The first public exhibition on the humanities in Taiwan over the past century will open at the National Museum of History (NMH) tomorrow, displaying many pieces of artwork and historical documents never put on show before.
The National Science Council, which organized the exhibition, titled “How Humanities Transformed the World: The Development of Scholarship on the Humanities over the Last Hundred Year,” said the show would be the first time the field of humanities in Taiwan was the subject of an exhibition since the field’s inception 52 years ago.
The exhibition includes about 250 artifacts and documents from the fields of literature, history, philosophy, art history, linguistics, anthropology and religion.
A handwritten cheatbook for the Imperial Examination from the Qing Dynasty, with hundreds of characters written on a small piece of paper, the paintings of celebrated Taiwanese painter Chen Cheng-po (陳澄波) and writings from the first prime minister of Japan, Ito Hirobumi, when he visited Taiwan during Japanese colonial rule, will be shown.
In addition, research results and reproductions of artifacts from the project were compiled into two books, published by National Tsing Hua University this month.
Project convener Yang Rur-Bin (楊儒賓), a professor in the university’s department of Chinese literature, said the main theme of the exhibition was the unique development of humanities in Taiwan.
Yang said the field could be divided into three periods over the past century.
The first was the period before the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government moved its capital to Taiwan in 1949, with artifacts from two sources — China and universities established in Taiwan during the Japanese occupation.
The second period was after the KMT arrived, when many Chinese academics moved to Taiwan, re-establishing the Chinese university system in Taiwan and combining it with the Japanese system.
The last period was after the lifting of martial law in 1987, after which the humanities field was affected by localization, cross-strait relations and internationalization.
The establishment of universities about a century ago, the abolishment of the Imperial Examination System — which lasted about 1,300 years — and the mass migration of historical artifacts, research institutes and academics to Taiwan in 1949 all had an impact on humanities in Taiwan.
Yang said the past century of development in the humanities was a testament to the formation of new knowledge systems and new models of thinking, and represented the largest migration of Chinese artifacts and academics to the south since the mass migration of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127 to 1279) in 1127.
Yang said he hoped visitors would learn that “important developments in Taiwan are not limited to the fields of science and technology, but also take place in the humanities.”
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