Taiwan's history without the fineries

There was no pomp and circumstance surrounding the opening of the Sweet Potato Nation Taiwan Historical Documents Museum (蕃薯國台灣歷史文獻展覽館) last month. No legislators, bureaucrats or city mayors were on the guest list and there was no star-studded ribbon cutting ceremony.

Instead, owner and curator Hong Tsong-yi (洪聰益) slipped a rusty key into an even rustier lock, made a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette, sat at his desk-cum-visitor information center and waited for patronage.

Nestled in a small ground-floor apartment building in Taipei's Yungkang Street, a thoroughfare better known for its stores selling icy desserts rather than its educational importance, there's no glitzy gift shop or other such razzmatazz at Hong's museum.

What visitors get instead is an undiluted blow-by-blow account through the use of original documents, photos, propaganda posters and postcards of life in Taiwan from between 1895 and 1970.

If all this appears rather reactionary, then so be it, as Hong established his own museum to prove that you don't need huge annual-budgets, fancy facades and attractive display cases to display history. In fact, according to the retired schoolteacher the simpler the better.

"If people think that big budgets, fancy buildings and flashy exhibits can teach us our history then they are mistaken," states Hong. "You learn from the data held within the fancy display cases, not the cases themselves."

For over 20 years, Hong taught Chinese history to high-school kids. And while he taught them all he knows about this empire and that emperor and of long-forgotten wars that changed the course of history, he couldn't teach his pupils about their own homeland, Taiwan.

Even when he took his pupils on the occasional field trip to a national museum the exhibitions pertaining to the nation's 20th century history were never detailed or engaging enough for Hong's satisfaction.

"About 80 percent of the material in textbooks was about China," recalls Hong. "And the material in the exhibitions was predominately computer-generated, badly organized and avoided any detailed explanation. In many cases, they don't even display the original documents, which is totally daft considering such establishments have huge annual budgets and expensive security systems."

As an amateur collector of historical documents dating from the beginning of Japanese colonial rule to the end of the "white terror" period, Hong decided to open his own private, no-frills museum a year ago.

"Even though I had a mass of documents and material, because I wanted to fill it with the genuine articles, it took some time to catalogue what I had and to find out where the gaps were," explains Hong. "Which was not only time consuming but costly as I had to buy several pieces from collectors in Japan who charge a lot more than local collectors."

While much of the material pertaining to the mid-part of Japanese colonial rule onwards has been sold to him by local people who discovered the materials either after the death of an elderly family member or when moving, Hong had great problems acquiring older material.

The highly colorful prints depicting Japanese military actions that greet visitors to the Sweet Potato Nation Taiwan Historical Documents Museum proved some of the most difficult to come by.

Common in Taiwan at the turn of the last century, according to Hong, many of the graphic and bloody prints were destroyed by local owners after the surrender of Japan in 1945.