Taiwan's Traditional Crafts and Intangible Cultural Heritage: Institutional Recognition Arrived, but the Apprentices Were Gone

30-second overview: In December 2022, the Ministry of Culture announced a new group of “Living National Treasures.” Su Ching-liang, an 87-year-old masonry master from Kaohsiung, was listed as a preserver of “masonry repair and construction techniques”; he died six months later. Taiwan did not write provisions for “cultural heritage preservation techniques and their preservers” into the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act until 2005, and only with another amendment in 2016 did it divide intangible cultural heritage into five major categories. Japan had designated its first 30 Living National Treasures as early as 1955, while South Korea established a similar system in 1962. Taiwan was 50 years late. By the time the law was finally in place, apprenticeship had already collapsed amid the decline of export-oriented OEM production and the wave of industrialization in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Bureau of Cultural Heritage statistics, among more than 600 holders of “traditional craft master” qualifications nationwide, those under 50 are “only a minority.”^{1 2 3}

The Last Coat of Limewash Before Tamsui’s Historic Monuments

On December 19, 2022, the Ministry of Culture announced a new list of preservers of “cultural heritage preservation techniques.” Su Ching-liang, an 87-year-old masonry master from Hunei, Kaohsiung, was listed under “masonry repair and construction techniques.” He was Kaohsiung’s first craft master to be designated a national-level preserver of intangible cultural heritage through the “cultural heritage preservation techniques” category.¹

Counting from the year he became apprentice to masonry master Han Chi-fu at age 16, Su had worked in plastering and masonry for more than 70 years. He had restored more than 30 historic monuments, leaving his handwork from one end of Taiwan to the other: the nationally designated historic sites of the Railway Department of the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office Transportation Bureau, Hsinchu Prefectural Hall, the Lin Family Mansion and Garden in Wufeng, and Hengchun Old City all bore his traces.⁴

Speaking in Taiwanese to a Central News Agency reporter, he said:

「阮自臺灣頭做到臺灣尾，對淡水一直做⋯⋯，做去到恆春。」¹

The year he was recognized, his grandson Su Chien-ming formally became his apprentice and obtained the Ministry of Culture’s traditional craft master qualification. Grandfather and grandson then took on the repair of the tower roof of the Kaohsiung Museum of History together.

「孫仔欲出來做，阮足歡喜的！按呢（修復）古蹟的工課就袂無去矣！因為阮拄仔好三代攏咧做古蹟，阮一代、阮後生一代、阮孫仔一代。」¹

Su Ching-liang died on July 20, 2023. The president issued a posthumous citation; the press release used elegiac language such as “a model in days past.”⁵ In his own words, the title “Living National Treasure” became “someone will finally carry on my trade.” But in Taiwan’s masonry trade in 2026, a family like his, with three generations in succession, is already an exception.

“Living National Treasure” Is a Term Taiwan Imported 50 Years Later Than Japan

The term “Living National Treasure” originated in Japan. Taiwan transplanted it from the Japanese system.

Japan enacted the Act on Protection of Cultural Properties in 1950. At first, its approach was a passive form of protection: selection because of fear that something would decline and disappear. The first amendment, in 1954, clearly established two recognition systems: “Important Intangible Cultural Properties” and their “holders.” On February 15, 1955, Japan designated its first 30 “holders of Important Intangible Cultural Properties,” commonly known as Living National Treasures. Since 1964, each individually recognized holder has received an annual government subsidy of 2 million yen, earmarked for training successors, research, and documentation.⁶

South Korea enacted its Cultural Properties Protection Act in 1962. The system broadly followed Japan’s, but included folklore within its scope.⁷

What about Taiwan? The first version of the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act did not appear until 1982, and its focus at the time was historic monuments, that is, tangible heritage. Only in the fifth major amendment in 2005 were “cultural heritage preservation techniques and their preservers” added to the statute, finally giving the spirit of the Japanese system a corresponding legal basis. Another amendment in 2016 divided “intangible cultural heritage” into five major categories: traditional performing arts, traditional crafts, oral traditions, folklore, and traditional knowledge and practices.³

