A new exhibition at the National Museum of Taiwan History in Tainan, “Transcending 1624 — Taiwan and the World,” which opened on Feb. 1, offers a rich and evocative interpretation of Taiwanese history. It begins with the question: “How should 1624 be viewed from 2024?”
It was the year Dutch traders landed on Taiwan’s shores, marking the “integration of Taiwan into the Asian-European trade network,” the exhibition said. The 17th century was when “Taiwan became connected to the rest of the world,” the museum added.
The motif of the exhibition is trade, commerce, cultural exchange, assimilation and adoption. In a word: openness.
Although billed as “Taiwan and the world,” the exhibition is about the world coming to Taiwan, to those in Taiwan at the time and how these interactions and exchanges shaped what Taiwan is today.
The exhibition is pedagogical, but not insistently so — visitors are invited to participate in a journey of discovery and to think about Taiwan, its past and its place in the world. It is an exhibition only possible after the nation’s democratization as the orientation of the exhibition is Taiwan, centering on the place and its people.
This would have been unthinkable during the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) dominated period, where Taiwan was “hollowed out” in the state’s historical narrative and people were told that the single orienting principle of Taiwanese history was Chinese imperial history.
This is not so in this exhibition. China is just one of multiple empires, including the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, British and Japanese, who have turned up on the nation’s shores.
As the academics Steven Lavine and Ivan Karp write in their book Exhibiting Cultures: “Every museum exhibition, whatever its overt subject, inevitably draws on the cultural assumptions and resources of the people who make it.”
Today, the museum draws upon the democratic and globalized ethos of the post-authoritarian and post-Chinese nationalist era. This is an exhibition that is of and for Taiwanese.
Although not explicitly stated, the visitor is left to contemplate the implication of a maritime Taiwan, a Taiwan connected to the world through commerce and exchange. As the military historian Sarah Paine says, throughout global history, maritime powers, like the Dutch, British and the US after World War II, have focused on expanding trade and openness, and in building a universal system of laws so they could trade in safety. On the other hand, continental empires, vulnerable to land invasion and viewing the domination of territory as the primary means to security, prioritized territory over trade expansion, and focused on “carving the world up into spheres of influence, each a legal world unto itself, and often fighting to expand at each other’s expense.”
We live in an era when the open, maritime order built by the allies after World War II is coming under great threat by a resurgence of continental powers like Russia and China. “1624” asks us which order Taiwan is more naturally a part of.
“Nothing of great significance happened in 1587,” the historian Ray Huang wrote in 1587: A Year of No Significance, but in his pen portrait of the Ming court, he shows an empire slowly decaying. Its collapse in 1644 ushered in the expansive continental empire of the Qing Dynasty, altering Chinese history forever. 1587, while a year of no great significance, paradoxically, was a portent of momentous change.
So, too, with Taiwan’s 1624, the year that Dutch seafarers arrived, two decades before the Ming’s collapse. Linking with the world and forging a diverse island culture, the nation began a maritime journey that it still charts today. 1624, this exhibition says, was a year of great significance.
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