National Taiwan Museum: From Imperial Showcase to Community Co-Creation, Who Has the Right to Display Taiwan?

30-Second Overview: In 1908, the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office established a museum following the completion of the trunk line of the Taiwan Railway; in 1915, a building with a 30-meter dome, stained glass, and classical colonnade was completed in Taipei’s New Park. It was once a showcase for the colonial government to display "Taiwan," and after the war, it changed its name and administrators, yet remained in its original location. Today, the NTM is a museum complex comprising four heritage sites, and the question has shifted from "what to collect" to "who decides how to display." (NTM Official Announcement)

Figure: The front view compresses the triangular pediment, classical colonnade, stairs, and dome into a single viewing axis; the exhibition banners at the entrance also indicate that this heritage site is not a static monument, but a museum that continues to receive visitors. Photo: Guillaume Paumier, CC BY-SA 3.0.¹

In 1915, entering the museum hall of Taipei’s New Park, one first sees the light. Stained glass divides the sunlight into layers of color, leading down to marble floors and up to a soaring dome. This building looks like a temple transported from Europe, yet it places Taiwan’s pineapples, bananas, acacia trees, minerals, and animal specimens into its own display cases. The grandeur of the architecture and the local nature of the collection were never separate matters from the beginning.²

More accurately, this museum did not first have a "Taiwan story" and then find a building to house it. It was first a modernization project of the colonial government, and only later, through regime changes, restoration, and community collaboration, did it slowly become a public space where Taiwanese people could renegotiate. The history of the NTM is not just about what it has preserved, but about who once named Taiwan for it, and who has gradually reclaimed the right to name.

A Railway, Birthing a Museum

In October 1908, the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office established a museum in Taipei. This timing was not accidental: in the same year, the trunk line of the Taiwan Railway was fully completed, connecting north and south traffic into a new administrative and economic axis. An article on the history of the museum in Taiwan Light points out that the initial museum premises utilized the Lottery Bureau building, and its name was the "Museum Attached to the Department of Agriculture and Industry of the Civil Affairs Bureau of the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office." Its predecessor can be traced back to the Commodity Exhibition Hall established in 1899.²

The Commodity Exhibition Hall displayed folk items, crafts, and industrial achievements from various parts of Taiwan. In other words, the museum’s first task was not simply to preserve the past, but to organize the colony into data that the Japanese government, investors, and the outside world could read. After camphor, sugar, minerals, plants, and Indigenous artifacts entered the same classification system, Taiwan simultaneously became an island, a market, and an object of study.

There is a contrast easily obscured by the "beautiful heritage" narrative: the museum’s classical appearance declares civilization and order, while the specimens inside produce knowledge about the colony. A 2008 academic study refers to this history as the cultural politics of the museum, pointing out that the architecture, institutions, display classifications, and target audiences of the Taiwan Governor-General’s Museum all involved how Japan understood Indigenous peoples, Han society, and "modernity" itself. The study also notes that after the post-war Nationalist Government took over, the museum could still become a field for the new administrators to present their own cultural order.³

Curator’s Note: A museum is not a transparent glass case. It decides which items go into the case, what names label them, and who stands outside the case to watch; thus, while a specimen is preserved, it may also preserve a certain classification system.

The 1915 Dome, Passing Through Four Names

In 1913, construction began on the museum building commemorizing Uemura Yasunori and Goto Shinpei, completed two years later. It later became the premises of the Taiwan Governor-General’s Museum, located between today’s 228 Peace Park and Guanguang Road, forming an urban axis with the old Taipei Railway Station. An article on the history of the museum in Taiwan Light records its establishment in 1908 and completion in 1915. The NTM Official Announcement, however, states that the Main Building was completed in 1915 and was among the first batch designated as National Heritage Sites.^{2 4}

The Main Building adopts reinforced concrete and brick load-bearing walls, with a classical colonnade on the main facade and a central dome approximately 30 meters high. The main hall is supported by Roman Corinthian stone columns, with stained glass, stone materials, and plant motifs placing European classical vocabulary and Taiwan’s natural products in the same space.²

This hybridity is no small matter. The architecture uses classical vocabulary to declare that a colonial government is capable of building modern public institutions, while the decorations incorporate Taiwan’s fruits, plants, and local materials. It is both a monument proving governance capabilities to the empire and a workspace translating Taiwan’s natural resources into knowledge and wealth.

