Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract/Objectives

In 2025, the 130th anniversary of the 1895 Yiwei War marks more than a commemorative year; it offers a crucial opportunity to re-examine Taiwan’s modern history. The Yiwei War was a turning point in East Asia and a major movement in which people in Taiwan resisted foreign rule, symbolizing resilience and a growing sense of collective consciousness in the face of a powerful invading force. It stands as a key milestone in Taiwan’s anti-Japanese resistance and provides an essential foundation for understanding how contemporary Taiwanese culture and identity have taken shape. Importantly, the war not only ignited mobilization and networks within Taiwan, but also intersected with the geopolitical rivalry among China, Japan, and other imperial powers. Hsinchu (Zhuke City), where National Tsing Hua University is located, served as a strategic hub in the Hsinchu–Miaoli campaigns and a critical battlefield in the greater Hsinchu region. The anniversary creates an excellent moment for this course to draw on collections held by the Tsing Hua University museum, library, and local historical archives, and to observe renewed scholarly dialogue—both in Taiwan and internationally—about this pivotal era, deepening collective understanding of East Asian history. By centering a locally grounded yet transnational historical conversation, the course aims to cultivate young scholars who can connect Taiwan history with international historiography. Within the university curriculum, commemorating the Yiwei War’s 130th anniversary serves as a pathway to professional training in Taiwan Studies: surveying and reflecting on historical sources, selecting and closely reading materials for cultural and educational transmission, utilizing public cultural institutions, and designing exhibition proposals and heritage-based learning journeys.

Results/Contributions

This course is structured in three stages. The first stage focuses on reading historical materials, including but not limited to war diaries, battlefield photographs, and ukiyo-e prints related to war. The second stage introduces curatorial practice and applies key literature on public natural history and related approaches to exhibition-making. The third stage centers on literary and historical studies of the 1895 Yiwei Anti-Japanese War. In this teaching experiment, the main question is how to increase the proportion of student-directed learning and, based on that shift, recalibrate the selection and workload of course materials.


Accordingly, I reduced the overwhelming number of knowledge-heavy units and expanded activities such as field investigations, building online maps, and museum internships. Students were given greater autonomy to decide their focal topics. I also prioritized materials that can serve as starting points for debate rather than final conclusions. Finally, instead of requiring only academic papers, I asked students to produce practice-oriented outputs: a local teaching plan integrating Yiwei history, a docent handbook and curatorial revision proposal for a local museum, or even an exhibition plan for family artifacts.


Students came from diverse backgrounds, including MA students in Taiwanese literature, K–12 teachers, and descendants of the Zheng family in Hsinchu. The results were encouraging: MA students still wrote theses, but examined how local elites engaged dynamically with Yiwei literati, the Japanese government, and the Qing state. Teachers designed lesson plans to help their pupils “dialogue” with history. One PhD student, a Zheng descendant, developed a curatorial proposal that reimagined family artifacts as carriers of historical record and memory. During a battlefield field trip—joined by Professors Chang Chi-ying and Hsu Shu-hsien—we visited Yiwei sites in Hukou, Xinpu, and Xiangshan. Through students’ self-led tours, we saw insights rarely possible in the classroom: they could explain the immediacy of clashes, shifting front lines, and strategic planning. As a result, the course moved beyond textbook learning to include cultural products and alternative thinking enabled by translation across different media.


Keywords

History of Taiwan Literature；Taiwan social issues；the Process of Literary Creation；Taiwan history；Contemporary Thought

Contact Information

劉柳書琴
qabus@gapp.nthu.edu.tw