The common explanation is that “Taiwan developed later, so its system came later.” But this explanation reverses cause and effect. Taiwan’s craft industries were major exporters in the 1950s through the 1970s: rush hats, bamboo weaving, ceramics, and Christmas lights were exported in large quantities to the United States and Japan, and at one point the scale of the industry was more active than Japan’s in the same period. The reason the system came late was that, for those 50 years, the government’s definition of cultural heritage included only historic monuments and objects, not “the people who know how to make these things.” By the time people were written into law, the craft masters who had once existed in household after household over those 50 years had aged one by one.

📝 Curator’s note: The average age of Japan’s first group of Living National Treasures in 1955 was 55. In 2025, the system underwent its first major overhaul in 50 years, adding “living culture” such as chefs and toji sake brewers, because aging in the craft-technique sector had become severe. Each year, 5 to 10 Living National Treasures die, and several craft fields have reached the point of having a “last Living National Treasure.”² Taiwan’s time lag means it inherited a system already racing against time, without yet having the same density of subsidy support.

Yingge’s Clay, Sanyi’s Trees, Meinong’s Rain

Exterior of the Sanyi Wood Sculpture Museum in Guangsheng Village, Sanyi Township, Miaoli County, Taiwan’s only public museum devoted to wood sculpture. Photo: Anrew0517, 2010-05-01, CC BY-SA 3.0, Commons File.

Craft settlements do not arise out of nowhere. Each is the double crystallization of “local materials × techniques brought by migrants.” Geography locks production possibilities into a radius; migrants determine what industry will grow within that radius.

Yingge (ceramics): The clay around Jianshan and Dahu is fine and sticky, good soil for pottery. In 1804, the ninth year of the Qing Jiaqing reign, Wu An from Cizao, Quanzhou, Fujian crossed the sea to Taiwan and opened a kiln at Tuzi Keng in Dahu. Later, because of armed conflict between Quanzhou and Zhangzhou immigrants, he moved to Kanjiao; in 1853, the third year of the Xianfeng reign, he moved again to Jianshanpu, today’s Yingge Old Street. Clan members Wu An and Wu Su later came to Taiwan and joined him.^{8 9} After Japanese rule began in 1895, the colonial government invested industrialization resources in Beitou, Nantou, Miaoli, and Yingge. In 1931, the “industrialization movement” introduced mechanized kilns and firing techniques.¹⁰ At its 1990s peak, Yingge had 1,300 ceramics factories and was known internationally as “Taiwan’s Jingdezhen.”¹¹

The next set of numbers should make you pause: according to statistics for non-metallic product factories, Yingge peaked at 701 factories in the late 1970s → 662 in 1997 → 554 in 2002 → 289 in 2007 → fewer than 100 factories and individual studios today in 2024.¹² Three causes of decline overlapped: globalization moved production to China and Southeast Asia, automation created oversupply, and environmental costs rose. The ceramic clay is still beneath Jianshan; the people who know how to make pottery are not.

Sanyi (woodcarving): Camphor trees covered the mountains of Miaoli. In 1918, the seventh year of the Taisho era, Wu Chin-pao, in the name of his son Wu Lo-sung, jointly established the Toda Products Company with a Japanese partner, Okazaki. At the time, camphor wood was controlled by the Japanese government. Wu Chin-pao was detained for collecting camphor tree stumps, and only after his wife Luo Duan-mei interceded was he released on bail; only later did he have the chance to partner with Okazaki in business. Sanyi woodcarving differs from woodcarving elsewhere in the world because it favors “roots, stumps, and burls,” that is, ingenious carving from unusual wood. Its source was the waste left behind by the camphor industry. What the Japanese needed was camphor oil, not tree stumps; the byproduct of the camphor industry became the starting point of Taiwan’s woodcarving industry.¹³

