For this report, we spent two days visiting the architecture featured as part of the “Tainan 400” celebrations, marking 400 years since the city's founding. On the first day we viewed buildings from the period of the Kingdom of Tungning (1661–1683), which ruled part of Taiwan in the name of the Ming Dynasty, and from the era of Qing-Dynasty rule (1683–1895).
We spent the second day seeing structures from the Japanese era (1895–1945), and the modern-style buildings constructed since the end of World War II. This journey through time gave us a clear outline of Tainan’s 400 years of history and culture.
Fu Chao-ching, professor emeritus in the Department of Architecture at National Cheng Kung University, who recently received a National Cultural Award, presented by then-premier Chen Chien-jen, tells us about Fort Zeelandia (now known as Anping Old Fort), whose construction beginning in 1624 is seen as the starting point of Tainan’s 400-year history. He begins by debunking some longstanding misconceptions.
Firstly, he says, many organizations use the observation tower at Anping Old Fort as the key visual symbol of Fort Zeelandia, and say that it was built by the Dutch in 1624. However, the tower was in fact built by the Taiwanese in 1975. Secondly, the fort’s Chinese name includes the word cheng (城), meaning a walled city, but it would be more correct to call it a bao (堡), meaning fortress. (Please see the article “A Tale of Two Citadels in Dutch Tainan.”)
Walking a Ming-Dynasty trail
Fu Chao-ching, who has been a student of Taiwan architectural history for more than three decades, notes that the period of the Kingdom of Tungning (1661–1683), founded by Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga), a Ming Dynasty loyalist who drove the Dutch out of Taiwan, was very important for Tainan. This is because no other city in Taiwan has any buildings from that era, meaning that the history of architecture in Taiwan starts in Tainan.
“Taiwan’s first temple dedicated to the Jade Emperor, its earliest Earth God temple, its first temple for the worship of Xuantian Shangdi, and its first Confucius temple were all in Tainan. If you look at these temples’ locations on the map, you can see that today there are still many small streets linking them together. Interestingly, these were paths that ordinary people walked back in those times,” says Fu.
A composite history of Tainan
Fu notes that as you walk through the city’s small streets, when you get to a certain point you can simultaneously see spaces from three different historical eras. He repeatedly says: “This is what’s interesting about Tainan.”
The place he is talking about is at the intersection of Minquan Road and Gongyuan Road, a location known to Tainan residents as Jiuling (Eagle Hill). At 14 meters above sea level, it was once Tainan’s most elevated spot. It is home to the Beiji Temple, built under the Kingdom of Tungning; the Temple of Heaven (Taiwan’s first Tiangong Temple), erected in the Qing Dynasty; and the former Tainan Weather Observatory, constructed in 1898 under Japanese rule. All three structures were deliberately located here because of its height.
Qing-Dynasty government offices
During the Qing Dynasty, the Taiwan Yamen (an office of the Fujian provincial government), the Taiwan Prefecture administration, and the Taiwan County government were all located in Tainan.
Besides the provincial, prefectural and local levels of government, even the Tainan Confucius Temple and City God (Chenghuang) Temple also had “higher” and “local” jurisdictions. With temples in those days also serving as centers of learning, the Confucius Temple had its “prefectural school” and “county school,” while there were both prefectural and county level temples dedicated to Chenghuang. Fu Chao-ching says that even more interestingly, back then the prefectural and county level yamen (government offices) were both normally built next to a City God Temple. Given that in those days there was no separate judicial branch, legal cases were heard in the prefectural yamen, and if interrogations in a case yielded no result by day, at night they would be continued in the Chenghuang Temple. This added a level of mystification—the supposed intercession of otherworldly beings—that recalls the cases of Judge Bao.
Besides the civil administrative system, the Qing Dynasty also had two important military offices in Taiwan. The first was the Taiwan military headquarters. The second, the maritime defense command, which had duties similar to today’s Coast Guard Administration and Maritime & Port Bureau, was located near the UIJ Hotel and Hostel.
Japanese-era new-style architecture
The appearance of new-style architecture was a defining feature of the era of Japanese rule. Of these buildings, the most representative is the former Tainan Prefectural Hall, located near today’s Tang Te-chang (Thng Tik-Tsiong) Memorial Park. Constructed in 1916, it now houses the National Museum of Taiwan Literature. The city hall and police headquarters were located next to it, while important commercial enterprises developed around this administrative area. With the opening of the Tainan Canal in 1926, the inauguration of the Hayashi Department Store on Zhongzheng Road in 1932, and the completion of the Tainan Train Station in 1936, this area, located at the intersection of waterways and major highways, was the most bustling part of Tainan back in the day.
Both the Hayashi Department Store and the former Tainan police headquarters have beige-colored tiled facades. Many people explain this fact by saying that this was a camouflage color, chosen to protect the buildings from US air raids in World War II. However, Fu counters that when these buildings were completed, in 1932 and 1931 respectively, the war had not yet broken out, so how could the architects foresee that they should use camouflage coloring? The real reason, he believes, was simply that it was fashionable.
The color became trendy following the Great Kantō Earthquake, which struck Japan in 1923, during which most of the brick buildings in southeastern Japan were toppled. Only Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, designed by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, did not collapse, because he used a temblor-resistant “raft foundation” design. The Imperial Hotel happened to also have a beige tiled facade, and this became popular along with raft foundations. Structures like the Tainan police headquarters (now Building 1 of the Tainan Art Museum) and the Hayashi Department Store, both designed by Sutejiro Umezawa, were subsequently erected as steel-reinforced concrete buildings with warm beige-colored tiled facades.
International Style buildings
After World War II, during the 1950s, school buildings all across Taiwan were mostly built with US aid. With Tainan’s National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) having the only department of architecture in the whole country at that time, International Style buildings began to appear, designed by US consultants and architecture department faculty. Classic examples of International Style buildings include the old library at NCKU and the former Tainan Telecommunications Bureau building. In contrast to traditional architecture, which emphasized mass, symmetry, and centrality, the International Style emphasized volume and centrifugation (outward movement). Its vocabulary includes steel-framed glass windows that offer transparency, floating staircases that suggest centrifugation and seem to hang in the air, and asymmetric spaces and forms.
Modern public buildings
The old houses movement
Fu Chao-ching suggests that the movement for reuse of old buildings, promoted since 1999 by the Foundation of Historic City Conservation and Regeneration, should be considered another important part of the Tainan 400 event. “The movement doesn’t aim to freeze all old structures as they were and make them into static historical and cultural heritage, but rather seeks to turn them into spaces used in daily life which can generate new memories, so that each old building can have a future.” Fu says that similarly, Tainan 400 is not about simply looking back into the past, but also about looking forward to the next 400 years, and about how Tainan can be rendered new and different.
