Taiwan Today

Taipei can be a cipher, a cryptic mixture of ultra-modern elements like the towering spire of Taipei 101, dense urban sprawl, grand Chinese-style edifices like National Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, European-inflected structures from the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945) and Qing dynasty (1684–1895) remnants such as the old city gates. Or, as author Joseph R. Allen puts it in Taipei, City of Displacements, the city is simultaneously “shoddy and chic, informal and formal, vernacular and international, neoclassical and postmodern.”

Allen is a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities who first ventured to Taipei in 1977 to study Chinese. He returned several times in the 1980s to study contemporary poetry. The inspiration to write Taipei, City of Displacements came as he pondered the city’s history during one of his frequent walks in the old city center. Therefore, he returned to Taipei in 1999 to put his literary training to use by studying Taipei as a text.

In essence, examining the city as a text means looking at the built environment as a type of inscription in space and time. As Allen notes, “each place has a history, a story of contingencies and changes, layers of production and construction, often reaching back through the decades and centuries.” A major advantage of approaching Taipei as a text is that it helps the “reader” penetrate beneath the surface impression of the city’s chaotic sprawl to glimpse its “chapters,” or larger historical patterns and themes.

Reading Taipei as a text means that Allen begins with what the city is—its physical reality—and interprets that to discover what the city means. One potential pitfall of that approach is that, just as with literature, every individual’s experience of the text, or city in this case, is different. Still, as subjective guides go, Allen is one of the best available: as a foreigner, he is able to view the city and its milieu with a sense of detachment, yet he speaks and reads Chinese well and has walked the streets of Taipei intermittently for more than 35 years. He is also able to apply his training in Western liberal arts inquiry as he peers into the murky back story of a byzantine Asian city.

Architecture enthusiasts will need to look elsewhere, however, as the book is more focused on cultural artifacts than on building styles. Readers interested in history, on the other hand, will find a fascinating study.

A central theme of Allen’s reading of the city is the concept of displacement, or the examination of how materiality is transformed by time and successive population shifts, regime changes and social upheaval. As the author argues, “the specific geographic, historical, and cultural contingencies in Taiwan make the island a particularly fertile ground for displacement’s genesis.”

Allen relies on maps to tell Taipei’s early story of displacement. In 1654, the Dutch produced one of the first detailed maps of the Taipei area, one that shows major rivers, settlements of the Ketagalan indigenous people and Spanish fortifications. The Dutch maintained a colony in southern Taiwan from 1624 to 1662 and dislodged the Spanish in the north in 1642. It is unlikely that either group of Europeans did much to displace the Ketagalan, however, as the Spanish were too few and the Dutch were not in the area for very long. By 1683, Taiwan had come under Qing rule, although there was a limited Chinese presence in Taiwan in those early years. Allen notes, for example, that a 1684 military map of the Taipei basin shows only the Danshui River, the Spanish fort in Danshui and two aboriginal villages.

By 1759, however, a map of Taipei shows Chinese settlements in today’s Wanhua and Guting areas, with farms appearing alongside several aboriginal villages. A 1760 map demonstrates the Qing court’s intention to displace the indigenous inhabitants, as it demarcates land in aboriginal villages as open for development by settlers. The writing was clearly on the wall for the indigenous people of the Taipei basin, prompting Allen to write that “Chinese infringement would become displacement and then, for the Ketagalan people, nearly complete erasure.”

When restrictions on immigration to Taiwan were eased in the 1760s, more Chinese settlers began arriving in the Taipei area. The city’s growing importance can be seen in Qing maps that show the establishment of traditional city walls with imposing gates and a modern railroad linking the city to Keelung in northern Taiwan.

Qing power was rapidly displaced at the conclusion of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, however, as the dynasty was forced to cede Taiwan to Japan. As Allen writes, “For the populations of Taiwan, both indigenous and Chinese, the changes in the lives of individuals were dramatic and oftentimes traumatic.” In line with Japan’s Meiji Reforms, Governor-General Gentaro Kodama (1852–1906) and civil administrator Shinpei Goto (1857–1929) set out to transform Taipei into a European-style capital. The construction of the baroque governor-general’s residence (today’s Taipei Guest House) in 1901 made it clear that Japan intended its presence in Taiwan to be permanent, as did the completion of the massive office of the governor-general (today’s Office of the President) in 1919. Allen points out that the imposing size, ornamentation and shapes of those structures amounted to a declaration of Japan’s political might.

Japan’s rule over Taiwan ended abruptly in 1945 with the conclusion of World War II. Just a few years after the displaced colonizers departed, Taiwan saw another massive population shift when, with the Chinese Civil War going badly, the Nationalists began retreating to Taiwan from mainland China. In 1949 and 1950, some 2 million displaced Nationalists arrived in Taiwan, with most settling in the Taipei area.

