Written by Shao-Ji Yao
Image credit: Book cover of the study on Wilhelm Joest’s stay in Taiwan in 1880, along with a catalogue of his Formosa collection now stored in Berlin and a Chinese translation of his travelogue. Provided by the author.
Introduction
As a Germanist, my first scholarly passion was the German Middle Ages. Yet in 2014, an unexpected commission from the National Museum of Taiwan History in Tainan led me in an entirely new direction. I was asked to translate the Geschichte der Insel Formosa (History of the Island of Formosa) (1897), authored by the German-Jewish historian Ludwig Riess (1861-1928), who at the time was serving at the Imperial University of Tokyo in Japan, into Chinese.
Image credit: Book cover of the annotated Chinese translation of Ludwig Riess’s “History of the Island of Formosa” (1897), published in 2019. Provided by the author.
This translation project opened my eyes to the manifold foreign influences that had shaped Taiwan before the onset of Japanese colonial rule. I was particularly fascinated to discover that, from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, numerous Germans and other German-speaking individuals were active in the Far East. Their engagement with the region was driven not only by commercial ambitions and geopolitical considerations, but also by a profound scholarly interest in this distant island situated at the crossroads of Southeast and East Asia. They left behind a remarkably diverse body of literature on Taiwan and the surrounding islands. Several of them also collected scientific specimens and transported them back to Europe, contributing to fields such as botany, zoology, geology, and, last but not least, ethnology.
A reference in Riess’s aforementioned historical work drew my attention to Wilhelm Joest (1852–1897), an ethnologist born in Cologne, who visited Taiwan in the summer of 1880. Through him, I encountered, for the first time, an ethnographic collection on Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples, now stored at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. During my subsequent visits to Berlin, I discovered that, in addition to Joest’s Collection, the museum’s Department of South and Southeast Asia also holds other objects from Taiwan. These are utensils from various indigenous communities in Taiwan that have made their way to Berlin over the past century and a half.
The provenance of these holdings has since become the central focus of my research. I seek to understand why these objects were brought to Germany, who collected them, and under what historical circumstances they were acquired. Equally important is tracing their subsequent trajectories by how these artefacts were catalogued, interpreted, displayed and preserved after entering the museum’s collections.
The framework: Adolf Bastian’s ethnographic Ambition
The Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin (Das Königliche Museum für Völkerkunde) was founded in 1873. In 2000, it was renamed the Ethnological Museum in Berlin (hereinafter referred to as EMB) and has been integrated into the Humboldt Forum since 2020. When the museum was founded, its first director, Prof. Adolf Bastian (1826-1905), aimed to establish a “universal archive of humanity”. For him, it was particularly important to archive “prehistoric cultures,” which often had no written records and were in danger of dying out after contact with “civilisations.” His method of documenting the living conditions of primitive peoples was to collect their utensils. By comparing different cultures and analysing their similarities and differences, he hoped to create a comprehensive history of humanity. For this purpose, Bastian used his scientific networks and private connections worldwide. Numerous collecting activities took place directly or indirectly through him until he died in 1905.
A consideration of the eight major voyages that Adolf Bastian undertook over the course of half a century, beginning in 1850, reveals a striking predilection for South and Southeast Asia, regions in which he resided on five separate occasions for extended periods. He was near Taiwan at least twice. During his first trip around the world in 1854, he passed through the Taiwan Strait for the first time on his way from America to Hong Kong. At the beginning of June 1864, after staying in Manila, he was once again near the island of Formosa when he set off for Japan. In the fifth volume of his travelogue Die Völker des östlichen Asien (The Peoples of East Asia), he compiled information from various sources about the island, which he never visited during his lifetime. Nevertheless, it can be assumed that the variously populated island at the intersection of Southeast and East Asia was an indispensable piece of the puzzle for his ambitious project. Besides the indigenous peoples of Taiwan, who belong to the Austronesian language family, the Han Chinese have settled there in large waves since the 17th century. For him, the former belonged to the so-called primitive peoples, whose cultures were of particular interest to European ethnologists. But the Chinese culture, which had not yet been integrated into Eurocentric world history, was also to be documented.
Image credit: Cabinet Taiwan / Botel Tobago (today Lanyu) in SSOA’s storage of EMB. Photo credit by the author.
Today, objects from both groups in Taiwan are kept at the EMB. Basically, Chinese objects, including Hakka ones, are currently stored in the North and East Asia Department, while Austronesian ones are in the South and Southeast Asia Department (SSOA). With the support of the former curator of the department, Dr Roland Platz, I spent a total of five weeks in Berlin in January and July 2019 to conduct a thorough investigation in collaboration with the storage keeper, Mr Claudius Kamps. This revealed that the SSOA department holds approximately 450 objects and about 70 historical photographs from Taiwan.
