's first modern museum celebrates its centennial.
One end of the wide in points to the city's main railway station. At the other end, one can see a white structure resembling an ancient Greek temple, complete with a dome on top. This Renaissance-style building is the National Taiwan Museum (NTM), designed during the era of 's colonial rule (1895-1945) by Ichiro Nomura, a Japanese architect who also designed the old train station, since demolished to make way for the current one. With many tall, modern buildings having risen up in the neighborhood, the museum perhaps looks less imposing than it once did. Yet its solemn facade and rigorous symmetry still stand as a testament to the city's architectural heritage. More importantly, it gives visitors a glimpse of the vanishing world of old , Tamkang University Department of Architecture assistant professor Bee Kuang-chein wrote in a book published for a 2005-2006 exhibition of the museum's architecture, a show that he also organized.
This year, 's oldest museum celebrates its centennial. The institution was established in 1908 as an organization attached to the Japanese governor's office to commemorate the completion of the north-south railway system, which marked a major achievement of 's colonial administration in its first foreign territory. Seven years later, the museum moved to the present building, which had originally been built in honor of Kodama Gentaro (1852-1906), the fourth Japanese governor of , and his top official Goto Shinpei (1857-1929). The Kodama-Goto period (1898-1906) is widely considered a crucial time when projects targeting economic, industrial and public-utility development laid the foundation for 's shift toward a modern society, despite the colonial intent behind the infrastructure works. Busts of Kodama and Goto once stood in the building. The building itself was formally designated a heritage site in 1998 and in 1999 the museum gained the name .
From its early days as 's first museum in the modern sense, NTM has housed a diverse assembly of artifacts. These holdings, together with the various collections of Taihoku () , the forerunner of , which was established in 1928, represent the major academic research efforts from the Japanese period. More often than not, the museum's researchers maintained close connections with, or were themselves, professors.
NTM's wide-ranging collection became even more diverse after the Japanese left in 1945 and the Kuomintang (KMT) came to from mainland as the new dominant power. Local museums were reorganized, with many items from smaller repositories moving to NTM. Today, NTM's more than 100,000 pieces include objects of natural science, as well as items of particular historical or cultural significance. "The two categories quite evenly divide our collection," says Li Tzu-ning, head of the museum's collection management department.
Treasured Map
One of NTM's top treasures is also one of the earliest surviving maps of . Created between 1699 and 1704 in the time of Chinese Qing emperor Kangxi--hence its name the "Kangxi Taiwan Map"--it features a colorful rendering of Taiwan's mountains, rivers, roads, houses and people on a scroll measuring 5.36 meters long. Instead of using a proportional scale, the map is presented in the form of a traditional Chinese landscape painting. Among other images unseen in standard cartography, half-naked men were drawn to represent indigenous people, while those in clothing signified Han Chinese immigrants.
The view of is painted as if seen from the Qing court across the strait. Symbolizing this, the eastern parts of the island on the other side of the Central Mountain Range are absent from the map. There are many stories about how the map found its way to and the NTM after being removed from a storeroom inside the Qing court. One of the more credible versions is that a Taiwanese merchant took the map during 's political turmoil in the early 1900s and brought it to , where it was eventually sold to the Japanese governor's office. The collection also includes two copies of the map commissioned by the museum. The Kangxi Taiwan Map will be on display in a special exhibition, which continues until November, as part of the museum's centennial events.
NTM is also home to around 7,000 historical items representing 's indigenous peoples. This is the world's largest such collection, approached only by the approximately 5,000 items in the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, according to the museum's Li. The mortgage bonds, sale contracts and other written business records from the indigenous Siraya people of the southwestern plains, for example, are the earliest known examples of romanization of local languages in . In the Dutch colonial period (1624-1662), missionaries romanized the Siraya language to teach local people and convert them to Christianity through translated testaments and textbooks. These preachers also helped the Siraya write down the conditions of their transactions with Han immigrants. After the Dutch left, the Siraya continued to use the romanized system.
Significant Relics
Visitors to NTM also can see the fossilized remains, including large fossilized skeletons, of various species of animals and plants, as well as mineral samples. Among other significant relics are fragments of human skulls unearthed in the early 1970s in 's Tsochen (Zuojhen) Township. "Tsochen Man" lived between 25,000 and 30,000 years ago and the find represents the oldest known human remains discovered in . A door to 's remote past, the Tsochen area is a rich source of fossils, including those of ancient rhinoceros, which lived between 450,000 and 900,000 years ago and were unearthed by expert teams organized by NTM in early 1970s. In 1984, this ancient mammal species was given the name Rhinoceros sinensis hayasakai after the Japanese geologist and paleontologist Hayasaka Ichiro, a professor, who started field research in the Tsochen area in the early 1930s.
