The foreign powers that occupied, invaded or traded with Taiwan have left their imprint in Kaohsiung as in other parts of country. The Former British Consulate at Takow (打狗英國領事館文化園區) is one of the southern city’s most popular tourist attractions, but for those who prefer military history to civilian affairs, another site, about 11km to the east, is more engrossing.
The Imperial Japanese Navy Wireless Communications Station (原日本海軍鳳山無線電信所) is located just east of the Chienchen River (前鎮河). On the other side of that waterway, visitors can find the photogenic remains of gun emplacements and fortified gates that once kept the administrative center of Fengshan County (鳳山縣) safe from rebels, irate Aborigines and other enemies.
The county, established in 1684 by the Qing Empire then ruling the China and Taiwan, covered much of today’s Kaohsiung City and Pingtung County. Its borders shifted, but as a local government division, Fengshan County didn’t disappear until 1909. Its core is now Kaohsiung City’s Fengshan District (鳳山區).
Photo: Steven Crook
Few travelers bother with this corner of the municipality, even though it’s well served by the Orange Line of the Kaohsiung Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) in addition to various bus routes. And within Fengshan, the IJN Wireless Communications Station isn’t the first destination for tourists. The leading attraction is perhaps the 200-year-old Fongyi Academy (鳳儀書院), where local youths were given a traditional Confucian education.
More than a decade ago, the Republic of China military moved out and the IJN Wireless Communications Station was designated a national relic. The significance of this landmark goes beyond its age — construction began in 1917 and was completed in 1919 — and its role in World War II. Having facilitated communication between the Japanese high command and naval units in Southeast Asia, it was turned over to the ROC Navy in late 1945. Then, after the KMT retreated to Taiwan, it became a place where Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) dictatorship imprisoned suspected dissidents.
For a good part of the postwar period, part of the base was a detention-and-interrogation facility known euphemistically as Fengshan Guest House (鳳山招待所). At the same time, staying true to the site’s original purpose, a navy communications detachment was also based here.
Photo: Steven Crook
The wireless station (open Tuesday to Sunday, 9am to 5pm; free admission) occupies a strangely-shaped plot of land, a perfect circle almost 300m in diameter with a rectangle attached to the southeast. Looking at a map, it resembles nothing so much as a tape measure.
The edifice nearest the center of the circle is known simply as the Big Bunker (大碉堡). The east and west ends of this building are buttressed by earthen ramparts. These — along with the exceptionally thick walls — were intended to ensure that, if the munitions stored within exploded, the blast wave would go upward, instead of decimating the surrounding structures.
Between 1976 and 1995, this bunker was the location of the ROC Navy’s Mingde Training Class (明德訓練班), where “stubborn” members of the armed forces were disciplined and re-educated. The large chamber in the center of the building was apparently subdivided into cells.
Photo: Steven Crook
The southernmost building within the site is almost as imposing as the Big Bunker, and like the bunker it has a flat roof on which long grass now grows. Known variously as the Cross-Shaped Radio Station (十字電台) or the Navy Radio Station (海軍電台), this housed much of the wireless apparatus and the personnel who operated it. The thick reinforced-concrete walls and heavy doors (cement and gravel clad in iron) were designed to protect the occupants and their equipment from external attack, rather than contain the effects of a catastrophe within.
The radio equipment is long gone, but large pipes remain in place. They were presumably installed for air circulation and to prevent the electronics from overheating. (Another function may have been to filter out poisonous gases; the first international agreement to ban chemical weapons wasn’t signed until 1925.)
A notice inside the Cross-Shaped Radio Station tells visitors not to go down into the basement, but there’s nothing to stop you exploring every nook and cranny. It isn’t difficult to imagine where cypher clerks might have sat, keeping their heads down as a commanding officer gave orders. There’s broken masonry here and there, but the environment seems quite safe.
Photo: Steven Crook
Elsewhere in the complex there’s a cylindrical red-brick water tank, a few single-story buildings that obviously date from the Japanese period, and three two-story structures that look more recent. The radio mast looks fairly modern, as does one of the air-raid shelters. Nine buildings once stood in the closed-off northern part of the base, but some of them have partly collapsed.
Around the site nothing is labeled, so do take the leaflet that the volunteer at the gate offers when you sign in; I wasn’t asked to show any kind of identification. The leaflet was bilingual — Chinese and Japanese — suggesting that Japanese tourists sometimes make the trek out to Fengshan to see this place.
The housing for military personnel and their dependents that used to crowd the northern and western sides of the base has been cleared and replaced by tall apartment blocks. The land to the east has never been built on, presumably to ensure there would be no interference with radio signals. Divided into dozens of small plots on which vegetables are cultivated, it’s a welcome patch of greenness in this densely-populated suburb.
Photo: Steven Crook
Steven Crook has been writing about travel, culture, and business in Taiwan since 1996. Having recently co-authored A Culinary History of Taipei: Beyond Pork and Ponlai, he is now updating Taiwan: The Bradt Travel Guide.
The unexpected collapse of the recall campaigns is being viewed through many lenses, most of them skewed and self-absorbed. The international media unsurprisingly focuses on what they perceive as the message that Taiwanese voters were sending in the failure of the mass recall, especially to China, the US and to friendly Western nations. This made some sense prior to early last month. One of the main arguments used by recall campaigners for recalling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers was that they were too pro-China, and by extension not to be trusted with defending the nation. Also by extension, that argument could be
Aug. 4 to Aug. 10 When Coca-Cola finally pushed its way into Taiwan’s market in 1968, it allegedly vowed to wipe out its major domestic rival Hey Song within five years. But Hey Song, which began as a manual operation in a family cow shed in 1925, had proven its resilience, surviving numerous setbacks — including the loss of autonomy and nearly all its assets due to the Japanese colonial government’s wartime economic policy. By the 1960s, Hey Song had risen to the top of Taiwan’s beverage industry. This success was driven not only by president Chang Wen-chi’s
Last week, on the heels of the recall election that turned out so badly for Taiwan, came the news that US President Donald Trump had blocked the transit of President William Lai (賴清德) through the US on his way to Latin America. A few days later the international media reported that in June a scheduled visit by Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) for high level meetings was canceled by the US after China’s President Xi Jinping (習近平) asked Trump to curb US engagement with Taiwan during a June phone call. The cancellation of Lai’s transit was a gaudy
The centuries-old fiery Chinese spirit baijiu (白酒), long associated with business dinners, is being reshaped to appeal to younger generations as its makers adapt to changing times. Mostly distilled from sorghum, the clear but pungent liquor contains as much as 60 percent alcohol. It’s the usual choice for toasts of gan bei (乾杯), the Chinese expression for bottoms up, and raucous drinking games. “If you like to drink spirits and you’ve never had baijiu, it’s kind of like eating noodles but you’ve never had spaghetti,” said Jim Boyce, a Canadian writer and wine expert who founded World Baijiu Day a decade
RSS