Preserver of Taiwan's Memories--Historian Douglas Fix

Throughout history there are always people who unwittingly affect the course of world events.

As Taiwan ports opened up to the outside in the 1860s, among the merchants and missionaries coming and going, an English sailor named William Alexander Pickering was just such a person. He was an explorer who learned Chinese to understand the people living in Taiwan. To penetrate the life of the average person, he associated with just about every segment of society. To probe the extensive "Aborigine area" of the time, he was willing to pay any price--even violating prohibitions on several occasions--to get to the traditional Aboriginal homelands in modern Pingtung and the Central Mountain Range, and becoming a rare phenomenon for the day--a "Taiwan hand."

Pickering's knowledge of Taiwan later opened the door for Charles W. Le Gendre and other "Taiwan hands." Le Gendre took up residence in Xiamen (Amoy) as the US consul-general in 1866, and a year later began collecting vast amounts of information on Taiwan. His first translator was Pickering. No wonder that the Taiwan Historical Dictionary describes Pickering as "representative of Western-power involvement in Taiwan affairs at the time."

Following the end of martial law in Taiwan in 1988 and the rise of Taiwan historical studies, the enormous influence on Taiwan in the 19th century of foreigners like Le Gendre and Pickering became known to all. But the pictorial and written records they left have also become precious historical material for understanding Taiwan.

Understanding all this, Professor Fix set to work in Oregon, on the other side of the Pacific. Using a very small, fixed yearly stipend from the school, Fix led groups of students interested in Taiwan history and conversant with European languages to translate the enormous number of written records, photographs and maps into English and put them up on the Internet in digital form. Now Fix has begun cooperating with Taiwan publishers on a Chinese-language version, projected to hit the press before the end of the year.

Aside from maps, the pictorial material left by 19th-century visitors to Taiwan represents valuable resource material for understanding the lifestyle of the Aborigines at that time.

Accident of history

With his bright blue eyes and Van Gogh beard, Professor Fix has spent more than a decade in Taiwan all told, and has a Taiwanese wife. Whenever Fix begins to comment on Taiwan history or historical figures, not only does he fully display his power of memory and the fruit of long and arduous study, he speaks in an almost accent-free, pleasing Chinese. He likes Taiwan and only by accident fell into the study of the island's history. His more than 30-year connection with Taiwan is, in a very fortuitous way, intimately bound up with a great turning point in the study of Taiwan history.

Fix grew up in rural Colorado and the first time he visited Taiwan was as a soldier. In 1971, on graduating high school he was drafted into the army, and was later sent to Taiwan to the military base at Linkou. After WWII there was an increasingly close military relationship between Taiwan and the US, both seeking to "contain red China." As part of this relationship, monitoring Chinese radio communications was always important work, and the Linkou base was the primary location for this. To enable him to monitor the "communist bandits," Fix had received Chinese-language training in the US. "Unlike most American soldiers, who didn't have the remotest contact with Taiwanese people, I was able to get to know Taiwan life," says Fix.

"At that time there was no golf course at Linkou--outside the barracks was just wasteland," he recalls. "When we had liberty, we would head to Taipei, especially Hsimenting." Never having lived in any large American city, he was captivated by the splendor of Taipei.

In 1974 when he got out of the service, Fix made a life-changing decision--he returned to Taiwan and made a major change of direction, applying to study as a foreign student in the history department of National Taiwan University.

"An important reason why Douglas was able to get into studying Taiwan history was the change in the overall political situation," says Wu Mi-cha, associate professor of history at NTU and a good friend and classmate of Fix at the time.

"The environment for historical studies was completely different from today. Especially there was the limitation imposed by the political atmosphere, where all historical studies still revolved around the Greater China orthodoxy and independent research on Taiwan history was extremely rare," says Wu. "But the tangwai ['outside the party'] movement of the time elicited the direct and indirect participation of people in the history department, including myself and Hu Chung-hsin. Douglas Fix, with whom we were quite friendly, was also led to participate in some tangwai activities through us."

James K.I. Ang, a classmate of Fix in the late 70s and early 80s in NTU's graduate history program and now an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Taiwan History at the Academia Sinica, says students who wanted to choose Taiwan as a research topic would as a rule be regarded as "not academic," or political dissidents. The rise of Taiwan historical studies is really tied to the tangwai movement of the time. Only because of the protection of this movement was the atmosphere we have today made possible.

"Whether it was due to the closing of the magazine Taiwan Politics, or the 'Chungli Affair' with suspicions of voting fraud in the election of the Taoyuan County chief executive, many fellow students secretly supported the movement. Once, through our introduction, Fix met with tangwai personalities like Chang Chun-hung," recalls Wu Mi-cha.

The American William Blakeney left this sketch of a battle taking place on the eastern shore of Taiwan. Unfortunately, it is still unclear just who the combatants were.

The February 28 Incident

In 1981 Douglas Fix left Taiwan to study at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1993 received his PhD with a dissertation on the Taiwan literature of the 30s and 40s, a topic then seldom treated.

