finally opened up in the 1980s, she went back to Xingang to find my great-great-grandfather’s house. While there, she was invited to meet with a local party official in Jiujiang. “He was very tongzhan,” she recalled. That is, he was welcoming of overseas Chinese returning to the mainland.

“If you come back, we can give you lots of things,” he told my grandaunt. “Many things for you to invest in. Just complete some applications.”

“But my family’s house, it’s all gone,” San Yi Po said. “Our things are gone. You’ve built on our property. What can I possibly apply for?”

“Oh, we have a lot of land. Just fill out some paperwork, and we’ll give you some other land.”

San Yi Po considered the proposal.

“Say, how long have you been away?” the official asked.

“How long have you all been here?” San Yi Po snapped. “That’s how long I’ve been away.”

The official frowned. “Well, if you add up all the years, that’s a lot of tax that you would owe on the land,” he said. “If we gave it to you, we’d have to charge you for the taxes.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” San Yi Po told me. “I told him I’d have to go back to Taiwan and check on some things, see if it would work. And then I got the hell out of there. What do I want their land for, anyway?”

She pulled a pair of silver coins from her shirt pocket. “Here,” she said. “A souvenir.”

I tried to read the script on the obverse side. “Year three of the republic—”

“Republic of China, third year!” San Yi Po said.

I had mistakenly read from left to right instead of right to left. The coins had been minted in 1914. These were silver dollars that my great-great-grandfather had buried, recovered, and given to San Yi Po, who carried them with her, along with about twenty others, from the mainland more than sixty years ago. She had given them away as gifts, until these two were all she had left.

“Been almost a hundred years,” San Yi Po said. “In the thirties we’d change one coin for 360 bronze pieces. They were worth even more before. You could buy a hundred pounds of rice with one coin. We buried a big jar of these in Jiujiang, next to the porcelain. One or two thousand coins in there.”

San Yi Po instructed me to hold them lightly between my fingertips and knock them together, an old trick to determine the authenticity of silver. Other metals made a dull jangle, but silver would ring clean and pure. I balanced a coin on each of my middle fingers and brought them together. They produced a crystalline, high-pitched chime, as a sparkle would sound, that reverberated through the room. Proof.