Takao Railway Museum Audio Guide

Takao Railway Museum: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Takao Railway Museum

   Welcome to Takao Railway Museum, known in Chinese as 舊打狗驛故事館, which translates roughly as the Old Takao Station Story House. You are standing in the Gushan District of Kaohsiung, at what was once the southern end of Taiwan's main railway line, in the old port quarter where the city's modern life began. This building is a former railway station, and a very particular kind of one. It was a freight station, and a famous one: it was once the largest goods station in Taiwan. Today it is described as the best preserved freight station on the island. Instead of tearing the old station down, the city turned it into a museum. Over the next few minutes we will follow its changing names, trace what happened when the passengers left, look at how the present building came to be, and then step out into the neighborhood it helped create. Let's start at the beginning, when this place was called Takao.

2. 02

   From Takao to Kaohsiung: A Station of Many Names

   Stations change names the way cities change their minds, and this one changed several times. It began as Takao Teishajo, meaning Takao stopping place, the southern terminus of the island's main line. Its first station building was made of wood. The starting date is told two ways. One account says the station was founded in 1900, which would make it the first railway station in Kaohsiung. Another places its establishment shortly after the main line opened through in 1908. Either way, this was where the railway met the sea. Then the city itself was renamed. In 1920 Takao became Kaohsiung, and the station became Kaohsiung Station. It kept that name until 1941, when the railway separated passengers from freight. Passenger service moved to a new Kaohsiung Station on the east side of the Love River, in the district of Dagang. The old site was renamed Kaohsiung Port Station and devoted to cargo. That is the moment this place stopped being a gateway for travelers and became a gateway for goods.

3. 03

   Takao Railway Museum: War, Rebuilding and the Present Building

   The building in front of you is not the original. In January 1945, near the end of the Second World War, American forces began heavy and frequent bombing raids on Taiwan. Kaohsiung was an industrial and military center, so it became a target. Kaohsiung Port Station, a vital link between sea and land transport, was left in ruins. In 1947 Taiwan Railway rebuilt the station building, slightly south of where the old one had stood. The new structure used reinforced concrete beams and columns with brick walls, under a wooden truss roof covered in cement tiles. The roof keeps the traditional hip form, sloping on four sides, but the building is plainer and less showy than the one it replaced. That modest postwar station earned recognition later. On the twenty-sixth of February, 2003, it was registered as a historic building of Kaohsiung City. Look at the four-sided roofline and imagine what the more decorative earlier station must have looked like.

4. 04

   Takao Railway Museum and the Birth of Hamasen

   Step outside the station in your mind and the story widens. This building is tied to Hamasen, the old harbor district nearby, which is regarded as the starting point of Kaohsiung's modernization. The name comes from the Japanese word hamasen, meaning beach line. It originally described the branch line running from the port station to the warehouses at the wharves, and later came to mean the whole area from the station westward to the ferry landing. In other words, a railway line gave a neighborhood its name. Freight kept this place busy long after passengers had gone. The old station remained a major hub for goods transport in Taiwan until it stopped operating in 2008. In October 2010 the Kaohsiung City Government's Bureau of Culture adopted the site and turned it into the Takao Railway Story Museum. The aim was to preserve the atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s, when rail freight was at its height, and let visitors feel what a working freight station was like. In October 2017 it took its present name. The museum is run by the Chinese Railway Culture Association on behalf of the Bureau of Culture.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off

   Before you move on, notice how many layers sit in one place. A wooden station called Takao. A city that changed its name. A freight depot at the center of a booming port. A bombed ruin, a plain rebuilt station, and now a museum that preserves the feel of working railway life. As you wander the grounds and the old station space, look for the details that mark a freight station as different from a passenger one, and think about how goods, not travelers, shaped this corner of Kaohsiung. Then walk toward the harbor and the old ferry landing, where the Hamasen district that grew up around this railway spreads out. The station is the first chapter of that neighborhood's story, and the streets beyond it hold the rest.