Beitou Hot Spring Museum Audio Guide

Beitou Hot Spring Museum: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Beitou Hot Spring Museum

   Welcome to the Beitou Hot Spring Museum, known in Chinese as 北投溫泉博物館. It stands in Beitou Park, in Taipei's Beitou District, on the stretch of Zhongshan Road that runs beside the park. Look for a Tudor-style building with a brick and wood façade and a black tile roof, tucked into the greenery. This is no purpose-built museum. It began life as a public hot spring bath in the Japanese colonial era, and it was once the largest public hot spring bathhouse in East Asia. Today it is a municipal historic monument, and it is the place to understand how hot springs shaped Beitou's culture and history. Here is the twist. The building fell into ruin, and it was saved by the people of Beitou themselves, starting with a group of primary school teachers and children. Over the next few minutes we will look at the bathhouse as it was built, the layers of use it lived through, and the remarkable rescue that turned it into the museum you see today.

2. 02

   Beitou Hot Spring Museum: A Bathhouse Built to Impress

   Picture June of 1913. The Taipei prefectural authorities have just finished a public bath, using more than 56 thousand yuan from their public health budget. It was planned under the Taipei prefecture chief, Imura Daikichi, and overseen by Moriyama Matsunosuke, an architect of the Government-General. The model was the hot spring bathhouse at Izusan, in Japan's Shizuoka prefecture. The building was completed on the seventeenth of June, and it was the biggest and most splendid public bath of its time in East Asia. The layout is part of the charm. The entrance is on the second floor, where you find a pavilion and a shoe-changing entrance hall, plus a tatami hall where bathers could cool off after soaking. Stairs lead down to the first floor, where there were separate changing rooms for men and women and a large bath. Important guests even had their own bathroom and rest room on the south side. The main bath mostly served men, which tells you something about who was soaking in those days. It was ringed by round arches and columns, and stained glass set into the side walls flooded the room with colored light.

3. 03

   Beitou Hot Spring Museum: Brick Below, Timber Above

   The building is a blend of Japanese and Western styles, and you can read that mix in its materials. The bath area on the ground floor is built of brick, while the rest area upstairs is timber. The whole site covers around 700 ping, a traditional Taiwanese unit of floor area, and the two-story structure has a Western-looking brick body with a dark tile roof. In 1923, the Japanese Crown Prince Hirohito came to Taiwan, and his itinerary included a visit to the hot springs of Beitou. To prepare, the bathhouse was extended with a second-floor rest room of more than 30 ping, set aside for the royal visitor. Not every detail has survived. The colored glass that once filled the arched windows on the west side of the ground floor had vanished before the restoration, so what you see now is a replica. That is a nice reminder when you look at the glass: it is a careful re-creation, based on the way the building once looked.

4. 04

   Beitou Hot Spring Museum: From Ruin to Community Treasure

   After 1945 the bathhouse took on many roles. At various times it housed a party office, a county council guesthouse, a police substation and a community service center, and it was sometimes rented out for wedding banquets. Eventually the hot spring trade in Beitou declined and the institutions moved out. The last police station left in February of 1988. The empty building was then occupied by residents as housing, some rooms were rented out as a film prop store, and the structure deteriorated quickly. Then, in 1994, teachers and pupils from Beitou Primary School, working on a local-heritage project, stumbled upon what looked like a ruin and realized it was the old public bath. Their petitions at first went nowhere, but the teachers and students organized signatures, local people joined in, and in 1997 the Ministry of the Interior designated the building a monument. It is now a municipal monument. The Taipei city government restored it for more than 111 million New Taiwan dollars, drawing on old photographs and the memories of local elders. It reopened as the Beitou Hot Spring Museum on the thirty-first of October, 1998, as the first museum in Taiwan saved through community action. Workers even found original hot spring plumbing during the work, including water-dividing pipes, ceramic pipes and the base stones of the old baths.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off

   The exhibitions inside tell the story of Beitou's hot springs, starting with how hot springs work, the mineral known as hokutolite and the volcanic landscape behind it all. The ground floor and the upper floor each hold part of that story, so it is worth following the building from level to level. Before you leave, try a small exercise. Find the entrance on the upper level and then walk down toward the old bath, as bathers once did. Look up at the arches, and think about the primary school children who first found this place in 1994. Outside, Beitou Park is all around you, and the Plum Garden, another historic building, is only a short walk away. Everything nearby carries its own part of the hot spring story, so let your curiosity lead you on.