Meinong (paper umbrellas): During the Taisho period under Japanese rule in the 1910s, Hakka migrants Lin A-kuei and Wu Chen-hsing invited umbrella-making masters from Chaozhou, Guangdong to Taiwan to pass on their craft. Another account says that master Guo Yuqin from Meixian, Guangdong crossed the sea and settled in Meinong. Early Meinong paper umbrella factories often used the character “Guang” in their names, such as Guanghuaxing, Guangzhenxing, Guangdexing, and Guangjinsheng, commemorating their Guangdong origins.^{14 15} In the golden age of paper umbrellas in the 1960s, Meinong produced 20,000 umbrellas a year, with an output value of NT$40 million.¹⁴ A 1981 field investigation by Taiwan Panorama found that one person working alone could make an average of two umbrellas per day; five people working in division of labor could produce up to 1,000 umbrellas per month. Umbrellas came in three standard sizes, 24 inches, 14.5 inches, and 12 inches, all with 32 bamboo ribs; custom-made versions had 40 bamboo ribs and a 22-inch radius. Prices ranged from NT$350 to NT$1,000.¹⁵

Lin Hsiang-hung, owner of the Guangrongxing factory, told a Taiwan Panorama reporter in 1981:

「由於製作過程複雜、工作辛苦，現在的年輕人都沒有耐心及恆心來學。也因此我們真是面臨後繼無人的局面了。」¹⁵

That sentence was written in 1981. Forty-five years later, it reads as if it had just been spoken today.

Zhushan, Nantou (bamboo weaving): Bamboo-forest resources, together with the Bamboo Craft Training Institute established by the Japanese Ikeda and Futagami in Zhushan District in 1939, cultivated the core of Taiwan’s postwar bamboo-weaving craft. After graduating from Zhushan Public School in 1939, Huang Tu-shan passed the exam to enter the institute and later became one of the founders of Taiwan’s postwar bamboo-weaving system.¹⁶ He was not recognized as a preserver of “bamboo weaving” until 2010, when he was 84; he died in 2020.

A Craft the Government Did Not Revive: The Revival of Sanxia Indigo Dyeing

The “Blue and White Series” indigo-dyed garments displayed at the Sanxia District Historical Relics Hall show the contemporary applications of Sanxia indigo dyeing after its 1996 revival. Photo: Outlookxp, CC BY-SA 4.0, Commons File.

Sanxia, formerly known as Sankakuyū, was the most important cloth-dyeing center in northern Taiwan during the Guangxu reign of the Qing dynasty. Clear creek water and damp mountain valleys were suitable for the growth of Strobilanthes cusia, the indigo plant known locally as daqing or malan, and dye workshops lined the streets. The red-brick facades on today’s Sanxia Old Street remain historical testimony to the wealth once brought by indigo dyeing.¹⁷

But after European synthetic dyes were introduced in the Guangxu period, and after Western-style clothing and Japanese kimono became popular in the middle of the Japanese colonial period, the traditional cloth-dyeing industry gradually disappeared. Sanxia’s indigo dyeing was lost for more than 70 years.

The source of this 1990s revival was not actually a government department. It was local Sanxia residents rediscovering it themselves. In 1990, Sanxia residents launched “Searching for the Lost Sanxia Blue.” In 1994, the Sankakuyū Cultural History Studio was founded, and in 1996 the Sankakuyū Cultural Association was formally established. In 1999, the association began an indigo-dyeing promotion and technical reconstruction project. Liu Mei-ling, the association’s secretary-general, worked with teachers Ma Fen-mei and Chen Ching-lin to recover the lost craft of indigo dyeing.¹⁷

This reverses the sequence of the “Living National Treasure” system: before the system arrived in 2005, craft revival had already happened in civil society in 1990. By the time the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act wrote the preservation system into law, Sanxia indigo dyeing had already kept itself alive for 15 years. The system came to certify, not to save a life.

