One of the things I like doing is collecting old photos of Taiwan. Here are some taken in the 1950s and originally published in the article entitled “Formosa: China’s Island Province” in a set of guides to the countries of the world published by Grolier.

The text surrounding the photos is itself a rather strange artifact. After a few paragraphs of discussion of Taiwan’s history to 1895, it focuses on the headhunting aborigines of Taiwan, who, with “such religion as they profess,” worship the god of rain — “theft is almost unknown” among them. This despite the fact that in the first half of 1950s the aborigines had gone twenty years without taking a head, spoke Japanese as their lingua franca, and were converting to Christianity en masse. All of the pictures, however, are devoted to the Han people of the island — none show any aborigines — but only a few paragraphs of error-plagued text (displayed below) discuss the modern period, and none talk about the customs of the local Chinese.

Note the mixture of Chinese and Japanese names on the map.

A policeman directing traffic.

If you liked these, don’t miss my page of photos from the National Geographic of 1920.

[Taiwan]

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