Aug. 14 to Aug. 20
On Aug. 15, 1978, the first Tzechiang-class express train (自強號) made its official maiden voyage, traversing the newly electrified route between Taipei and Taichung. It was a British EMU100 train, a model that was used by the Taiwan Railway Company until June 2009.
It was a major milestone in Taiwan’s railroad history, which stretches back to the construction of the first railroad in 1887 under the supervision of the Qing Empire’s governor of Taiwan, Liu Ming-chuan (劉銘傳). Liu is often considered the “father of Taiwan’s railways,” but a quick Google search will reveal that there is another contender for the title — Japanese national Hasegawa Kinsuke, who was the chief engineer behind the completion of the Taiwan Trunk Line (縱貫線) in 1908, which connected Kirun (Keelung) and Takao (Kaohsiung).
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Liu was Taiwan’s first governor when the Qing decided to separate it from Fujian Province in 1885. Long considered a backwater province, the Qing only began to take an interest in developing Taiwan in the latter half of the 19th century.
The idea of building a railroad in Taiwan was first proposed in 1877 by Fujian governor Ting Jih-chang (丁日昌), who saw Taiwan as a key defensive location — but it never materialized due to technical and financial issues.
Liu officially submitted a requested to the imperial court in April 1887 to build a north-south railroad. The court approved it a month later. Liu quickly set up the government-run Taiwan Railway Business Administration (全台鐵路商務總局) and recruited British and German engineers. Construction reportedly began June 9, the birthday of George Stephenson, who built the first public railway in the world — some dispute this claim, but the date is still officially observed as the anniversary of Taiwan’s railroad.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The first tunnel, from Taipei to Keelung, took about three years and resulted in many deaths and accidents. Upon its completion, Liu wrote a couplet which ended with “human power triumphs over God’s work” (居然人力勝神工). The first car made a test journey from Dadaocheng (大稻埕) to Xikou (錫口, today’s Songshan District, 松山) area in July 1888, drawing thousands of spectators.
Qing era railway construction ended in Hsinchu in 1894. Liu had left his post three years earlier, and his successor Shao Yu-lien (邵友濂) stopped most of Liu’s modernization programs soon after.
THE JAPANESE EFFORT
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
A year later, the Qing ceded Taiwan to Japan. Historian Tai Pao-tsun (戴寶村) writes in the book Around the Island: The History of Taiwan’s Railway (縱貫環島:台灣鐵道) that the railroad was already in pretty bad shape when the Japanese took over and the situation was exacerbated when the retreating Qing troops sabotaged the tracks and facilities.
By July 1895, the Japanese had restored the entire railroad to working condition, using it to transport supplies in their campaign south against local resistance. Tai finds it ironic that the railroad, which was built to protect Taiwan, ended up being used by the invaders against the local population.
In the first few years, the Japanese uprooted sections of the old railroad, even abandoning the Taipei-Keelung tunnel and building a new one that was easier to traverse.
In 1899, construction began to extend the railroad further south, employing Japanese engineers and cheap Taiwanese labor. Books on Taiwanese history barely mention Hasegawa, who began his railroad career as a technician in 1877 and arrived in Taiwan in 1899 as the project’s chief engineer.
Shinpei Goto, minister of civilian affairs, wrote later in an official railroad publication, “I was the head of the railway project in name only. In fact, everything related to railroad construction was taken care of by Hasegawa. All I did was stamp paperwork.”
Hasegawa deemed the original Qing Dynasty line too steep and planned a new line south from Taihoku (Taipei). At the same time, he ordered construction to start north from Takao (Kaohsiung). During this time, he also helped build stations, branch lines (such as one to Tamsui) and connections to various ports.
The two construction camps finally met in the middle on April 20, 1908, and Hasegawa left Taiwan shortly after, having completed Liu’s vision 20 years later. A statue of Hasegawa stood in front of then-Taihoku Station from 1910 until the end of Japanese rule.
Taiwan in Time, a column about Taiwan’s history that is published every Sunday, spotlights important or interesting events around the nation that have anniversaries this week.
The depressing numbers continue to pile up, like casualty lists after a lost battle. This week, after the government announced the 19th straight month of population decline, the Ministry of the Interior said that Taiwan is expected to lose 6.67 million workers in two waves of retirement over the next 15 years. According to the Ministry of Labor (MOL), Taiwan has a workforce of 11.6 million (as of July). The over-15 population was 20.244 million last year. EARLY RETIREMENT Early retirement is going to make these waves a tsunami. According to the Directorate General of Budget Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS), the
Many will be surprised to discover that the electoral voting numbers in recent elections do not entirely line up with what the actual voting results show. Swing voters decide elections, but in recent elections, the results offer a different and surprisingly consistent message. And there is one overarching theme: a very democratic preference for balance. SOME CAVEATS Putting a number on the number of swing voters is surprisingly slippery. Because swing voters favor different parties depending on the type of election, it is hard to separate die-hard voters leaning towards one party or the other. Complicating matters is that some voters are
Last week the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) announced that the legislature would again amend the Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures (財政收支劃分法) to separate fiscal allocations for the three outlying counties of Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu from the 19 municipalities on Taiwan proper. The revisions to the act to redistribute the national tax revenues were passed in December last year. Prior to the new law, the central government received 75 percent of tax revenues, while the local governments took 25 percent. The revisions gave the central government 60 percent, and boosted the local government share to 40 percent,
Sept 22 to Sept 28 Hsu Hsih (許石) never forgot the international student gathering he attended in Japan, where participants were asked to sing a folk song from their homeland. When it came to the Taiwanese students, they looked at each other, unable to recall a single tune. Taiwan doesn’t have folk songs, they said. Their classmates were incredulous: “How can that be? How can a place have no folk songs?” The experience deeply embarrassed Hsu, who was studying music. After returning to Taiwan in 1946, he set out to collect the island’s forgotten tunes, from Hoklo (Taiwanese) epics to operatic