📝 Curator’s note: The Sanxia case exposes an invisible contrast: “bottom-up craft revival” and “top-down cultural heritage preservation” are two different paths. Ministry of Culture subsidies mostly flow to organizations, such as associations, museums, and research centers, with a smaller share reaching craft masters themselves. Subsidies are “project-based”: when a project ends, so does the support, making it impossible to sustain craft masters’ long-term creative work. Academic criticism of the subsidy structure is caught precisely in this structural mismatch.

Learning a Craft from a Master Who Had Been Dead for a Century

In 1981, the 70th year of the Republic of China calendar, Yeh Wang cochin ware at Xuejia Ciji Temple in Chiayi was stolen.

Lin Guang-yi, then in his early 30s, had just become apprentice to Lin Tian-mu to study cochin-ware glazes, and he took on the restoration project. Yeh Wang, also known as Yeh Shih, born in 1826 and Taiwan’s first native-born cochin-ware ceramic artist, had been dead for more than a century. No written records remained of the glaze formulas, firing temperatures, or color-mixing ratios used at the time.¹⁸

During the restoration process, Lin Guang-yi discovered that he simply did not know what raw materials Yeh Wang had used, or what glaze ratios. Every color he mixed was wrong. Every incorrect ratio was like repeatedly verifying that there was no way back to the era when Yeh Wang was still alive. He later told a Rhythms Monthly reporter:

「在整個修復過程中，其實我好像是從頭再學習一次。」¹⁸

He also said:

「如果葉王還在，我一定拜他為師。」¹⁸

Lin Guang-yi spent more than a decade slowly feeling his way back. He was later recognized as a “third-generation inheritor of Yeh Wang cochin ware.” But he knew that what he had recovered was only the “closest” version of Yeh Wang, not Yeh Wang himself.

This is the true difficulty of a lost craft: when one or two generations have been interrupted, later learners, even if they want to learn, cannot find a master to face. Apprenticeship requires two people face to face, with the master correcting mistakes by hand. Make a mistake once, be corrected once, and next time it becomes right. Yeh Wang’s apprenticeship chain broke after his death; Lin Guang-yi could only learn from Yeh Wang’s “works,” not from Yeh Wang.

Weaving Patterns Are Bodily Memory: Yuma Taru’s 34 Years

In 1992, Yuma Taru, whose Chinese name is Huang Ya-li, an Atayal woman born in Tai’an Township, Miaoli in 1963 and then just about to turn 30, began “running through the tribes.” She visited eight Atayal subgroups and more than 100 communities for fieldwork.¹⁹ Beginning in 1996, her husband Baunay Watan spent three years accompanying her to film a documentary, completing K'gi na yaki (Grandmother’s Ramie) in 1999. The film documents her process of learning traditional Atayal weaving techniques from her grandmother.²⁰

Her weaving studio, Lihang Workshop, is located in the Xiangbi community in Miaoli. Along the Da’an River valley, it recruits Indigenous women to learn weaving. Counting from 1992 to 2026, she has been doing this work for 34 years and has successfully reconstructed 400 to 500 pieces of traditional Atayal clothing.²¹

In 2016, the Ministry of Culture recognized her as a preserver of the important traditional craft “Atayal dyeing and weaving: sandwich weaving, pattern-picking techniques, and Atayal woven patterns.” At the time, she was Taiwan’s youngest Living National Treasure, at age 53.²² She told a vocus interviewer:

「文化認同這件事，是你打從心底喜歡它；若它沒有真正進入你的骨骸，那是沒有用的。」²³

「應該用這樣的方式吸引族人，而不是學織布就能做傳統服裝，讓自己更有尊嚴，讓自己知道自己是誰。」²³

The phrase “enter your bones” is worth pausing over. In Han Chinese crafts, apprenticeship is a one-line transmission from master to apprentice. Yuma Taru’s revival of woven patterns is about allowing Atayal woven patterns to enter the bodies of an entire community of women again. What the body learns survives far longer than what a book remembers.

