The National Museum of Taiwan History (NMTH) in the southern city of Tainan shines a spotlight on lesser-known aspects of the island’s rich and complex past, as exemplified by the ongoing exhibition “Taiwanese During World War II.” The show, which began in July and will run until the end of February next year, gives voice to the Taiwanese people who lived through and participated in the global conflict during the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945).
“During World War II, when Taiwan was under Japanese rule, the colonizers sent many Taiwanese people to fight for them on the battlefield,” notes Tan I-hong (陳怡宏), an assistant researcher and curator at the museum, in the preface to this year’s summer issue of Watch Taiwan, a quarterly published by the institution. “After the postwar takeover of Taiwan by the Republic of China [ROC], people’s recollections of the war, as if sealed away, went unrecorded by history.” Through its exhibit, the museum seeks to unlock these unspoken memories.
The NMTH, which formally opened in 2011 and operates under the Ministry of Culture, is the only organization of its kind fully devoted to researching and presenting the history of Taiwan. It therefore complements the work of the National Museum of History (NMH) in Taipei, which specializes in exploring China’s past, notes NMTH director Lu Li-cheng (呂理政), an anthropologist and museologist.
The Taipei institution, founded in 1955, was the first public museum set up in Taiwan by the ROC government after its relocation to the island in the late 1940s. In the early 1990s, following the end of martial law in 1987 and the emergence of cultural localization movements, the government proposed establishing a museum dedicated to the history of Taiwan. Yet, “while the institution was created at the behest of political leaders,” Lu says, “we must work to justify why society needs it.”
The director likens the relationship between the NMH and NMTH to that between Academia Historica in Taipei, which operates under the Office of the President, and Taiwan Historica in central Taiwan’s Nantou City, which formerly functioned as a committee under the now-defunct Taiwan Provincial Government before becoming part of the Taipei academy in 2002. “Academia Historica concentrates on Chinese and ROC history,” Lu notes, “while Taiwan Historica focuses on archiving documents from throughout the island’s past.”
The NMTH aims to present a comprehensive picture of the island’s history. To this end, it houses a permanent exhibition called “Our Land, Our People: The Story of Taiwan.” This exhibit, which was designed by Lu and is displayed in a continuous space on the second floor of the museum, shows an overview of Taiwan’s past dating from tens of thousands of years ago through the influx of cultural influences from China, the West and Japan right up until the present day.
“When you’re on the fourth floor of the museum, you can look down at the exhibition and get a glimpse of the complete history of Taiwan,” the director says. “As the island has been governed by various powers and has experienced many political changes, a true understanding of its history can only be gained by studying the interaction between all of the various ethnic groups who’ve settled in Taiwan, as well as their connections to the land, over large stretches of time.”
Lu insists that history must always be open to new discoveries and interpretations. “We avoid promoting any single perspective of the island’s past,” he says. “Rather it is our hope that by illuminating many different viewpoints, visitors will be able to develop an objective view of the history of Taiwan.”
This goal is apparent in another ongoing exhibition at the museum named “Transformations in 1895: 120 Years After the Japanese Conquest of Taiwan.” The show, which was also organized by Tan and will run until December 13 this year, explores the approximately five-month campaign of resistance fought by locals against the Japanese colonizers in 1895 after the island was ceded to Japan by the Qing court. The exhibit includes documents written by and reports about Japanese troops, Qing officials, Taiwanese intellectuals and ordinary people as well as foreigners staying in Taiwan. “The local resistance to the colonizing troops is presented from a global perspective without taking a pro- or anti-Japanese stance,” Lu notes.
Tan hopes that visitors develop their own ideas concerning the 1895 battles after learning about the viewpoints of local people who elected to fight, as well as those who opted to make peace with, the arriving Japanese forces. “Both groups had their reasons for the choices they made,” he notes.
In comparison to the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the 1895 campaign of resistance against the Japanese conquest was barely taught to local students until 1997, when a program called Knowing Taiwan focusing on the history, geography and society of the island was introduced at junior high schools. As a result of the growing awareness of and interest in Taiwan history, events that previously received little attention such as the armed opposition to the Japanese colonialization have been featured in a significant number of dramatic works in recent years, such as the film Blue Brave: The Legend of Formosa in 1895 and the Taiwanese opera The Seal of 1895. Released in 2008, both works were adapted from novels set during the rise and fall of the Republic of Formosa, an independent state declared by local pro-Qing leaders in response to the island’s cession to Japan.
A copy of the republic’s flag, which depicts a yellow tiger on a blue background, is featured in the “Transformations in 1895” exhibition. The short-lived state was a taboo subject during Japanese colonial rule and the martial law period and as such was rarely mentioned in official histories of the island throughout much of the 20th century.
The primary mission of the NMTH is to help bridge gaps in Taiwan’s history. To this end, Lu notes, the institution is working to build a substantial collection of source materials in a wide variety of languages about the island’s past. To date, it has gathered more than 87,000 items, with 2,095 formally added to its collection last year alone.
For more than a decade, officials working for the preparatory office of the NMTH and the institution itself have been traveling to locations around the world to compile Taiwan-related historical materials. In August last year, for instance, Tan and his colleagues went to mainland China to visit such sites as the Fujian Provincial Archives and Jiangxi Provincial Museum, while another team of NMTH researchers went to France and Spain in November to tour institutions including the National Archives in Paris and the University of Barcelona. Trips such as these also serve to build links with foreign scholars in the fields of Taiwan and East Asian studies.
As part of its mission to expand awareness of the island’s past, the museum has launched numerous projects to translate and publish historical documents written in foreign languages. Last year, these efforts led to the release of a Mandarin translation of The Island of Formosa, Past and Present, a 1903 book widely regarded as one of the most significant English-language works on the history of Taiwan. The author, James W. Davidson (1872–1933), came to Taiwan in 1895 to work as a war correspondent after the island’s cession to Japan. He witnessed the Republic of Formosa’s resistance to Japanese forces, and in 1897 was appointed the United States’ consular agent on the island.
At present, the institution is also translating the book Formosa, geográfica e históricamente considerada, or Formosa, geographically and historically considered, which was written by José Maria Álvarez about the period of Spanish colonial rule of northern Taiwan (1626–1642). Initially published in 1930 in Barcelona, it is widely considered the first Spanish-language book in the field of Taiwan studies. An abridged translation of the text was released in 2006 by Taiwan Historica. At present, the NMTH is completing this work and plans to release the full Mandarin version of the book next year.
Located in Tainan’s Annan District, not far from where the Dutch East India Co. established the first major Western outpost on Taiwan almost 400 years ago, the museum hopes that its efforts to translate foreign historical texts will promote broader understandings of the island’s past. “We want to interpret Taiwan history from a global perspective,” Lu says. “Far from isolating it, the seas around Taiwan have connected it to the world since the prehistoric age.”
The director points out that while founding a national museum is a challenging task, the real work begins once it opens. “Despite the rapid modernization and democratization of Taiwan, its history is still not very well known among its people,” he says. Rectifying this, he notes, is the raison d’être of the institution.
Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw