Keelung Fort Commander's Official Residence Audio Guide

Keelung Fort Commander's Official Residence: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Keelung Fort Commander's Official Residence

   Welcome to one of Keelung's quietest survivors. You are in Zhongzheng District, in the port city of Keelung on Taiwan's northern coast. Here stands a Japanese-style house built in 1931, during the period of Japanese rule, as a residence connected to the Keelung fortress command. Keelung was a harbor that armies cared about, and this house belongs to that story. It was never a palace or a grand fortress. It is a single-family Japanese dormitory-style building, a home for a military household, and it shows how people lived around the machinery of a port defense. Over the next few minutes we will follow the house through its life. It served as a commander's residence, then as a rented family home known as Li's house. It was nearly lost as walls fell in, and it was then painstakingly rebuilt. Today it stands as a municipal historic site open to visitors, and you are walking into a place that almost vanished.

2. 02

   A Home Beside a Fortress Command

   To understand this house, start with the fortress it served. In 1896 the Japanese army set up a fortress command post in the Dashawan area of Keelung. In 1909 it was renamed the Keelung Fortress Command, and it became the highest military command center in northern Taiwan during the Japanese period. A command like that needed housing nearby. During the 1920s and 1930s the colonial government developed the Dashawan area, around today's Zhongzheng Road and the Zhongzheng District Office site, and built a group of official houses that served as dormitories for Japanese scholars and officials. After the city was reorganized in 1931, this group of residences was given a new address designation. This house was built in that same year, 1931, as the residence of the Keelung fort commander. The fortress headquarters building itself is a separate structure, begun in 1928 and designed by the technician Shinichi Asai. Think of the headquarters as the office and this house as the place where the commander went home at night.

3. 03

   From War's Aftermath to Li's House

   The story turns in 1945, when Taiwan passed from Japan to the Republic of China. The original commander's residence had been bombed, so the Fortification Command took over this house and used it as a temporary Commander's Residence. A stopgap became a long chapter. Later, the building was rented by the Li family, and that is how it picked up its nickname, Li's house. It is a very ordinary kind of afterlife for a military building: families moved in, rooms were adapted, and over decades the house was altered and added to. The rear facade in particular changed because of added structures, though the house still carries the character of Keelung's local architecture and the pattern of military dormitories. Then came the long decline. Over the years, large areas collapsed, and the house became little more than a few broken walls. That is the starting point to keep in mind when you look at the sound timbers and clean lines around you now.

4. 04

   Rebuilding a Ruin

   The rescue was gradual. The house was declared a municipal historic site on the seventh of December, 2006. In 2016 the building and its land, which had been under the Ministry of National Defense, were transferred to the Keelung City Cultural Affairs Bureau. In 2017 the city folded the house into a project called The Tagana Story, an effort to bring historic scenes across greater Keelung back to life under the Ministry of Culture's Reconstruction of Historical Scenes program. More than 37 million New Taiwan dollars went into restoration, aiming to recreate the Zen-like, elegant Japanese residential space of the past. Restoration work ran from November 2018 and was scheduled to finish in 2020. The program also leans on virtual and augmented reality to deepen the visitor experience. While you are here, look at how light moves through the corridors. A local heritage figure, Chan I-chung, suggests reading Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows to appreciate the play of light and shadow in Japanese architecture. A prize-winning poem about fishermen, Zeng Yuanyao's Railroad Alley Days, is inscribed on a window pane: Waves are their sky, and trawler deck their land.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off

   This house is one stop on a larger walk. As you wander, notice how the house sits within a neighborhood once shaped by a fortress command. Ask yourself which parts feel like a family home and which feel like a military posting. And when you pass the window with the poem, pause to read it against the harbor city beyond. There is plenty more to uncover in the streets around you, from the stories of the port to the other official houses of the old Dashawan district. Let your curiosity pick the next turn.