The story
Shi Wen-long grew up poor in wartime Tainan, taught himself the violin as a boy, and went on to build one of the world's biggest plastics companies. He spent much of that fortune on the instrument he had loved first, and the Chimei Museum he founded in Taiwan now holds one of the largest collections of violins in the world, well over a thousand of them, including many by Stradivari and other great makers.
Unlike most such collections, these are meant to be played. The museum lends its finest instruments to musicians, so they are heard on concert stages as well as seen in the galleries. Around the violins spread Western paintings and sculpture, arms and armour, and halls of stuffed animals and fossils, all inside a vast Greek Revival building in a Tainan park.
From its opening in 1992 until the move to that building, the museum charged nothing to enter. As a schoolboy Shi had spent his afternoons in a free museum in Tainan, and he called it paradise.
