Searching for the roots of the nation

Opened just two days ago, the Shihsanhang Museum of Archeology (十三行博物館) is centered around a sort of postmodern hexagonal fortress. The tower is four stories tall, austere, stone tiled and windowless, and for some reason the whole structure leans at a 17 degree angle. Walking up the staircase at its center, which is, fortunately, level, the tour guide and I were discussing how conscious the government may be that it's pushing Taiwan's non-Chinese prehistory through projects like this brand new NT$380 million institution.

In this regard he mentioned a scholar named Benedict Anderson and said something about museums and "nation building". It was curious because the last time I'd heard anyone drop the English phrase "nation building" into a Chinese sentence about museums, it was National Palace Museum Director Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝) talking about his first major revisionist show -- The Birth of Taiwan: Formosa in the 17th Century -- which opened at the National Palace Museum in January.

The term "nation building" comes from Anderson's book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. In it, Anderson proposes that the only thing that holds a nation together is its citizens' shared imagination that they're all somehow linked. And what feeds this collective idea is cultural information museums, the media, textbooks and other productions -- disseminated by some central force or forces, usually the government. It's a deconstruction of the idea of "nation-ness" that breaks the concept down into smaller parts, but on the flip side it also provides a blueprint for building a nation, if that happens to be what you want to do.

My tour guide, a recent college graduate who'd studied journalism, told me the book had been translated into Chinese and was required reading for several departments in universities here.

The strategy, one can suppose -- and the intentions of the Ministry of Education are still in question here -- is to emphasize aspects of Taiwan's history that have nothing to do with China; and this will in turn galvanize Taiwanese notions of a unique, non-Chinese identity. In this way the Shihsanhang Museum fits in with other recent projects focusing on Taiwan's pre-(Chinese)-history, including Taitung's Peinan Culture Park (opened last December), the Prehistory Museum (opened 2001) and the Austronesian Culture Festival (begun 1999).

The museum itself tells the story of the Shihsanhang culture, which existed in and around the site of the museum between 500 and 1,800 years ago. Its people were possibly, but not definitely, related to the Ketagalan, the Aborigines who lived in the Taipei region before the Chinese began driving them out around the 17th century. They lived all along the northern Taiwan coast, though the culture takes its name from the Shihsanhang site to the south of the Tamshui River's mouth in what is now Pali township.

They were fairly advanced as indigenous tribal cultures go. They hunted with spears and arrows and fished from dugout boats; they traded for gold, bronze and glass with the Fukienese and for pottery and jade with tribes from all over Taiwan; they lived in 10m long wooden houses on stilts; and most importantly, they knew how to smelt iron.

The forge discovered at the Shihsanhang dig merits its designation as a "class two historical site." From around 2,000 years ago there is evidence of iron tools all over the island, but only at Shihsanhang had a furnace for producing iron been found.