Taipei – Japan-era “Preserved” Housing
Posted: August 18th, 2009 | 1 Comment »Up a back street of Taipei near the Normal University and the Shida district are some ‘preserved’ houses that formerly belonged to the Forestry Department. The local government seems pretty proud of the ‘preservation’ though most of them looked pretty gutted though some appear lived in still. The gardens are rather overgrown and some in a state of disrepair. So if this is Taipei city government’s definition of preservation I’d hate to see what happens when they totally don’t give a s**t.
Here’s some photos of the houses anyway, as much as you can get given the high walls and lack of access.
The Council for Cultural Affairs is OK at this kind of thing, but the Taipei City Government is, well, less thoughtful. For example, take the recent stoush over their plans to rip up a large number of old trees – thin on the ground in Taipei – to build, wait for it, a park (which had some tenuous connection with Hakka culture, I think). Cities in the south have generally done a better job on this than Taipei.
The resolution of heritage cases are all very complex (many old houses are owned by families who live elsewhere and don’t want to spend for the upkeep) but I think it not coincidental that under a KMT city government these relics, especially, of Taiwan’s pre-1945 career as Japan’s ‘fifth island’ are being allowed to quietly fall apart. This is in marked contrast to the Japan heritage fever that swept the island from about the mid-1990s under the more ‘bentu’-minded government of President Lee Teng-hui (and of course then-Mayor of Taipei City, Chen Shui-bian). When the KMT first drafted heritage regulations in 1984, they set the time frames specifically to omit any Japanese-era structures, though they were since amended.
Jeremy Taylor has written a series of very good academic articles about the politics of ‘heritage’ in Taiwan, which I highly recommend Paul.