Treating Architecture as the First Exhibit

When approaching the Main Building, one first sees the main facade; only upon entering does one discover that the architecture itself has arranged a viewing sequence. The portico leads people into the central hall, the dome pulls the gaze upward, and the columns separate the central space from the side exhibition halls. This is not mere decoration, but a spatial syntax of public education: first making people feel order and grandeur, then directing attention to specimens and explanatory texts.²

Looking back at this syntax today, one cannot simply end with "classical, elegant, magnificent." The architecture places Taiwan’s natural products into an external civilizational framework, while simultaneously leaving open the possibility for later audiences to deconstruct this framework. When exhibitions explain architectural materials, restoration traces, and the history of acquiring the collection, the dome is no longer just a background, but becomes a historical artifact subject to questioning.⁵

In 1949, the name was changed to "Taiwan Provincial Museum." In 1999, it was changed again to the current "National Taiwan Museum." The name changed, the administrators changed, and the park was renamed from Taipei New Park to 228 Peace Park, but the building remained in its original location. Taiwan Light places this evolution in the context of post-war regime alternation and urban memory: a public building built against the backdrop of colonial rule did not disappear with the departing rulers; instead, it was taken over by the next regime, renamed, and handed over for use by later Taiwanese society.²

This also explains why the NTM cannot simply be written as "Japanese colonial architecture." Its brick walls, dome, and collection indeed preserve traces of Japanese colonial modernity. But its use after 1949, its renaming in the 1990s, and its current exhibition shifts are equally Taiwan’s own history. The architecture does not permanently safeguard the right to interpretation for any single regime.

The Land Bank Underground, Financial History in the Walls

The NTM today is not just the Main Building in 228 Peace Park. The NTM Official Announcement lists four branch halls as important modern buildings constructed during the Japanese era. The predecessor of the Paleontology Museum was the Taipei Branch of the Nippon Kangyo Bank, taken over by the Taiwan Land Bank after the war, and later, under the Taiwan Museum System Project in 2005, was responsible for restoration and operation by the NTM.^{4 6}

Therefore, the walls of the Paleontology Museum do not only speak of fossils. They also preserve the overlapping history of banks, land, colonization finance, and post-war public financial institutions. When a bank is reconfigured as a natural history museum, the premises itself becomes a question: How did finance support modernization? How was land measured, mortgaged, and developed? And how does a museum put these seemingly different stories back into the same city?

The predecessor of the Nanmen Hall was the Taipei Nanmen Workshop of the Taiwan Governor-General’s Monopoly Bureau, established in 1899, primarily handling the camphor and opium industries. The official English premises page and the Nanmen Hall exhibition page point out that the workshop closed in 1967, with existing ruins including the Red Building, Little White Palace, and water storage tanks. Today’s exhibitions look back at the impact of the camphor industry on socio-economics, ethnic culture, and the ecological environment through historical objects and local ruins.^{7 8}

Placing the Nanmen Hall into the NTM system is equivalent to refusing to write camphor only as "an early successful export commodity of Taiwan." Camphor was once the intersection of industry, monopoly systems, mountain collection, and global trade. Opium places the fiscal and bodily control of colonial governance on the same map. Cracks in the heritage walls, the scale of warehouses, and local exhibitions allow industrial history to be understood without relying solely on a string of years.

The permanent exhibition at the Nanmen Hall further breaks this history into eight themes: "Definition, Market, Battlefield, Production, Camphor Monopoly, Opium Monopoly, Nanmen Workshop, Local Exhibition," ensuring that commodity history does not stop at export figures, but connects to production spaces, monopoly systems, and heritage restoration.⁸

The Railway Ministry Park outside the North Gate pulls out another line of modernization. Its predecessor was the Railway Department of the Taiwan Governor-General’s Transportation Bureau, serving as the hub of Taiwan’s railway administration from the late Qing Taipei Machinery Bureau, through the Japanese era Railway Department, to the post-war Taiwan Railway Administration. The NTM Official Announcement lists the Railway Ministry Park as an important node of modern architecture and railway history, placing it alongside natural history, finance, industry, and urban modernity as a microcosm of Taiwan’s modern history.⁴

Four Premises, Four Methods of Entering Taiwan’s Modern History

These four entries are not tourism classifications arbitrarily designed by the museum, but a cross-organization of each premises’ predecessor and today’s exhibition functions. Official premises data and NTM announcements respectively provide their historical evolution, architectural identity, and exhibition direction.^{4 7 6}

Curator’s Note: The four premises are like four entrances: the Main Building enters through natural history, the Paleontology Museum through finance, the Nanmen Hall through camphor and monopoly, and the Railway Ministry Park through transportation and administration. Taiwan’s modernization did not suddenly occur in a white temple, but grew between banks, workshops, railway tracks, and specimen cases.

A 2022 restoration exhibition study breaks down the exhibition methods of these premises into three aspects: heritage life history and socio-cultural context, architectural features, and the restoration process. Observing the Paleontology Museum, Nanmen Hall, and Railway Ministry Park, researchers point out that local exhibitions allow audiences to see ruins, construction methods, and equipment originally present in various parts of the building, as well as the issues the restoration itself faced.⁵

This method is important because "restoration" is not about returning a building to the year that looks the most beautiful. Restoration exhibitions put dismantled components, retained construction methods, and traces of building users back into the narrative, so that heritage sites are no longer just a finished photo, but a social life history still being read.

Beyond Specimens, Who Can Tell Their Own Story?

