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• 1 media/QingAn.jpg 2019-11-18T17:21:25-05:00 Sacred Geographies of Urban Colonial Taiwan: Jilong's Geography in Transformation 32 Evan N. Dawley image_header 2020-07-13T20:45:00-04:00 25.1276, 121.73918 1885-1945 Evan N. Dawley Colonial regimes, almost by definition, engage in the transformation of the spaces into which they insert themselves. This practice, however, is not unidirectional or simply imposed upon the colonial terrain, it is a contested process in which all actors advance their territorial visions through methods that include asserting ownership, restructuring the physical geography, and passive and active forms of resistance. Jilong (Keelung) became a site for processes of de/reterritorialization under Japanese colonial rule when it emerged, briefly, as the location of the first headquarters of the Taiwan Government-General, and then more substantially as the primary port of entry soon after Japan claimed control of Taiwan in June 1895. The town, its harbor, its terrain, its people, all of these facets left Japanese control in 1945 in radically altered conditions. The most obvious aspects of these changes--the different physical and urban topographies visible in these two historic maps--should not be taken as evidence of the successes of Japanese colonial rule. Nor should the quantity and distribution of temples during the 1930s in the third map, with Taiwanese institutions in red and Japanese in blue, and one purported fusion in purple, be seen as an indication of a permanent remapping of the sacred or physical terrains. Very much to the contrary, a spatial exploration of the sacred geographies within Jilong reveals a different process and outcome: the construction and assertion of an ethnic Taiwanese identity through temples and their associated festivals, in opposition to Japanese efforts to reconsecrate Taiwan through Shintō and missionary Japanese Buddhism.
  
  This module demonstrates how space and place were created through these contested territorializing projects. The projects themselves involved self-conscious efforts to define the physical terrain through modern cartography, state policy, and social activity of a largely religious nature. I highlight the first of these in particular by using a number of historic maps, most of them created by the Japanese colonial government, which present a flat, totalizing vision of space in which places are controlled through their description and delineation. Nevertheless, modified versions of these maps and a number of GoogleMaps help to depict the points of intersection between sacred and profane, between physical and imaginative geographies—that is, the temples and the territorial cults of their principal deities. In using them, I bring out what the historic and contemporary maps hide: the people who created space and place by applying meaning to it through their everyday interactions.
  
  Central to these processes of de/reterritorialization were the construction, reinforcement, and transgression a set of boundaries: those between Taiwanese and Japanese identities and their affiliated social groups; between sacred and profane; and between physical and imaginative geography. These boundaries were often porous and non-exclusionary. For example, physical and imaginative geographies overlapped as they were contested and defined. Similarly, points on a map do not indicate absolute or natural relationships between a place and an identity. Rather, they represent relationships that were fluid processes of construction and reconstruction.
  
  Furthermore, this interactivity is reinforced by the module's structure. Clicking on specific segments of the radial diagram below reveals the pathways to which each connects, and the intersection of pages, media, and chunks of sacred space.
  The module contains six pathways. The first, “Key Concepts,” is a reference pathway containing definitions and discussions of the main ideas that underlie and inform the entire module, such as sacred geography, the different actors who created space and place, and the different spatial scales and perspectives that operate within the module. The main body of the module begins with main pathways that address the Taiwanese and Japanese efforts to define and control the sacred and profane. Both of these threads link to a third thread, on the competing festivals that highlighted the efforts to claim and occupy both physical and imaginative geography; and to a fourth thread that depicts the failure of Japanese efforts to make Jilong a purely Japanese sacred space. The module ends with a brief examination of the post-1945 full florescence of religion as a key marker of Taiwanese identity. Readers are encouraged to explore the module as they choose, and to refer to the conceptual material as needed, in order to better understand the creation of space and place in urban colonial Taiwan.