Final Excursions

April 23, 2026

Karl led the students on a walking tour of the National CKS Memorial. We have probably walked through this Memorial at least 25 times in the last five years. It has been very interesting to watch it change. Each time we go we notice adjustments to the exhibits.  In July 2024, they made a big adjustment and moved the changing of the guard outside at the foot of the steps. It is no longer a changing of the guard because the honor guard is gone. Now on the hour, some soldiers march out and provide a shorter performance and then march away.

The change is part of Taiwan's Ministry of Culture's goal to address transitional justice. Chiang is a complicated figure in Taiwan's history. Many Taiwanese see him as a dictator who oversaw the White Terror campaign of political torture and imprisonments. 

The honor guard used to stand guard in front the of his statue. Signs on the wall said "quiet please." That has all been removed. We took a picture in front of the statue wondering if next time we come, it might be moved out to the statue park we visited last week.

Speaking of the White Terror atrocities, our last field trip was to the National Human Rights Museum located at the Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park in Taipei.  The White Terror was a period of political repression, authoritarian surveillance and purges carried out by the KMT under Chiang. We were fortunate to have Mr. Frederick Chin, a former Green Island prisoner share with us his first-hand account standing in the very location where terrible things happened to him. 

He was born in Malaysia and came to Taiwan at 19 to attend university. One day he was rounded up and brought to the detention center on this location. The government demanded a confession from him, but he didn't do anything wrong. He told them if they would tell him what he did, he would confess. Instead he described the horrible torture he went through. He was beat up and knocked to the ground. He lost three teeth in the pool of blood. They demanded that he clean up the mess. 

He brought us to the very cell where he was held for eighteen months. During that time, he only left the room four times. He slept on the ground in the corner. The toilet was across the room, and the prisoners used the toilet water to bathe and wash their clothes. The conditions were truly inhumane and very difficult to listen to. He told us he cannot remember a lot about what he did during those months except sit on the floor of the room. Finally, after 18 months, he was sentenced to prison for twelve years and moved to Green Island. He noted that of those tens of thousands who were arrested, tortured and in many cases executed, only about 20 percent were actually guilty of the crimes for which they were charged. 

When he was finally released he lived on the streets of Taipei, homeless for three years. Finally, things changed and he met some people who were willing to help him. He married and raised a family in Taiwan and now he is retired. He comes to this museum to volunteer and share his story in hopes of promoting human rights. His message to the students was no matter how hard things get, there are good days ahead.

The White Terror resulted in 3,000-4,000 executions. This wall bears some of the names of the known victims. Over 100,000 were imprisoned as political prisoners. They are still working on recovering the victims' names.

The museum has a gallery depicting human rights protests in different parts of the world. The one on the left is Tiananmen and the one on the right is White Paper protests in China during Covid.

The art was a reminder of the many unfair and unjust things that happen in this world. Fortunately, as Preach My Gospel says, "all that is unfair about life can be made right through the atonement of Jesus Christ."

Karl invited some guest speakers to three of his classes this week. This is his former U.C. Berkeley colleague, Wu Yu-Shan. We have been using a classroom at National Taiwan University where he also teaches.

He also invited his former student, Lev Nachman, who also teaches at National Taiwan University. He took one of Karl's Intro to Political Science courses years ago, and said to him, "I want to do what you do!" Now he does that and a lot more. He probably knows more about the Taiwan electorate than any one and gave a very interesting lecture sharing his polling data that just came in the day before.

Last night we were treated to a dinner hosted by the school of one of Karl's current Taiwanese students. He graduated from a "micro-school" here in Taipei. He has given such a glowing report of his first year at Puget Sound, his head master invited us to a dinner to get to know their oldest students and some of the parents.

They only have 35 students! They have four teachers and their head master is in the center. We spent a wonderful evening getting to learn about them and getting their tips for our last week in Taiwan.

Taipei and Tainan

 

April 18, 2026

We flew from Shanghai to the Songshan airport in Taipei. We made regular trips to the Taoyuan airport when we lived here before, so it wasn't quite like coming home. We knew that airport well. But as soon as we got in our taxi and started driving through the streets of Taipei, it felt like home.

We spent only two nights in Taipei before we hit the road again! We headed off to Tainan in a bus. We went to the National Museum of Taiwan History. Karl has been teaching a course on Chinese nationalism and identity. This museum went to great lengths to portray their past as a place inhabited by people from many different places to show that their identity is complicated. This display shows how the Japanese colonists tried to construct different ethnic groups from the indigenous population.  

As we saw in China, the government sponsored patriotic educational sites to promote their ideal citizens' view of themselves, their nation and the world. This museum had a large section on education during the Japanese colonial period. The Taiwanese were required to take on Japanese names, speak Japanese and attend Japanese schools.

This sign caught my eye. While we were in China, Karl was not allowed to give explanations at the patriotic sites. Only approved museum guides could comment on the museum collections. So, this sign caught my eye. History "is a collaborative endeavor by people with differing opinions and perspectives."

