Chimei Museum
museum in Tainan, Taiwan
The Chimei Museum (Chinese: 奇美博物館; pinyin: Qíměi Bówùguǎn; Wade–Giles: Chʻi²-mei³ Po²-wu⁴-kuan³) is a private museum established in 1992 by Shi Wen-long of Chi Mei Corporation in Rende District, Tainan, Taiwan. The museum's collection is divided into five categories: Fine arts (including painting, sculpture, decorative arts and period furniture); Musical instruments; Natural history and fossils; Arms and armor; Antiquities and artifacts. The museum is known for housing the world's largest violin collection and for its significant collections of ancient weapons and sculptures. Forbes magazine, in its February 1996 article on private collectors in Asia, called the Chimei Museum "one of the world's most surprising art collections." The museum moved to its current venue on Wenhua Road in 2014, and it is open to the public except on designated days.
Background
The museum was first established and housed in an administration building of the Chi Mei Corporation in 1992 by the company's founder Shi Wen-long, then relocated to the Tainan Metropolitan Park in 2014, and reopened in 2015. Shi is known for his collection of antique violins housed in the museum. Besides being an entrepreneur, Shi is also an amateur violinist who has performed in public many times. To improve the level of classical music and western art in Taiwan, he founded the Chi Mei Culture Foundation in 1977 and has been providing scholarships through the Chimei Arts Award to developing artists in both classical music and fine arts since 1988.
Born in 1928 during wartime to a family of 10 children, Shi found escape at a "small local museum in Tainan." He later founded Chi Mei Museum in 1992 with the idea of building a museum for all, especially the underprivileged and those "who don't have a chance to travel and see museums abroad." He was an amateur performing concert violinist. Shi Wen-long died on 18 November 2023, at the age of 95.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Chimei Museum” as museum in Tainan, Taiwan. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the places & architecture register because the source frames it as museum in Tainan, Taiwan. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5095087. VIAF identifies the subject as 207326909. The Library of Congress control number is n2017039546. Authority coordinates are 22.927, 120.244. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1992, 1996, 2014 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chimei Museum” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.