There was no pomp and circumstance surrounding the opening of the Sweet Potato Nation Taiwan Historical Documents Museum (蕃薯國台灣歷史文獻展覽館) last month.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 (
PHOTO: CHEN CHENG-CHANG, TAIPEI TIMES
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."
PHOTOS: CHEN CHENG-CHANG, TAIPEI TIMES
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As an amateur collector of historical documents dating from the beginning of Japanese colonial rule to the end of the "white terror" period, Hong decided to open his own private, no-frills museum a year ago.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.
While the concept behind Hong's private museum stemmed from his disenchantment at the glossy manner in which national museums display local history, the Sweet Potato Nation Taiwan Historical Documents Museum is not simply a juxtaposition of random objects.
There is instead a whole heap of method behind Hong's apparent madness. According to the historian, much of the material on display touches on subjects that the national museums would shy away from.
"I didn't only want to display objects such as paintings. I wanted to show local people what life was like back then," continues Hong. "There's stuff here that surprises, other stuff that shocks and several displays that leave visitors scratching their heads as to why they were never told about these aspects of our past."
One such display deals with the nation's first elections. Held in 1935, the elections might have been far from democratic -- the only parties that ran were sanctioned by Taiwan's Japanese colonial rulers -- but as Hong will be the first to point out, Taiwan was holding elections long before many of its Asian peers.
Another little-known aspect of Taiwan's past which comes to light at the museum pertains to the 1935 Taiwan International Trade Fair.
Through the use of postcards, booklets and even entry tickets, Hong gives visitors a previously unseen glimpse of the events and buildings that were the centerpiece of the nation's inaugural international trade fair.
The fair covered an area of over three million pings and attracted over 235 million visitors, which makes today's much-hyped trade fairs seem rather insignificant.
"I don't think I've had one visitor who was aware that there was an election in Taiwan in 1935," says Hong. "And when they see that Taiwan once hosted Asia's largest trade fair, boasted Asia's largest dam and was once the world's leading manufacturer of celluloid film, many of them appear quite startled by all this."
It's not only the surprisingly large number of facts and figures from Taiwan's commercial and political history that leave visitors to Hong's museum in rather a quandary as to why such data was omitted from not only textbooks but many a historical tome.
According to Hong, many are shocked to discover how deeply Japanese security forces infiltrated Taiwanese society.
A collection of household registration documents dating back to the turn of the last century makes for frightening reading.
According to records on display at the museum, the authoritarian eyes of the local police were everywhere. Household registration documents dating back to the early 1900s show that even the habitual and private opium-smoking habits of a certain Hsieh Shih-chi (謝世枝) who lived on Beimen Street (北門街) were noted by the local constabulary.
Not that the nation's opium-smoking habits came as a surprise to the colonial rulers. After all, the authorities were the sole importers and sellers of the illicit drug, as a balance sheet with weekly sales of the narcotic adorned with the chop of Go Hsien-jung (
Although it must be said that a certain degree of anti-Japanese colonial sentiment exists at the private museum, the colonial rulers are not the only ones to find themselves portrayed in a less-than-cordial manner by Hong.
Anti-KMT sentiment is also pretty rife. The section devoted to Chiang Kai-shek's (
"I'm trying to tell the story of Taiwan as it was. While the rulers enjoyed glitzy lifestyles, the vast number of the general population lived in fear of the security forces and in pretty bad conditions," Hong explains. "National museums don't do this. If we were to rely on and believe the history they told us we'd be in serious trouble. And, as a history teacher, I have no intention of letting this happen."
The Sweet Potato Nation Taiwan Historical Documents Museum (蕃薯國台灣歷史文獻展覽館) is located at 91 Yungkang Street, Taipei (台北市永康街91號) and is open between 2:30pm and 6pm Monday through Saturday and on Sundays from 10:30am until 6pm. Admission is free. There are no English-language materials available at the museum.
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