After the museum, Karl planned on leading us on an overly ambitious walking tour of Tainan. The plan was to start at the Confucian temple, but when we got there, it was closed so we looked over the wall. Then we went to the shrine (see picture above) for the Ming pirate who freed Taiwan from the Dutch East India company and their 38-year reign on Taiwan. We saw the statue, but the shrine was closed! Fortunately, one of program facilitators who was with us talked them into opening the gates for a quick walk through. Koxinga's mother was Japanese, so the shrine when it was first built looked like a Shinto shrine but was later China-fied when an angry former Ming soldier sought revenge for Koxinga's son killing his family.

We then walked to the Hayashi Department store to go to the rooftop and see the gunshots and bomb damage from the American raids during WW II. The glass protecting the wall above the lights covers the war wounds. The building is a five-story Japanese-style building and was the tallest in Taiwan when it was built during the Japanese colonial period.

We then walked to one of the hundreds of Mazu temples in Tainan. This one is known as the Grand Mazu Temple. It was the first government-built Mazu temple. Originally the buildings was the home of a Ming official, but wanting to curry the favor of the locals when the Qing came to power, they converted it to a Mazu temple. Mazu is the goddess of the sea and Taiwan's favorite deity. Her image is dark black from hundreds of years of incense burning.

The walking tour took two hours! We were starving, so we got an Uber and went to a favorite place to eat in Tainan.

The next morning, the plan was to visit Fort Zeelandia (the Dutch East India Fort built in in the 1630s). But the program providers didn't have Karl's vision. We stood outside the recreated fort while our tour guide talked about it and then saw one original wall. This is a picture of the fort from the National History Museum the previous day.

We also walked to the Anping Kaitai Mazu temple. It is considered one of Taiwan's oldest Mazu temples, but the front of it was covered in scaffolding. It contains a rare, soft-body Mazu thought to have been brought by Koxinga's fleet.

We also toured the Anping tree house, which is a former warehouse during the Qing dynasty where salt and camphor and other products were stored. Banyan trees have completely overtaken the building!

On the way back to Taipei, we stopped at the Chiang Kai-shek mausoleum and statue park. Chiang wanted to be buried in his favorite presidential residence in the hills of Daxi. It was intended to be a temporary resting place until he could be permanently moved to his ancestral birthplace in China. 

We were there in time for the changing of the guard, but you cannot go inside the memorial building. When we were here in 2018, the building had just been desecrated by protestors, and it has not been reopened since.

Next to his mausoleum is a statue park filled with hundreds statues of Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen. Karl was trying to decide what the intention of the park is. Is it to mock? Is it to make money? Is it to keep peace by not doing anything provoking? 

Maybe a little bit of all? At least in Taiwan, history is a collaborative endeavor.

Shanghai and Nanjing

View of Pudong from the Bund in Shanghai.

April 12, 2026

I've fallen behind because all Google products are not allowed in China. My VPN was not crafty enough to allow me to easily use them, and Karl's travel plans have kept us moving quickly. We took the train from Beijing to Shanghai. 

View of the Bund on the Huangpu River in Shanghai.

The Bund is the famous waterfront promenade in Shanghai that is sometimes referred to as a museum of world architecture. The buildings are colonial-era banks, hotels and consulates with the famous Fairmont Peace Hotel and the Customs House. This area's heyday was between the 1860s and the 1930s. The buildings all have plaques on them describing who built them. I could have spent all my time wandering around looking at them.

Outside the Shanghai History Museum.

We saw two museums for Karl's course. The Shanghai History Museum was a new museum to us located in the former Shanghai Race Club building, another historical colonial relic. The bottom two floors contained bronzes and jades, which were not what we were there to see. The upper floors' museum collection tells the story of Shanghai's history through the utilitarian lens of the Communist Party. The students were tasked to find examples of "top-down" and "bottom-up" popular Chinese nationalism.

Painting at the entrance to the Memorial Hall to the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.

The first time we came to this location in 1992, there was just a historical marker on the wall of the building. When we came nine years ago, the government had created a museum of a few rooms with artifacts and pictures. We were surprised to see the Party has rebuilt it on an even grander scale. And there were lots of Chinese tourists educating themselves on the Party's glorious beginnings. This painting is interesting because it is a grouping of key communist historical sites. We have been to most of these buildings on this trip. The pagoda on the hill was the one we saw in Yan'an.

We walked back to our hotel from the museum through the French Concession. We talked with this Uyghur man selling fruit from a cart. He doesn't look theyway you might expect a Chinese citizen to look. He is from Xinjiang in Northwest China and that population has Turkish roots.

We climbed 382 steps to get to the top of the Sun Yat-sen mausoleum.

We took an overnight trip and backtracked toward Beijing to spend a day in yet another former capital of China: Nanjing. Through China's 5,000 year history, they claim to have had four ancient capital cities: Beijing, Xi'an, Nanjing and Luoyang. We are visiting three of the four. Nanjing was the capital for six dynasties including the Ming. We came to see Sun Yat-sen's (China's George Washington) mausoleum, the Ming tombs, the Memorial Hall for the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders (that really is the name) and to see where the Treaty of Nanking was signed that ended the First Opium War. The building at the head of the stairs contains a seated statue of Sun looking very much like the Lincoln Memorial

Grove of trees covering the burial mound of the Emperor Zhu Yuangzhang and his wife.