Stone Carving Is Not on the List: Indigenous Crafts Waited 11 Years to Fill the Gap

By the end of 2021, the Ministry of Culture had recognized a cumulative total of 21 items and 29 people as “preservers of important traditional crafts” at the national level, covering seven major categories: ceramics, woodcarving, bamboo weaving, lacquer art, dyeing and weaving, metalwork, and embroidery.²⁴ But there is one obvious absence: stone carving has no national-level preserver.

This is not because Taiwan does not practice stone carving. Hualien’s Yuli, Taitung’s Dulan, Kinmen, and Penghu each have stone-carving traditions, and Indigenous communities’ slate houses and stone daily implements are crafts that have continued for millennia. Yet on the list of “preservers of important traditional crafts,” stone carving still has no separate individual recognition.

What appears on the list, and what does not, is itself a curatorial choice. Taiwan’s cultural heritage preservation system has its own blind spots.

Look more closely at one structural problem: the four Indigenous craft items, Kavalan, two Paiwan items, and Seediq, all entered in the same batch in 2021. When the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act was amended in 2005, Indigenous crafts had almost no national-level registrations. They had to wait until the 2016 amendment, and then another five years until 2021, for four items to be added together. Institutional recognition of Indigenous crafts came at least 11 years later than that of Han Chinese crafts.

Six Hundred Craft Masters, and Those Under 50 Are “Only a Minority”

The arithmetic in 2026 is simple.

As of May 2023, Taiwan had 615 intangible cultural heritage items across six major categories, including both general and important items; 182 of them were in the traditional crafts category.²⁵ National-level “preservers of important traditional crafts” totaled 29 people cumulatively as of 2021, and several more were added after 2022. The “traditional craft master” qualification certified under Ministry of Culture commission has more than 600 holders nationwide.

The Bureau of Cultural Heritage acknowledged in a report that traditional craft masters under 50 are “only a minority.”²⁶ The sentence sounds plain on the surface, but the calculation becomes startling once spread out: if 70% of the 600 are over 50, then 180 under-50 craft masters remain. Averaged across Taiwan’s six major craft categories, ceramics, woodcarving, dyeing and weaving, bamboo weaving, metalwork, and lacquer art, each category has about 30 successors. Spread again across all of Taiwan’s craft settlements, including Yingge, Sanyi, Meinong, Miaoli, Guanmiao, Daxi, Lukang, and Tainan, each settlement may have only single-digit numbers of young craft masters left.

Compare the numbers for Japan’s Living National Treasure system: in July 2025, Japan had 105 living Living National Treasures, and each individually recognized holder received an annual government subsidy of 2 million yen earmarked for training successors, research, and documentation.² Taiwan’s current system has no equivalent-level subsidy scheme for “preservers of important traditional crafts.” Local craft masters mostly have to find their own markets. Cultural-and-creative transformation, collaboration with designers, and entering cultural and creative parks are survival methods contemporary Taiwanese craft masters have actively found for themselves, not something the system provides.

Chen Wan-neng, a Lukang tin artist, third-generation family practitioner, and Living National Treasure recognized in 2011, told a Liberty Times Arts Weekend reporter:

「昨日創新，今日傳統；今日創新，明日傳統。」²⁷

The other side of that sentence is: what does not innovate today will be gone tomorrow.

⚠️ Controversy: The Ministry of Culture and the National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute (NTCRI) have promoted “craft × design” collaborations. Seen positively, brands such as 22 Design Studio, inBlooom, and the Taiwan Tile Museum have given old crafts new markets. Seen negatively, craft masters are treated as a “materials library”: designers use them, while craft masters do not hold IP leadership. Designer Hsiao Ching-yang said: “Good cultural-and-creative work is possible only when there is good culture.”²⁸ But what “good culture” needs is for craft masters to have time to work slowly and teach slowly, not to be rushed into product launches.

