History ＼ Cultural Heritage

On Saturday, October 20, 2018, we gathered at Shilin MRT Station in the early morning. Our teachers took us to Songshan Cultural and Creative Park to visit exhibition which calls "Power Infrastructure as Landscape - Taiwan Power Cultural Heritage".

In the beginning, we couldn’t help to go up the top of curved ramp at the entrance. We definitely could see many texts were up and down along the curved ramp. That was a description about each name and electricity generated of hydropower plants in Taiwan. We didn't know that the power generation in Dajiaxi is the largest in all hydropower plants until seeing it. We also didn’t know about those insulators with special shapes after the staffs explained it to us.

Retired director of Dajiaxi power plant, Yu-Pang Cheng, came to introduce Taiwan power development and said seriously that people who worked in the electricity industry work very hard, so that everyone lived in Taiwan had a convenient life, and Taiwan industry development also needed their support because electricity belonged one of public constructions which should be planned five to twenty years earlier than society develops. It would take nearly a decade for a power plant to operate from preparation to completion.

The exhibition site mainly introduces hydropower generation, which is the earliest major power generation method in Taiwan. There are five areas of exhibition: “River Landscape”, “Water Landscape”, “Public Landscape”, “Mountain Landscape”, and “Memory Landscape”. There are many old photos on the scene including some design drawings, so we can understand the power development process of this century. There is a fake tunnel to make people go through and know how to tunnel to get the hydropower by commentary boards and documentary videos. At that time,

we found someone demonstrating the climb of the tower. Unfortunately, this experience event was limited to 12 years old, so we only watched the children climb. However, in the past, it was really tough for the staff to build an iron tower and pull the line in the mountains because of conducting a transmission line across the Central Mountain Range.

The most impressive area was memory area which were many old devices like electric meter, camera, telephone, doorplate, etc. Especially, the typewriter was really surprised us because the ancient had to pick the word one by one and line them up. It is really worthwhile to get close to see these old meaningful things in movie scene, and watch the documentary to know history from old people. Finally, we were happy to have the postcards with memorial seals on from the organizer and satisfied to go home.