By KHT Staff. Images via Kaohsiung City Cultural Affairs Bureau.
KAOHSIUNG — Kaohsiung will mark Taiwan’s National Heritage Day this weekend with exhibitions, walking activities and an immersive historical game, while highlighting efforts to give older buildings new functions instead of preserving them only as static monuments.
This year’s local program is titled “A Dialogue Between Old Bottles and New Wine: A Kaleidoscope of Takao Heritage Revitalization.” Takao is an earlier name for Kaohsiung.
National Heritage Day will be observed across Taiwan on Saturday, Sept. 19, and Sunday, Sept. 20. Kaohsiung’s activities are concentrated around Hamasen (哈瑪星), one of the city’s earliest modern neighborhoods.
Eight sessions of an interactive game titled “Time-Travel Tea Dream” will be held at the Former British Consulate at Takao (打狗英國領事館). Participants will explore the site while interacting with actors portraying sailors, diplomats, merchants and missionaries from the port’s 19th-century history.
The Former Patriotic Women’s Association Hall (原愛國婦人會館) is hosting an exhibition examining Hamasen’s development as a center of transportation, trade and urban life. Visitors can also collect stamps and illustrated cards at participating heritage sites around the neighborhood.
The activities form part of a larger Cultural Affairs Bureau effort to show how historic buildings can remain useful after restoration.
Among the examples promoted by the city is the North Signal Tower (北號誌樓), a rare surviving railway signal building with its original equipment. Its two-story design, combining a brick ground floor with a wooden upper level and large windows, followed an industrial model developed in Britain and later adopted at Kaohsiung Port.
Nearby Japanese-era red-brick rowhouses on Shinhamacho 1-chome (新濱町一丁目連棟紅磚街屋) now accommodate an “Old House Clinic.” The service brings together building inspection, architectural design, construction, and reuse expertise to help owners preserve aging properties
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Other adaptive-reuse projects include the former Formosa Plastics Kaohsiung factory, now being developed as the Formosa Plastics Wang Brothers Park (台塑王氏昆仲公園), and the former Banana Shed (香蕉棚) beside Pier No. 3. The latter once stored bananas during the height of Taiwan’s postwar agricultural export trade and has since been converted into offices for technology companies.
The Kaohsiung Butokuden (高雄市武德殿), completed in 1924 as a martial arts hall for police, offers a different model. After restoration, it returned to its original purpose and now hosts kendo instruction and Taiwan-Japan cultural exchanges.
Details and registration information for the weekend program are available through the Kaohsiung Cultural Heritage website. Some activities require advance registration and have limited places.
