Here and There – Taiwan
My first visit to Taiwan was far from an auspicious occasion. Flying back to Australia from London, we were going to stop over in Hong Kong. We were travelling with British Airways. At some point in the flight, it became clear the weather was deteriorating. One of those always cheerful English pilots came on the intercom: “It’s a bit windy and wet in Hong Kong. Might be a bit bumpy. We’re following a Qantas flight, and they’ll let us know how it looks when they land.” Then the purser came on: “Please fasten your seat belts!” I think we all assumed that was all. It wasn’t. As we were getting closer to Hong Kong and the old Kai Tak airport, it was not just windy. We were flying through ominously thick cloud.
The next announcement from the flight deck told us that the Qantas flight was going to commence its landing approach and we began our descent. I am sure you have been in a similar situation. The plane drones on, and as there’s nothing to see, you just wait and wonder how much longer before you’ll arrive. Suddenly, we were thrown back against our seats and the jumbo jet was roaring upwards. It was, to be honest, more than a little scary. No more announcement from the flight deck, and not much conversation around us. We waited for what seemed like many minutes before our pilot came back on, “There’s a typhoon at Kai Tak, and we weren’t able to land. Sorry about that. We’re heading for Kaohsiung.” Scrabbling around for the map at the back of the airline magazine, I discovered Kaohsiung City was in the south of Taiwan. Up on the flight deck, I think they were a little preoccupied and forgot to tell us any minor details like these about our new destination!
By the time we landed, Kaohsiung’s ‘international airport’ was rather busy. Back in the late 1970s, it was a small operation. We taxied to the end of the runway, turned off, and stopped. I could see that a Qantas jumbo was just ahead of us, also stationary. There were other aircraft further along. It was “a bit of a traffic jam” and it took over an hour to get us to the terminal. Kaohsiung wasn’t ready for several international arrivals; it’s possible it wasn’t ready for any international flights. We were escorted into the arrivals hall and asked to hand over our passports. We were told we would be taken to a hotel. It was late in the day. We’d be sleeping there before we would be leaving for Hong Kong the next morning.
The hotel was barely adequate, instructions confusing, and it was with a feeling of relief to find ourselves back at the airport the next day, ready to fly over to Hong Kong. Oh, and one final challenge: all the passports had been put in a cardboard box, and we had to scrabble around to find our own, and then show the photograph page to a bored policeman. No, it wasn’t an auspicious first visit. Indeed, all I can remember is the flight, the hotel, and scrabbling around trying to find our passports in a cardboard box!
Some years later I was back in Taiwan, but this time I went to Taipei. I suppose that first visit had rather shaped my expectations and was rather stunned to discover that Taipei was a modern, busy city, with a modern, busy airport. Apart from the fact there were rather a lot of scooters and motorbikes around, in most ways it could have been a major city in any other part of East Asia or Europe. Into a taxi, and off to a very nice Sheraton Hotel. Did I say there were many two-wheelers around? The roads were packed with cars, but they were outnumbered many times over by hordes of bikes and scooters. Our taxi driver drove with ‘elan’ through the packed lanes, managing to clip off his left-hand driving outside mirror against a truck. It was almost as exciting as that flight into Hong Kong. Despite the drama and packed roads, the hotel was like an oasis: cool, calm, and very elegant.
I was in Taipei to take part in a meeting of management organisations. Having meetings in Taipei for the Asian Association of Management Organisations was unusual. In fact, this might have been the first, as we usually met in Hong Kong, and seldom elsewhere other than occasionally in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur. Our Taiwanese hosts were wonderful. We had our meetings, but we also had some outstanding meals – sorry banquets – and time was set aside to see Taipei. Perhaps I should have said hardly enough time: I had arrived in the evening when the roads seemed very busy. That gave me a rather inadequate perspective.
When we set off from our hotel on a tour in the early afternoon, then I saw what ‘busy’ was like in Taipei. I am confident it is different now, but then it was a challenge to get our coach out from the hotel entrance, and then we moved along a little more than a crawl. It was only one kilometre to the National Palace Museum, and were it not for the pollution from traffic, walking might have been quicker. All that became irrelevant when we arrived at the museum. It looked like a palace, and the name is deliberate. The National Palace Museum is one of the great museums of the world, largely unknown to a western audience, and the result of the extraordinary events that convulsed China in the first half of the 20thCentury.