Grandfather and Grandson Applying Limewash Together

In December 2022, the year 87-year-old Su Ching-liang was recognized, his grandson Su Chien-ming had just obtained the Ministry of Culture’s traditional craft master qualification. That year, grandfather and grandson took on the repair of the tower roof of the Kaohsiung Museum of History together. The 86-year-old Su Ching-liang went to the worksite to guide the work; the younger Su Chien-ming applied limewash and repaired roof tiles.¹

The centenarian Wang Ching-shuang, born in 1922 and still alive in 2025, creates for five to six hours every day. His sons Wang Hsien-min and Wang Hsien-chih have taken over, and his grandson Wang Chun-wei is the third generation. A three-generation family is a rare craft household in which the apprenticeship chain has not been broken. Wang Hsien-min repeated his father’s words:

「要做好漆藝，就要活久一些。」²⁹

The Taiwanese version of “to make lacquer art well, you have to live a little longer” is “to make the system work well, you have to move quickly.” Taiwan did not write preservation techniques into the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act until 2005, 50 years later than Japan. It did not divide intangible cultural heritage into five major categories until 2016, 13 years later than the 2003 UNESCO Convention. The law now exists, but the number of people still alive who can do the work and teach it is limited. Su Ching-liang died six months after being recognized; Huang Tu-shan died 10 years after recognition. They were all from the generation born between 1925 and 1935. What about the generation born between 1945 and 1965? When apprenticeship collapsed in the 1970s, they were just about to begin as apprentices, and most changed trades.

The settlements remain. The clay remains. Camphor trees will keep growing. Bamboo forests will keep sending up shoots. But apprenticeship requires two people face to face, with the master correcting mistakes by hand. When Su Ching-liang’s grandson applied that coat of limewash on the tower roof, beneath that limewash was one of the few chains in Taiwan’s traditional crafts that had not yet broken.

The longer the list grows, the fewer people remain who can teach. The next time you walk into a cultural-and-creative shop and see that behind each product is the name of a Living National Treasure, behind that name there may still be someone, or there may not.

Further Reading:

• Indigo Dyeing — the full craft history of Sanxia indigo dyeing, from export “blue gold” to its 1996 community revival
• Taiwanese Floral Cloth — the journey of Hakka red floral cloth from Japanese-period factory product to local cultural symbol and identity marker
• Paper Umbrellas — the transformation of Meinong paper umbrellas from everyday rain gear to works of art
• Bamboo Hats — rush weaving and a representative object of Taiwan’s rural craft traditions
• Traditional Festivals and Celebrations — craft as the material carrier of festivals, from Yanshui Beehive Fireworks paper structures to palanquins in Mazu processions

References

Image Sources

This article uses three Wikimedia Commons CC-licensed images, all cached in public/article-images/culture/ to avoid hotlinking source servers:

• Yuanxiangyuan Paper Umbrella, Taiwan 2013-07 — Photo: Outlookxp, 2013-07-20, CC BY-SA 3.0. A group of Hakka oil-paper umbrellas displayed at Meinong Yuanxiangyuan Paper Umbrella Cultural Village, with red, yellow, black, and other colors spread across their canopies; one of the most representative visual archives of Meinong paper umbrella craft.
• Sanyi Wood Sculpture Museum 20100501 — Photo: Anrew0517, 2010-05-01, CC BY-SA 3.0. Exterior of the Sanyi Wood Sculpture Museum in Guangsheng Village, Sanyi Township, Miaoli County, Taiwan’s only public museum devoted to wood sculpture.
• 三峽區歷史文物館內所展示「藍與白系列」藍染服飾 — Photo: Outlookxp, CC BY-SA 4.0. The “Blue and White Series” indigo-dyed garments displayed inside the Sanxia District Historical Relics Hall, showing the contemporary applications of Sanxia indigo dyeing after its 1996 revival.