Facing Taiwan, whose local customs and culture were different from mainland China or Japan, the authorities often needed to invent or try new ways that they could not implement in the respective metropoles. The history of the lumber industry in Chiayi city exemplifies the relationship between the utilization of the forest, the construction of infrastructures, and urban development.Īs a borderland of empires, Taiwan was treated as the laboratory of innovation policies and technologies. Chiayi won a reputation as a prosperous “lumber city” at the foot of Alishan. However, the dynamics between the city and the new industry has been neglected in current scholarship, which has concentrated on investigating the mountains and the colonial management of the forest resources.¹ When the lumber industry was introduced into Chiayi, it created new economic infrastructures, such as processing stations, a transfer station, and auction markets for the processed trees. Its establishment signaled the beginning of the golden age of forestry in Taiwan. In Chiayi, the opening of the Chiayi Sawmill and the introduction of the modern lumber industry changed the spatial and economic landscape of the city. As Japan took over Taiwan after 1895, in the following fifty years, Taiwan underwent a dramatic transformation in every aspect of society, particularly in economy and the utilzation of space. Since then, it has been abandoned, and the memories associated with it have faded away from public memory.Ĭhiayi was once a walled city and one of the significant centers of rice production in Taiwan. In 1963, when the Nationalist government changed its forest policies from utilization to preservation, the sawmill was shut down. During its heyday, it was even praised as “the Greatest in East Asia” with the latest equipment and largest forest farm – Alishan (阿里山). Established in 1914, it was the first modern sawmill with the latest machines and technologies imported from the United States to Taiwan. The Chiayi Sawmill 嘉義製材所 was one of the historical buildings under discussion. The movement, mainly directed by the local government with support from Chiayi residents, aimed to rediscover Chiayi’s heritage against the backdrop of urban renovation. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the conservation movement for old buildings in Chiayi 嘉義 in Central Taiwan reached an unprecedented climax in history.
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