We also visited the Ming tombs in Nanjing which immortalize the founder of the Ming Dynasty and his Empress wife. There is another set of stairs to climb to see a large building, but we learned that he was buried with his wife on a hill behind the building that is covered with trees. After seeing the Taj Mahal and many grand memorials over these past few months, I liked the contrast to this simple yet equally beautiful burial mound.

This is not to say the Ming tombs are not ostentatious. This is the Stone Elephant road that leads to the mausoleum. It has 12 pairs of massive stone animal statues. The first pair is standing, the second pair is seated. They represent a procession leading the emperor from the material world to the afterlife. They represent the emperor's power and the vastness of his empire.

Statue in front of the Nanjing Massacre Museum of a mother and two children running from a bomb.

Like the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC or the Hiroshima Peace Museum in Japan, the Nanjing Massacre Museum is another museum with a tough topic to cover. The purpose of this museum is to document the truth, educate the public, honor the victims and promote peace. It has the feel of a patriotic education site. The displays are mostly pictures and descriptive narrative. The numbers stated of those harmed are not agreed upon by scholars. It is a sobering experience nonetheless.

This photo is in the museum educating the public on the end of the First Opium War. The treaty was signed in August of 1842 on board a British warship docked in the Yangtze River in Nanjing. This event seems like it should be old news! But the Party has memorialized it with a new museum declaring how China's century of humiliation was overcome by the Party. 

We had some free time before we needed to catch our train back to Shanghai, so we went on our own to the Fuzimiao Temple. The temple grounds hold the Confucian Examination Hall, one of two sites where students could sit to take the Imperial Examination. They sat through nine days of examinations in order to qualify for elite government positions.

This picture shows a sock a student wrote notes on to take into the examination. Cheating on tests has been a problem for centuries! 

 

 

Summer Palaces, New and Old

 

The New Summer Palace

April 4, 2026

The New Summer Palace was the luxurious summer retreat for the Qing Emperors. It was also Empress Dowager Cixi's home away from her Forbidden City home. 

Notice the bats on the Summer Palace windows. In Chinese, the word for bat is a homophone for the word for fortune or blessing. So, bats are a recuring motif in the architecture of the palace.

The Long Corridor was built to allow the Empress Dowager to enjoy strolling in the garden in rain or sunshine. It has over 14,000 paintings depicting scenes from classical literature, historical figures and birds and flowers.

This one portrays a scene from Journey to the West, but it was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Our guide said it was done by "crazy teenagers."

Fortunately, many of the paintings survived.

The first Marble Boat was built by Emperor Qianlong. It was destroyed by Lord Elgin during the Second Opium War. The Empress Dowager rebuilt it ironically using money that was earmarked for the navy. Although both boats were described as marble, they were both made of stone painted to look like marble and neither boat could float!

There were plenty of boats that could float on the man-made lake. The first time we came, we took a boat ride. This time, we enjoyed the flowering trees.

This map depicts the Old Summer Palace or Yuangmingyuan. We have not been to this historical site and thought it was just a collection of ruins. We were surprised to find the 350 square hectare park filled with local tourists. We learned it is an important national symbol for China. It represents the peak of Qing Dynasty architecture contrasted with the peak of the Century of Humiliation China endured. 

The Old Summer Palace was a collection of Western-style Baroque buildings and traditional Chinese style architecture. It was known as the "Garden of Gardens." The buildings held the greatest collection of China's 5,000 years of treasures ever concentrated in one location. During the Second Opium War, it was burned and looted by an Anglo-French Army. Victor Hugo famously wrote, "one day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned." His was a rare voice of conscience for the time.

For a long time, the remnants of the buildings were removed by locals who repurposed them for their own needs. The CCP, has preserved the Palace Grounds as an important patriotic education site. 

There were plenty of visitors taking in the historical education! Karl assigned his students to talk with two local visitors to find out why they were there and what they learned from their visit.

These statues are not the originals. The originals were looted, five of which are still not located while the others are in various places around the world. The statues are Chinese zodiac heads on human bodies, and they formed a "hydraulic clock." Each hour the corresponding head would spout water to tell the time. They are one example of many looted objects around the world. Of the estimated 1.6 million Chinese artifacts now located in 47 museums outside of China, roughly one million of them came from the Yuanmingyuan. Should they be returned to their original owners or allowed to remain where they are now?

This wall is the remains of a mosque Emperor Qianlong built for his favorite Uyghur concubine, Xiang Fei in hopes of easing her homesickness.

This Wanhua Maze was commissioned by Emperor Qianlong and designed and built by Jesuit missionaries in 1749. The Emperor and his concubines enjoyed the maze. Eunuch's would hold lanterns and it was a popular Mid-Autumn festival tradition. It too was destroyed but rebuilt in the 1980s.

Finally, we got to go to the US Embassy and receive a briefing from one of Karl's former students and former Pacrimmer!