The Japanese surrendered Taiwan to the Republic of China (ROC) at Taipei City Hall (now Zhongshan Hall), which has a story that provides a good example of displacement at work. The site the hall stands upon formerly housed a Qing government administration center, some parts of which were preserved in the 1936 Japanese construction of the city hall. From 1937 to 1945, the Nationalists had endured bitter conflict with the Japanese in China in the Second Sino-Japanese War, so it was understandable that they felt a deep abhorrence of all symbols of Japan’s presence in Taiwan. Under the Nationalists, the building was renamed Zhongshan Hall in honor of ROC founding father Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙, 1866–1925) and physical reminders of the Japanese presence such as the imperial crests over the hall’s doorways were eradicated.

Allen next turns his gaze to the displaced remnants of Taipei’s Qing-era city walls, the construction of which began in the early 1880s. The Qing government did not have much time to develop the space between the walls before the Japanese arrived in 1895. The Japanese therefore inherited an enclosed area with sufficient empty space to erect grand colonial structures like the governor-general’s residence, thus building where the Qing had merely planned. This juncture is one of the few times in the book where Allen stretches the concept of displacement perhaps a bit too far, as the meaning of the idea grows somewhat woolly in a passage noting that this was “a displacement of intended, not actual structures.”

As the city grew under the Japanese, Goto had the walls razed and built wide boulevards in their place. While the walls had served to enclose the imperial city center, the gates were the focal point of attention, both architecturally and functionally. The Japanese originally planned to raze the walls’ five gates, which had seen their role as key entry points to the city displaced by roads and railroad lines. The West Gate was demolished, but a conservation effort preserved the remaining four. To the uninitiated, however, they now appear to spring abruptly from Taipei’s modern backdrop, curious historical remnants divorced of context. Allen notes, for example, that a highway viaduct passes just inches from the preserved North Gate.

The footprint of the city walls still lives on in parts of Taipei’s Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system. Just as the razing of the walls yielded space for constructing wide roads, those roads provided room for the excavation work needed to construct the mostly subterranean MRT system. Segments of the system’s Bannan and Xiaonanmen lines follow the paths of the city walls almost exactly, and the name of the latter line is borrowed from that of the Small South Gate. Most of the system’s riders, however, are likely oblivious of the MRT’s link to the displaced city walls. The true value of Allen’s book, therefore, lies precisely in its ability to tell such stories.

In Allen’s hands, 228 Peace Memorial Park, previously known as Taipei Park, reveals layers of cultural and political displacements, meanings and motivations. Under the Qing, the year 1888 saw the construction of Tianhougong, a major city temple dedicated to the goddess Mazu. The Japanese sought to neutralize the temple’s power, however, and appropriated the area to build a park, which was completed in 1907, making it one of the earliest in Taiwan. The building that housed Tianhougong remained, but the Japanese made it the home of the Taiwan Association of Chinese Studies. Thus, in a striking act of displacement, the Japanese took control of one of local society’s most important religious centers and used it as a tool for studying that society.

Elite Culture

It may appear curious, then, that the Japanese later preserved Qing-era memorial arches by moving them to the park. Of the two remaining arches, one was built in 1882 at the order of the Qing emperor to celebrate the good works of a local widow, while the other commemorates the imperial Qing examination halls. The Japanese moved the arches because they impeded modernization plans elsewhere in the city, but could not bring themselves to destroy the arches, as they represented esteemed aspects of elite Chinese culture. “A better solution was to preserve them inside the new public space of the park, where they would be relatively safe—safe from modernization efforts, but also safely displaced, away from a position of power in local culture,” Allen comments.

In Taiwan, 228 is a shorthand reference for the deadly government crackdown against long-time local residents that began on February 28, 1947. Not until martial law was lifted in 1987 did serious discussion begin over how to deal with the legacy of what had become known as the February 28 Incident, and the idea for installing a February 28 memorial in what was then known as Taipei Park was first broached in 1992. After much wrangling, the monument opened in 1997 on the 50th anniversary of the February 28 Incident. In a fine example of the workings of displacement, Allen notes that the February 28 Monument was built in the precise location a statue of Goto had once occupied.

The establishment of the monument marked a tectonic shift in Taiwan’s society, with Allen writing that the “February 28th Monument was officially opened at a site so strategically located that it was a sign of a new era.” This was an indication that displacement can sometimes have positive results, as in the space of a half century, the park had transitioned from an instrument of colonial control to a space in which the democratizing central government could acknowledge the mistakes of the past.

Allen next turns to an examination of displacement as revealed by Taipei’s major museums. By the 1960s, the Nationalist government was focused on simultaneously projecting the image of the ROC as the guardian of authentic Chinese culture and as modern “free China.” An expression of the drive for cultural preservation was the 1965 establishment of the National Palace Museum (NPM) at the former site of the Sun Yat-sen Museum in Taipei’s Shilin District. The museum served as a symbol of the nation’s responsible and progressive preservation of traditional Chinese culture, especially in view of mainland China’s disastrous efforts to erase the past with its Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.

