Technology is making it possible for filmmakers to give audiences an acute sense of being present while a historical incident was happening.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE TAIWAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HISTORY
Visitors to Tainan’s West Central District might overlook the Judicial Museum, despite its distinct features that include a gabled portico, Tainan’s only mansard roof, with oeil-de-boeuf windows, and a spired, baroque dome.
The authorities did a fine job of recapturing the building’s original grandeur, reflected by its recognition as the winner in the preservation and maintenance category at the 4th National Cultural Heritage Preservation Awards in 2017.
With its ionic columns, adorned with foliate scroll reliefs, and the coffered skylight ceiling, the lobby is certainly exquisite. And alongside the main building’s eastern wing, shaded gardens offer contemplative refuge from the hubbub beyond. In one old courtroom, there’s an unmistakably Taiwanese photo opp for dressing up in judges’ gowns or bailiffs’ uniforms.
However, with so much competition — including Confucius Temple and the Tainan Arts Museum across the street — this fine Japanese colonial relic is probably best saved for a loose-end, rainy day. Aside from a rather staid exhibition on the Judges Association of the Republic of China, there’s a dearth of English-language material. The volunteer guides are friendly and helpful in explaining the basics, but the building’s most fascinating historical associations remain largely invisible.
A peek around the capacious Courtroom Number Three gives no indication of the monumental events that unfolded there between August and October 1915, striking a mortal gavel blow to Taiwanese hopes of casting off the Japanese imperial yoke. For it was here in that room — then known as Courtroom Number One of the Tainan District Court — that more than 1,400 people were tried for their role in the Tapani Incident, the last armed majority Han Chinese uprising against Japanese rule.
The imperial armies scatter death in their wake,
Corpses clog the streams, valleys turn blood red.
These lines (in translation) from a 21-year-old poet and doctor, Lai Ho, later renowned as the father of modern Taiwanese literature, captured the mood in the wake of the rebellion and subsequent crackdown that left over 1,000 people dead.
The trials were conducted by ad hoc temporary courts under the Bandit Punishment Law of 1898, which gave Taiwan’s Government-General judicial carte blanche. At least 866 people were sentenced to death by the Tainan court, though most sentences were commuted to lengthy prison time, with 135 people eventually executed.
“As the verdicts were read and translated, some defendants remained steadfastly silent, while others mumbled to themselves,” writes Paul Katz, a Distinguished Research Fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Modern History, in When Valleys Turned Blood Red, his account of the Tapani Incident. The book’s title derives from Lai Ho’s 1918 poem. As Katz describes the scene: “Some bolder ones tried to approach the bench in protest, while others wept and pleaded for mercy. The guards promptly ordered all the convicted men and women to be silent and herded them out of the courtroom.”
These emotional scenes are brought to life with remarkable realism through Return to the First Court – Tapani Incident Trial, a short virtual reality film in the VR History Recreated exhibition at the National Taiwan Museum of History in Tainan’s Annan District, around 10km north of the Judicial Museum. The film was premiered at the Judicial Museum in 2023 in the very room where the events occurred. Using an HTC Vive headset, viewers are transported into a version of the old courtroom, its beams, benches, and pillars represented in painstaking detail.
Viewers also hear movement and murmuring from the gallery, where one woman — a baby strapped around her — cries out at one point in defense of a defendant whose face is obscured by a straw basket hat. (In a caption to a photo in his book, showing prisoners condemned to execution, Katz describes this headwear as a type of bamboo kasa, but it resembles the woven tengai worn by komusō, the flute-playing itinerant Buddhist monks.) From the wings, a guard emerges, menacingly brandishing a baton and admonishing the distraught young mother to hold her tongue.
Feeling personally present
“VR helps you fall right into the story,” says Meiyun Hsu, an associate researcher at NTMH’s Exhibition Division. “You can hear the whispers around you, see the different angles of history, even touch or feel the fear or happiness of the characters.”
The film follows the story of a young man who is unwittingly embroiled in the turmoil unleashed by the rebellion. Innocent but powerless before imperial justice, he is imprisoned as a boy, emerging many years later, old before his time, greeted by a younger sibling he barely knows. As Katz’s book indicates, there were likely many such cases of bystanders caught up in the chaos. Hundreds died languishing behind bars, with the last detainees released in 1927.
The immersive experience, says Hsu, allow the viewers to understand and empathize with the plight of the participants. “They can understand more about the choices that the people back then had to make,” says Hsu. “It has a stronger impact than a regular exhibition.”
Responding to arguments that this approach might represent the dumbing down of history in an era of short-form video content, Hsu says the technology can effectively complement traditional textbook-based learning. She notes that the film is aimed at viewers aged 12 and above, who will have at least some knowledge of history. “This technique can build on that foundation, showing them that between the pale lines of textbooks are stories of real people, with real feelings.”
The movie is one of six — each about 17 minutes long, including three minutes of instructions. Rotating daily, two films are shown for an extended period at the exhibition viewing space before another pair is introduced. Currently showing alongside the Tapani film until July 5 is Bridge of Spirits — a rainbow, which depicts Indigenous Atayal youth facing an identity crisis under Japanese rule in the 1930s.