I don’t want to get tangled up in the complicated history between 1900 and 1948, but some bits are important to the story of the museum. The trouble began with the Boxer Rebellion, an uprising aimed at expelling foreign, colonial and Christian groups in China between 1899 and 1901. This was during the final years of the Qing dynasty, led by the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, or in its English equivalent, the ‘Boxers’, because many of its members were skilled in Chinese martial arts, or ‘Chines Boxing’ as the British termed it. The Guangxu Emperor, the tenth emperor in the Qing dynasty and a weak leader, was under the thumb of Empress Dowager Cixi, who was regent. Cixi died in 1908. When the Qing court tried to introduce some administrative and legal reforms many officials, officers, and students sought wider ranging reforms, with ideas including establishing a constitutional monarchy, or the overthrow of the dynasty and the creation of a republic. In the end, The Republic of China was proclaimed on 1 January 1912, ending 2,000 years of dynastic rule.
The next few years were confusing, with warlords fighting among themselves, German incursions began during the First World War, and some gains were ceded to Japan in 1919. Eventually Sun Yat-sen began to pull the country back together. In 1924, the Prime Minister, Huang Fu, decided to address the special treatment that had been given to the Qing emperor’s family. The title of emperor was abolished, and the Qing family had to leave the Forbidden City. This began a series of steps to acquire and preserve all the imperial possessions. By 1925 plans were in place to make the former palace a National Palace Museum (NPM).
More trouble was brewing. Sun Yat-sen had linked with the emerging Chinese Communist Party. After his death in 1925, Chiang Kai-Shek took over, and a bitter war developed between the nationalists and the communists. The Japanese began occupying parts of China in 1931, the start of a war between China and Japan that continued until 1945. In early 1933, the Japanese army began to head towards Beijing. The NPM Council decided to move the collection south, in 13,427 containers and 64 packages. Other historical items from various palaces and collections were added, a further 6,194 containers and eight packages. They were to be moved several times, and it was only at the end of the Second World War that the collection began to be shipped back to Beijing, a process finally completed in 1947.
Well, you know that wasn’t the end. A year later the Communist Party was gaining dominance, and the National Central Museum Council decided the most precious items should be transported to Taiwan. The task was as monumental as the earlier transfer of the collection. On December 21st, 1948, part of the collection was placed in 532 containers, and transported to Taiwan. Other material was sent over, including artifacts, books, and treaties (packed in 240 containers) from the Institute of History and Philology, the Academia Sinica, the National Central Library, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On Jan. 6, 1949, a second batch of material, including NPM artifacts (1,680 containers), Preparatory Department artifacts (486 containers), and artifacts, books, and maps of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, the National Central Library (1,336 containers), were sent over, and finally, on Jan. 30, 1949, the third group of material from the NPM (in 972 containers), Preparatory Department (154 containers), and National Central Library (122 containers), were shipped by a naval ship. Now you know what’s in Taipei National Palace Museum – and you can probably understand why the mainland Chinese regard all that material as stolen. Makes the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum look like a pathetic, minor sideshow!
In the view of most scholars, many of the works in the collection are masterpieces, and the Museum is widely acknowledged as an important treasure trove of Chinese culture. The holdings from the Palace Museum included 46,100 antiquities, 5,526 paintings and calligraphies, and 545,797 rare books and documents. The collection from the National Central Museum included 11,047 antiquities, 477 painting and calligraphies, and 38 rare books and documents. In sum, the combined collection consisted of 608,985 cultural relics. There is so much held in the museum that only a fraction of the collection is on display at any one time. I was told it takes 20 years to see everything that is allowed to be in public view.
It certainly makes an interesting comparison with the mainland’s Shanghai Museum. The National Palace Museum is an imposing, massive building: its name comes from the palace in Beijing, but it could have been a palace in its own right. The Shanghai Museum, opened in 1996, couldn’t be more unlike the NPM. It was designed by a local architect Xing Tonghe in the shape of an ancient bronze cooking vessel, a ding. It has a round top and a square base, symbolizing the ancient Chinese perception of the world as “round sky, square earth”. It has a great collection, beautifully presented, and one of my favourite visiting places in China: but if you have been to Taipei, you’ll immediately realise the Shanghai Museum has a much smaller and less prestigious collection. The Taiwanese hold most of the outstanding items. Greece hopes to get back the Elgin Marbles, but their repatriation would be inconsequential compared to the return of the NPM’s collection to the Peoples Republic.