The NPM was literally born of displacement. After the last emperor was expelled from the Forbidden City in 1925, the collected artifacts of the Qing dynasty came under ROC control. When the invading Japanese began pressuring Beijing in 1933, much of the collection began a multi-stop odyssey around mainland China that would last until 1947. Then, in the dark days of the Chinese Civil War, in December 1948 the Nationalists began shipping almost 3,000 crates containing some of the best items in the collection to Taiwan. Thus, in a somewhat incongruous twist, the displaced cultural objects of China’s Qing dynasty came to be preserved by the republican government in Taiwan.

The other major museum Allen examines is today’s National Taiwan Museum, which was known as the Colonial Administration Museum under the Japanese and as the Taiwan Provincial Museum in the early Nationalist days. The building was constructed as a memorial hall for Kodama and Goto and the architectural style was once again European-inspired but translated by the Japanese and applied in Taiwan.

The museum’s visitors were intended to be Japanese, not Taiwanese, as its purpose was to help the colonial rulers study Taiwan’s natural environment and people, which thus could be viewed as displaced museum specimens in their own land. Little wonder then, that the Nationalists renamed the facility. Their use of provincial, not national, in the museum’s intermediate name is instructive, as in the years following the Chinese Civil War, much of the Nationalist government’s focus remained on reclaiming its governing position in mainland China, of which Taiwan was seen as a province. In 2003 the name was changed to National Taiwan Museum, reflecting the modern emphasis placed on studying Taiwan for its own sake.

Doubled Displacement

Allen draws his narrative to a close by examining signs of displacement in statues of people and horses. As for the Qing era, Allen writes, “there was almost no tradition of secular statuary in China.” Meiji Japan, on the other hand, was a strong participant in the craze for public statuary that began during the 16th century in Europe. In Taiwan, that meant an oddly doubled displacement in which Japanese imperialists introduced imported Western neoclassical statuary. In 1906, for example, a statue of Kodama was installed at the south entrance to what was then Taipei Park. Allen describes the statue as “an overtly European-style military figure standing (literally) over the colonization of the island.”

When martial law ended, there were an estimated 4,500 statues of former President Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石, 1887–1975) scattered in schools, military bases and other public spaces in Taiwan. Allen reports finding a Chiang statue that once stood in Xindian in southern Taipei with an English plaque that read “Most people who exercise and walk in the school every morning would spontaneously bow to the CKS statue, and students follow this action.” With the deepening of Taiwan’s democracy, however, the Chiang statues began slowly disappearing from public view. The statues have been moved “not to destroy them, just to hide them away,” Allen points out, contrasting their fate with statues that were pulled down and demolished in Eastern Europe with the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, the remarkably smooth displacement of Chiang’s statues is reminiscent of Taiwan’s peaceful transition from martial law to democracy. In both cases, there was an appreciation on the part of the public and the government that times had changed, that Taiwan was ready for the next step.

Allen winds up the main body of the book with an examination of a three-quarter-scale bronze statue of a horse in a corner of 228 Peace Memorial Park. This is perhaps the book’s weakest section, one that reflects another pitfall of interpreting the city as a text. When one begins “reading” objects for their meaning, the problem becomes one of how to limit the inquiry, as almost any object has a story to tell. The story of the horse is a bit vague, but it is an aberration, as a fairly tight grasp of the subject matter is evinced throughout most of the book.

After park administrators are unable to provide information on the original location or function of the horse, Allen embarks on a personal quest to unravel its story. His only clues are its partially effaced engraving of a crest in the shape of a cherry blossom, and the stylized character for tai, part of the word Taiwan, which was the symbol of the Japanese colonial administration. His research reveals that Japanese patrons gave bronze horses to Shinto shrines in colonial times as votive offerings, while the sakura, or cherry blossom, was a known but rare Japanese family crest. In terms of displacement, the connection of the horse with Shinto and colonialism is meaningful, as Allen notes the “blatant role that state-sponsored Shinto played in the imposition of colonial rule in Taiwan.”

After the end of World War II, the Shinto shrines were dismantled or converted to other uses, Allen finds, but the bronze horses proved much more durable reminders of Japan’s presence. While the nationalists did not have a problem with the shape of the horses, the crests they bore were seen as odious symbols of colonial oppression. As with other bronze horses around Taiwan, an attempt was made to erase the crest on Allen’s horse in 228 Peace Memorial Park. The effort was only partly successful, as enough remains for one familiar with the symbols of the Japanese era to grasp the meaning of the statue. Time has its own power to displace, however, and with survivors of the colonial period becoming fewer and familiarity with Japanese iconography waning, the power of the crests has dissipated almost to the point of disappearing. For the vast majority of visitors to the park, the horse is now little more than an attractive object or plaything.

The main text ends with Allen still pondering the mystery of the horse. Stripped of its original markings and context, all it can do is hint at fragments of the past, leading him to call it an “extreme example of displacement.” His attempt to read the horse as a text thus reveals only the effects of displacement, not details of the process. In modern Taiwan, which has survived many waves of displacement and yet emerged democratic, multicultural and prosperous, perhaps that is enough.

Write to Donald Silver at donald@mofa.gov.tw