Global Environment Hall
1993
Beyond a bright entrance hall a series of curved dioramas opens out, each one a window onto a landscape: musk oxen on the Arctic tundra, a tiger in dry forest, Taiwan's own mountains and coasts with their deer and birds. The Global Environment Hall, opened in 1993, is the museum's gallery about the planet itself, from the rocks under your feet to the ecosystems that cover them. Its sections move from the microscopic world of cells and crystals, through the diversity of living things, to the natural ecology of Taiwan, and end with the minerals and forces that shaped the island.
Look closely at the dioramas, which are built in the classic natural history museum tradition with mounted animals set against painted backgrounds that curve away to a false horizon. Then go on to the geology displays, where specimens of ore, gemstones and volcanic rock are shown with the story of the earthquakes and typhoons that Taiwan lives with. The hall's newest permanent exhibition, opened in 2025, is a large mineral gallery called Earth's Treasures, the first of its scale in Taiwan. A 3D theatre and a Science on a Sphere installation, a globe onto which satellite data is projected, show the whole Earth breathing through its seasons.
The hall belongs to the second phase of the museum, built in the early 1990s together with the Human Cultures Hall, and it reflects a shift in the museum's mission toward environmental awareness. Two of its original theatres, the Bird's Eye View and the Environment Theatre, closed in 2022 and their spaces are being renewed. A memorable detail is the diorama of Taiwan's high mountains, where the painted background dissolves so smoothly into the modelled foreground that visitors often reach out to check where one ends.
Did You Know? The Science on a Sphere globe here was the first installed outside the United States when it arrived in 2008.
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