I could have stayed in the National Palace Museum for the whole of my time in Taipei. However, in the course of meetings, one of the Taiwanese delegation learnt I was interested in social anthropology. He wanted me to learn about the indigenous ethnic groups of Taiwan, and so I found myself on a flight to … Kaohsiung! No typhoon to affect our journey, and at least an opportunity to see the city a second time, and really see it this time. However, I wasn’t aware that Kaohsiung was an industrial centre, and one of the city’s major products was cement. The dust was everywhere, blocking the sun, and casting a dull grey blanket over the town. Fortunately, my host wasn’t interested in the city, and in no time we were riding in a minibus, travelling through Pingtung County, up towards the mountains that run north-south in Taiwan for almost the whole length of the island.
Fresh air, sun, and increasingly beautiful scenery. We were going to the Taiwan Indigenous Culture Park. The park had opened in 1987, and we were there in the early 1990s. Since then, it has been extensively developed. However, almost against my expectations, it was very interesting. Setting aside the tourist paraphernalia (aimed at Taiwanese tourists, of course), there was material about various tribes that were native to the island, and especially the hill areas. In many ways (and certainly I didn’t say it to anyone at the park) the people and the cultural artifacts reminded me of similar indigenous groups in Malaysia.
Language was a problem (at that time, there was very little in English), and my guide from Taipei was constantly trying to move me along. I was left with the impression of some stunning weaving, riotous colours, and an unanswered question: were the people I saw actual members of the various traditional groups, or were they the equivalent of the ‘people’ you meet at Disneyland? One rather nice object was a presentation box with circular stones, each one of which was painted with the colours and a symbolic image of each of the tribes. I kept that for years, but it left for the Land of Lost Socks in more recent times.
Looking back at the visit to Taipei, I suppose one obvious question is whether the items in the Taiwan museum were stolen. China is clear about that, as is Taiwan. Well, we can’t answer that question unambiguously: like most things, it all depends. However, one issue intrigues me. Without those hundreds of thousands of items having been sent to Taiwan, would many have been destroyed in the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976? Saved, but should they be returned? That question will be irrelevant when the mainland ‘reacquires’ Taiwan.
Given my theme of ‘here and there’, how does this relate to Australia? I suspect you know the answer. Many of the cultural artefacts from pre-colonisation days have been scattered far and wide. You can find Aboriginal galleries and collected items in cases in museums in the United Kingdom, the USA and some European countries. Many items were taken without knowing or caring about the indigenous owners. Like China looking across the Taiwan Strait, today’s indigenous Australians look overseas, hoping to repatriate what was taken. Like the Taiwanese, many overseas museums are reluctant to handover what they believe they had acquired quite legitimately. There are some local problems, too.
Yorta Yorta man Jason Tamiru, a cultural heritage officer for Indigenous nations in north-west Victoria, has worked to secure “thousands of bones, hundreds of people” from collections around the world, and organised traditional burials and interments, (the SA Museum has the remains of some 4,600 people alone). He was involved in the return of the widely known Indigenous child: the “Jaara baby”. Originally buried in the hollow of a tree in the mid-19th century, wrapped in possum skins, the baby was discovered in 1904 by an axeman felling trees. It was almost a century later, in 2003, when the Melbourne Museum returned the remains to the Dja Wurrung people. “We put the baby back into a tree, back on Country, including all its belongings,” says Tamiru. The baby was wrapped in a new possum skin cloak and given a new rattle. Traditional tree burials are “very sacred” and reburying the bones of ancestors reconnects cultural lines by “absolutely awakening those spirits”.
However, not everyone agrees how to do this, with disputes among indigenous groups. In May 2022, the 42,000-year-old remains of Mungo Man and Mungo Lady were reburied, after being ‘found’ in the Mungo Visitor Centre! An Indigenous group filed an injunction to prevent the planned reburial, which had been approved by the Willandra Lakes Region Aboriginal Advisory Group. To add to the confusion, Federal approval was required, as the location was within a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and reburial is a ‘controlled action’ under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. With 10,500 first nations ancestral remains still in museums, it is proving challenging to resolve competing views, and disputes continue over who controls what. What an embarrassing mess, or perhaps a challenging mess, one we share with colonisers and conquerors around the world.