The Kangxi Taiwan Map (detail) (Courtesy of National Taiwan Museum)
NTM director Hsiao Tsung-huang says that the birth of the museum also marked the beginning of a comprehensive system of scientific knowledge and study focused on . The museum's colonial origins, however, have put it in a somewhat ambiguous, if not embarrassing, position at times. Department head Li points out that in the Japanese period, research and other investigations were conducted by the museum largely for economic or political ends. On the one hand, collecting data about the new territory's natural resources made it possible to assess the potential economic value of large-scale exploitation. On the other hand, it also demonstrated the extent of 's colonial designs on . "Many of the museum's collection and research results bear a colonial stigma," Hsiao says.
For example, the museum holds nearly 3,000 items from Southeast Asia, such as knives and swords from the East Indies, making it the largest such collection in . However, the collection also attests to 's use of as a colonial base for southbound exploration, Li says.
Given this colonial background, when the KMT government came to and worked to promote Chinese culture, the , as NTM was then known, was downgraded to function as an ordinary social-education organization. Its privileged status as one of the island's most prestigious research institutions began to give way as new counterparts emerged. The National Museum of History was established in 1955 as 's first public museum in the KMT era, followed in 1965 by the opening of the present-day site of the , which holds artifacts moved from . In the 1990s, due to NTM's abundant holdings in the field of natural science, it was poised to merge with the National Museum of Natural Science in , which had opened in 1986. Had the merger gone through, NTM would have become a branch of the museum.
Despite these changes, the NTM still houses some remarkable items. In fact, a unique flag, another of NTM's most prized possessions, says much about the museum's ambivalent standing and 's winding historical path.
The flag, featuring a yellow tiger on a blue background, represented the short-lived Formosan Republic, which declared independence from China on May 25, 1895, shortly after the Qing court lost its war with Japan and was forced to cede its claims to Taiwan. In fact, the independence move was an attempt by local pro-Qing leaders to prevent Japan's possession of the island. Even the flag's design was carefully chosen to reflect this allegiance--in Chinese culture the tiger is second to the sacred dragon, which symbolizes China itself. Ten days after the state was formed in Taipei, Tang Jing-song, the previous governor of Taiwan Province and the new republic's president, fled to China to escape Japan's military efforts to take over the island. Local residents were left to resist the Japanese invasion, but their efforts were futile and Japan had taken full control by October the same year.
The original flag of the short-lived republic was taken to Japan, but it was believed to have flown at Keelung Fort on the island's north coast. The item in NTM's collection is a copy made by a Japanese painter in 1908. At 3.1 meters long and 2.6 meters wide, it is considered to be a faithful reproduction of the original, even down to the damaged bottom-right corner of the erstwhile war trophy.
After the power shift to the KMT government, the flag became a taboo part of history in that it represented an attempt to form an independent Taiwan. "The museum was frequently warned by police headquarters not to show the name Formosan Republic," Li says. Likewise, during the rule of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, the same flag was less than heartily received because it represented a historical allegiance to the Qing court.
NTM director Hsiao sees a future for Taiwan's oldest museum, despite its colonial and postcolonial entanglements. He hopes the institution can reclaim its place as an authority on the land and history of Taiwan and focus on the universal values of protecting the island's biodiversity and ethnic pluralism. As part of its current work, NTM is involved in an ongoing project in Taipei incorporating a selection of buildings associated with the period of Japanese rule. The "museum system project" includes the sites of the former Land Bank, the Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation and the former Taiwan Railways Administration building. The proposed scheme includes plans to restore the buildings, develop the landmark structures as museums and network the resulting sites as a system of learning museums.
Tamkang University's Bee Kuang-chein points out that in ancient Greece, the temple represented a meeting place of humans and gods, as well as a human vision of eternity. With that in mind, perhaps the NTM with its Greek temple-style facade can act as a point of dialogue between human civilization and the long flow of time. Hopefully, NTM's ongoing museum project will revitalize and continue that dialogue.
Write to Pat Gao at kotsijin@gmail.com