To collect ethnographic materials, not only explorers but also businesspeople living abroad and civil servants in the foreign service were engaged. The collection activities in Taiwan under Bastian’s influence continued for some time after he died in 1905. Against this backdrop, numerous collections from Taiwan were created until the first decade of the 20th century, contributing to Bastian’s fundamental concept of “psychic unity of mankind”. After the Second World War, it was not until the late 1960s that a few more collections were added to the museum. Overall, the Formosa Collection in Berlin can be said to have a 150-year history, which can be divided into three eras according to the History of Taiwan:
- From the 1860s to 1895
- From 1895 to around 1910
- After the Second World War
As far as can be ascertained, the oldest objects from Taiwan were acquired in 1871. However, they had already been collected around 1860 during the Prussian expedition to East Asia (1859-1862). Around this time, the Chinese Empire was forced to open several ports to international trade under the Treaty of Tientsin (天津條約) in 1858. Among others, four ports in Taiwan were affected. Foreign companies, Christian missionaries, and consular institutions have been officially established on the island ever since. In this period, several acquisitions took place in the 1880s.
The cession of Taiwan to Japan in 1895, following the Treaty of Shimonoseki (馬關條約) after the First Sino-Japanese War, marked a turning point. Travel conditions changed after the handover of rule: Western travellers were always accompanied or monitored thereafter. Improved infrastructure made travel to the interior of the country more accessible, which in turn influenced relations among the Chinese, the Japanese and the indigenous peoples. Since taking over the island, the Japanese government had gradually restricted the rights that the Chinese had generously granted to foreigners. The last acquisition before World War II was on the occasion of the visit of the Taiwan-based Japanese anthropologist and archaeologist to Berlin in 1927. But the donation can no longer be linked to Bastian’s tradition.
The acquisitions made in the aftermath of the Second World War are of an altogether different character. A considerable number of objects were obtained from antiquarian dealers or at auction, often selected for their aesthetic appeal. The collection thus comprises, inter alia, elaborately carved house panels and ancestral pillars—objects whose transport would have entailed prohibitive costs for earlier generations of collectors. Brunhilde Körner, former Director of the East Asian Department, spent three months in Taiwan in 1968, primarily to collect utensils used by Chinese communities, as access to mainland China was severely restricted during the Cultural Revolution. During her stay, she also acquired a small number of objects from Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, although these were largely items produced for the tourist market.
Note: This section is an excerpt from my article in German (“Adolf Fischers Formosa-Sammlung im Ethnologischen Museum zu Berlin”), which will be published in the upcoming issue of the Baessler Archiv (Vol. 71, 2026).
Exhibition
Following my in-depth research, I am currently working with the National Taiwan Museum to organise an exhibition in Taipei featuring items on loan from Berlin. In November 2023, the Research Center for European Taiwan Historical Materials （歐洲臺灣史資料中心）, which I founded at National Chengchi University, the National Taiwan Museum (NTM), and the Ethnological Museum of Berlin co-signed a Memorandum of Understanding establishing a framework for collaborative research and future exhibitions. In September 2024, the then Director of NTM, Shih-You Hung, led a delegation to Berlin to visit the EMB and the Humboldt Forum. During this visit, both parties reached a preliminary agreement to organise a special exhibition at NTM in the first half of 2027. Subsequently, on 5 June 2025, the former Director of the EMB, Prof. Dr Lars-Christian Koch, the current Director of NTM, Mr Teng-Chin Chen, and I jointly signed a Letter of Intent at the NTM, formally confirming that NTM would curate the 2027 exhibition, which will feature Indigenous Taiwanese collections from the EMB.
This exhibition centres on Indigenous Taiwanese collections from the EMB, re-examined through a collaborative, transnational curatorial framework. Collected primarily between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these objects represent some of the earliest ethnographic acquisitions made by Western collectors in Taiwan following the opening of its ports. They not only reflect the material culture of Indigenous communities but also reveal how Taiwan was historically constructed within transcolonial scholarly networks.
Image credit: Working on documents in the storage of EMB. Photo provided by the author.
The exhibition is structured around three key perspectives. First, it reconstructs the history of collecting by tracing collectors’ movements and the formation of knowledge between Taiwan and Germany. Second, it highlights the objects themselves, including rare and sometimes unique pieces such as banana-fibre garments and deerskin paintings, emphasising their cultural and historical significance. Third, it foregrounds reconnection with source communities. Through field research, Indigenous language interpretation, and contemporary artistic responses, these objects are reactivated as part of living cultural practices.
Rather than presenting a static historical display, the exhibition positions the museum as a space for dialogue – bringing together past and present, Europe and Taiwan, and multiple perspectives in a shared process of interpretation. As the Austrian historian Andreas Grigorowicz (1978) said:
“Every object in an ethnographic collection has two stories. One is connected to the ethnic group that produced the object, while the other is the story of its acquisition and concerns the fate of the object after it came into European possession and lost its original function.”
In collaboration with Taiwan’s indigenous community, we intend to use the planning exhibition to tell a third story, which aims to recover the lost connections between artefacts that have fallen into foreign hands and their original owners.
Dr Shao-Ji Yao (姚紹基) returned to Taiwan after completing his master’s and doctoral degrees in Germanistik at the University of Trier and has held a professorship in German Studies in the Department of European Languages and Cultures at National Chengchi University in Taipei since 2007. His current research focuses on German-Taiwanese relations up to the early 20th century. Within this context, he is particularly interested in German-speaking travellers in Taiwan and the German and European communities residing there. In addition to various writings on this topic, he is working on historical photographs and ethnographic collections currently held in museums in German-speaking countries.
This article was published as part of the special issue on Polyphonic Curation: Museum Exhibitions and Indigenous Dialogue.