The most difficult legacy of the NTM is not necessarily the dome or the marble, but collection and classification itself. Early museums often classified by ethnicity, object function, or physical characteristics, organizing complex societies into rows of easy-to-view cabinets. A specialized article on Indigenous literature points out that there is a significant shift between the classification-style displays common in early 20th-century anthropological museums and today’s direction emphasizing public participation, online exhibitions, and co-creation exhibitions.⁹

This is not about judging all early research as wrong, nor about automatically judging today’s curation as correct. The issue is, when an artifact leaves its source community and enters a capital museum, who gains the power to explain it? Museums can provide resources for preservation, research, and public display, but if it only allows the museum itself to decide what the artifacts represent, the display still follows the structure of "the big museum speaking for others."

The NTM’s recent practices begin to address this issue. The NTM’s 2016 official cooperation announcement records that since 2009, the "Big Museum Leads Small Museums" initiative has promoted the return of Indigenous artifacts to their hometowns, later expanding from one-on-one return exhibitions to two big museums leading multiple small museums, artifact reproduction, and joint curation. The announcement also records that at that time, 8 special exhibitions had been conducted in cooperation with 6 local Indigenous cultural museums.¹⁰

The focus of this path is not just sending artifacts back to tribes for exhibition, but changing who sits at the curation table. The official announcement records that cooperation invited tribal elders into the museum’s repository to inspect and select exhibits, lent original collected artifacts to local cultural museums, and had tribes lead the planning of exhibition content and interpretation of exhibits.¹⁰ These practices change "returning to the hometown" from a transportation issue to a re-arrangement of knowledge and power.

The review of research simultaneously reminds us that the representation of Indigenous culture remains insufficient; cooperation does not mean the problem is solved. Returning to the hometown, dialogue, and co-creation are not pretty endings, but working methods that require museums to continuously face interpretive differences, knowledge positions, and the distribution of institutional resources.

Curator’s Note: "Co-creation" is not inviting local representatives to a meeting and then taking back the decision-making power inside the museum. True co-creation should leave space for questioning, modification, and rejection when exhibit selection, names, narrative order, and results return to the community.

From this perspective, the NTM’s current transformation is not a straight line "from colonial to progressive." The architecture and collection left from the colonial period are the foundation for today’s research and display; the same batch of architecture and collection also carries the classification methods of Taiwanese society at that time. What the museum can do is not pretend this history does not exist, but expose it, letting more people know how a specimen was acquired, how a workshop operated, and why an artifact appears in a cabinet.

Figure: The white high columns, golden capitals, and high ceilings of the main hall guide the viewer’s gaze upward; the exhibition plaques below remind the audience that this building is simultaneously a historical space and a museum still operating today. Photo: Scchiang; CC BY-SA 4.0.¹¹

The Next Century of a Museum

The value of the NTM lies not in the title of "the oldest" itself. What is truly important is that it places Taiwan’s natural history, industrial history, financial history, railway history, and ethnic culture into the same walkable urban system. The NTM Official Announcement also views the four premises as heritage architecture for understanding Taiwan’s modern development.⁴

But publicness is not automatically completed by attaching the word "National." It relies on how exhibitions mark sources, how they handle controversies, how they involve source communities, and how they acknowledge inequalities in the process of forming the collection. Heritage restoration preserves walls, columns, roofs, and construction methods; exhibition transformation must preserve the right of different people to ask questions about these objects.

Four Layers of Perspective for Readers

The first layer looks at the exterior: identifying the dome, colonnade, stained glass, and urban axis. The second layer looks at function: questioning how the museum connects with railways, banks, camphor workshops, and monopoly systems. The third layer looks at the collection: confirming the source, classification, and original life context of objects. The fourth layer looks at power: noting who writes the labels, who can offer different interpretations, and whether local communities can participate in the final display decisions.

These four layers of perspective also apply to online reading. Images should not just add atmosphere to an article. They should let readers know which building, which space, and which viewing angle they are seeing. Good captions guide the gaze from the exterior back to the history of the premises, allowing readers to understand why the colonnade, specimens, and display cases before them are worth seeing.

Supplementary Article Data

This article separates premises data, museum history articles, and academic research: official pages are responsible for confirming architecture, years, and museum affairs; museum history articles supplement urban memory and regime evolution; academic research is used to handle colonial display, restoration methods, and the limitations of community collaboration. The three sources cannot replace each other; only together are they sufficient to avoid writing the museum as a single nostalgic attraction.^{4 3 5}

Curator’s Note: A photo can only tell the reader "what it looks like here"; a good caption must also tell the reader "why to look here at this moment." The two photos in this article enter from architectural exterior and natural history display respectively, allowing readers to see how the NTM simultaneously preserves space and knowledge classification.

Therefore, next time you walk on Guanguang Road, you don’t have to just take photos in front of the dome. You can first ask three small questions: Who collected this object? Whose life did it originally belong to? Who today decides how it should be explained? These three questions will turn the museum from a beautiful heritage site into a democratic site still in operation.

The museum of 1908 organized Taiwan for the empire into an observable object. The NTM of 2026 must let Taiwanese society decide together how it is observed. Preserving this museum is not just preserving a building from 1915, but preserving a place where a society continuously rewrites its own story.

References