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.