Other movies include depictions of the aftermath of the short-lived Republic of Formosa in 1895, the Se-á-huán (the Taiwanese Hokkien term for the French assault on Taiwan as part of the Sino-French War of 1884–1885), and the 1874 Japanese punitive expedition against the Paliljaw, an Indigenous name for the Paiwan people of the Hengchun Peninsula. A unifying narrative device throughout is the posing of questions to the viewers about what they might have done in the circumstances portrayed.
Visitors to NTMH can find VR History Recreated on the fourth floor of the Exhibition & Education Building, with six screenings per day, split into morning and afternoon sessions, with a break between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Registration is open from 20 minutes before the first screening at 9:10 a.m. Of the available six seats, one is designated as wheelchair space.
While some of the historical episodes covered in the exhibition are now part of school syllabi in Taiwan and may be familiar to history buffs, the subject of a deeply moving VR movie by Taipei-based filmmaker Asio Liu is likely obscure to all but the most devoted diggers into the past.
Having debuted as part of a multimedia exhibition titled Virtuality Embodied at the Kaohsiung Fine Arts Museum in 2025, Somewhere Unknown in Indochina is Liu’s reimagining of the plight of the more than 2,000 Vietnamese “boat people” who were settled in refugee camps on Penghu between 1977 and 1988. Few Taiwanese have heard of this history. On a recent visit to Penghu, I met people in their 40s who had grown up a stone’s throw from the locations of the former facilities at Chuwan on Xiyu islet and Chiangmei on Baisha islet, but who were completely unaware of the camps’ existence.
“People didn’t really know about this,” says Liu, founder of Mimeo Films. “It wasn’t discussed.” He first learned about it while doing his military service on Penghu in 1995. Through a dream in which a young girl warned of the impending demolition of the former facilities, he was drawn to investigate the camp relics. Another dream, featured in the film — in which ragged umbrellas floated up across a desolate wasteland, with dimly lit huts in the background — came to him in 2003, convincing him to visit the camp remnants before it was too late.
“I’m not sure what the broken umbrellas mean, but I’ve tried to explain them as a metaphor for broken refugee boats or forgotten refugee camps,” he says. “And an umbrella is somewhere people will take refuge.”
At the Chiangmei camp, which hosted a museum on these events before it was torn down to make room for a Coast Guard Administration facility, Liu found a photo of a Vietnamese girl, Kim Chi, posing in front of mural depicting a boat called the Thanh Phong. Brought to Taiwan in this vessel in tragic circumstances, Chi — as she is called in the movie — became the protagonist for Somewhere Unknown in Indochina, which blends fact with fiction, including a connection with the Khmer Rouge’s infamous Tuol Sleng prison in Cambodia.
Although the Republic of China had been expelled from the United Nations in 1971, and was thus not compelled to assist with the thousands of people who strayed into its territorial waters during the Indochinese refugee crisis of the late-1970s, it was persuaded to do so by the Catholic charity Caritas, which had a presence on Penghu. The charity later helped resettle most of the refugees in North America and Europe.
Another factor was the propaganda value for the Kuomintang government, as these refugees were fleeing the chaos and persecution of Communist regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia. The political element was evident in the name of the organization — the Free China Relief Association — that ran the camps. At one point in the film, anti-communist slogans can be spotted on the walls of the Chiangmei camp museum, which Chi’s long-dead sister Phuong has led her to in a dream.
“This was the period when the U.S. [broke ties with Taiwan and] recognized China,” says Liu. “We heard political propaganda about saving these refugees when we were young, but it was soon forgotten.”
After assisting me with fitting the headset, Liu tells me not to turn my head to view the environment around me, but instead to rotate myself in the swivel chair he has provided for me to get a 360-degree experience without discomfort. (For the VR History Recreated films, viewers are likewise warned not to rotate their heads. But disobeying this injunction appeared to give me a fuller appreciation of the breadth of the VR environment and intricate details such as the gallery, guards, and accuracy of the courtroom’s replication in the Tapani film.)
Having a panoramic view makes certain scenes particularly vivid, such as the harrowing 66-day journey on the Thanh Phong, which 146 people boarded, with just 34 emerging and cannibalism reported. Another is the minutiae of Chi’s flat in Brussels, where, as a middle-aged woman, she is encouraged by her daughter to return to Penghu to honor the memory of her sister.
Of the boat scene, Liu notes: “Although it was composed in black and white, and while even the characters are not moving — and in fact only the seas in the background are moving — many audiences said they felt like they were in the boat.”
Concerning the fictionalized elements of the film, Liu says he contacted Kim Chi to communicate his vision and get her blessing. “I explained to her that if I hadn’t had this kind of dream, her story might be totally forgotten by history,” he says. “And she could accept that.”
Although Liu emphasizes the importance of preserving this history, he says his approach, almost paradoxically, is to decenter history itself from the narrative, leaving it as something for viewer to explore if they are interested.
“I want the audience to be more focused on the story than history itself — there’s historical context, but I try to make this invisible,” he says. “If the audience learns that something happened in late 70s or early 80s Indochina that made people flee their homeland for other countries, that’s enough.”
Bringing history into the present is also one of his goals, particularly with the recent focus among civil society organizations and media on Taiwan’s lack of refugee and asylum legislation. “I’ve tried to connect the stories with contemporary reports of boats and refugees all over the world,” he says, noting that his work seems to resonate more with foreign audiences. “For some reason, Taiwanese don’t always feel an immediate connection to refugee issues.”
