David on Formosa

A few days ago I spread out a map of Taipei on the table and looked at all the places I had visited. I noticed that there are still many places in Taipei that I have hardly visited, let alone explored. This morning I took the MRT to Xiaonanmen Station, on the short line that connects Ximen and CKS Memorial Hall. Wandering out of Exit 3 it was a short walk to the Taipei Botanical Gardens (台北植物園).

greenhouse at the Taipei Botanical Gardens

The gardens are fairly small but well organised. If you are in to botany you will find most of the plants labelled with their Chinese names and scientific names.

this guy was looking after the corn

pond in the Taipei Botanical Gardens

Just outside the gardens is the National Museum of History (國立歷史播博物館). The building looks something like a temple. Admission was only NT$20. There were a number of displays including "The Beauty of Taiwanese Classical Furniture" and an exhibition of artwork by Jiang Ming-te. Most of the other displays were historical artifacts from China. This made me wonder exactly which nation the "National" in the museum's history refers to.

National Museum of History

From the museum it was another short walk to the Postal Museum (郵政博物館) on the corner of Chongqing and Nanhai Roads. Again this museum presents a somewhat confused version of Taiwan's history as it flip-flops between telling of the development of the postal system in Taiwan and China. There were a few fascinating insights into Taiwan's history offered by this museum though. The first was that in 1895 when the shortlived Republic of Formosa came into being it established its own postal service. The following quote is from one of the museum's story boards.

To meet the postal purposes as well as to raise funds to pay his soldiers, General Liu established the Postal Administration of the Formosa Republic on July 31, 1895, issuing postage stamps and accepting mail articles from the public. The stamps which adopted the scene known as "Flowing River and Roaring Tiger" as the central design were usually referred to as "single tiger" stamps. On October 19, 1895 General Liu fled Taiwan for mainland China; consequently the Postal Administration of the Formosa Republic was closed after having operated for 81 days.

Flowing River and Roaring Tiger

The other interesting fact was that in 1945 after Japan had lost the war and the ROC government took over the administration of Taiwan they were unable to use stamps from China for the postal service. In order to meet the demand for stamps they used the stamps issued by the Japanese but overprinted them with "Taiwan Province of China".