However, like so many historians sympathetic to the tangwai movement, Fix had been originally attracted to the February 28 Incident of 1947, so influential for Taiwan, as a dissertation topic.

"First, the roots of ethnic conflict in Taiwan can probably be traced back to the February 28 Incident and the way the KMT government handled it," says Fix. "Second, February 28 changed the Taiwanese evaluation of the Japanese colonial regime."

In the process of researching the February 28 Incident and the history of the Japanese colonial period, Fix discovered that Taiwanese dissatisfaction with the colonial regime could be seen everywhere. "But from the 1950s, the focus of dissatisfaction turned to the KMT government. Compared with KMT rule, more and more people began to cherish the memory of the colonial government, and this was intimately bound up with the later Taiwan independence movement."

"Nevertheless, at the time many archives were still secret and material available for research was extremely limited," Fix recalls. Added to this were continued government misgivings. His professors and fellow students counseling him to give up the idea resolved him to adopt an "outflanking" strategy and study Taiwanese society of the 1930s and 40s.

The era before the outbreak of WWII was a time of relative prosperity and freedom for Japanese-occupied Taiwan. Influenced by the wave of national self-determination that followed on the heels of WWI and by the emergence of a Taiwanese elite educated under the occupation, from the 1920s labor and peasant movements appeared throughout Taiwan, and a communist movement developed. "In the 1930s a cultural movement sprang up too. By studying the 30s and 40s one can understand the sociopolitical and cultural atmosphere as it existed prior to the February 28 Incident. Without an understanding of that period it is impossible accurately to understand the incident itself," says Fix. "But even for that earlier period, many files were still closed, so I decided to start with materials already published and ultimately got into the subject through literature."

"Had Fix's research succeeded then, he might have become the first specialist on '228,'" says Wu Mi-cha. "But the 30s and 40s at that time remained a blank period." Fix's research included the gradual rise of Taiwanese ethnic nationalism, and this greatly influenced the work of later researchers of the February 28 Incident.

Aside from maps, the pictorial material left by 19th-century visitors to Taiwan represents valuable resource material for understanding the lifestyle of the Aborigines at that time.

Witness to Taiwan history

At the same time Fix was altering his focus and searching for a path to his goal, times were changing and Taiwan history was gradually moving from being forbidden territory under martial law to becoming a politically correct branch of study. More and more scholars were examining the February 28 Incident, and Fix, who had not become a "228" specialist, did not lose any of his abiding interest in Taiwan history. From 1998 on he pushed his research interest back further, beyond the Japanese occupation and into the 19th century.

"I had previously been asked by nativist author Lin Ko-hsiang to collect materials on 19th-century foreign visitors to Taiwan, for a book he was writing. But it wasn't until 1998 that I began to systematically organize what I had collected," Fix recalls.

"Taiwan scholars appear to attach little importance to basic research, says James Ang. "Take the period I specialize in, Taiwan history in the 16th and 17th centuries. I've always lamented the fact that because a great many foreign-language materials have never been compiled and annotated, we have a situation whereby many discussions of early Taiwan history really cannot stand up to the historical evidence." Seeing the way Douglas Fix has done the legwork of basic research for Taiwanese historians over many years, Ang says with a sigh, "The contribution in terms of basic research that Fix has made by spending ten years compiling and editing historical materials on Taiwan from the US and Europe, including material by Le Gendre, far outweighs the publication of a few academic papers!"

140 years ago, General Charles W. Le Gendre compiled a great deal of "Taiwan knowledge" and pictorial data. Later he helped Japan to attack Taiwan after the Mudan Village Incident. Up to the present day, much of the "image" of Taiwan for many European and American scholars or those in the cultural sphere comes from Le Gendre, the "Taiwan hand." "Furthermore, there are few Chinese-language documents on Taiwan from the end of the Qing Dynasty, and almost no pictorial record. By comparison, Le Gendre preserved for us a great deal of dynamic material with an extremely high research value," says Ang.

Aside from fairly well-known Westerners like Le Gendre and Pickering, on Fix's 19th-century Taiwan web page you can find many names that even historians in Taiwan have never heard of.

Carrying a pistol, some measuring instruments, a few books and a minimum amount of baggage, a sailor in the Russian navy named Pavel (Paul) Ibis got the idea to come to Taiwan spurred on by the invasion of Taiwan by Japan following the Mudan Village Incident. He walked from the south clear to the north of the island passing along the way 13 Aboriginal villages, including those of the Amis and the Bunun, and leaving behind an interesting travelogue and pictorial record of the Aborigines. Other explorers and naturalists, including Germans, French and others speaking European languages left behind many precious records concerning Taiwan. "In the past, no one in Taiwan knew about these people. It was Professor Fix who put this right for us," says Wu Mi-cha.

Using the latest digital technology, people who have an interest in this historical material need only connect to Fix's "Formosa" online library to browse through over 100 travel diaries, reports and historical documents. In addition to the written material, this online library also offers an extensive collection of images originating from 19th-century foreign visitors to Taiwan, as well as maps that make those in Taiwan and foreign libraries pale by comparison.

What is most special about this material is that Fix has annotated the texts with itineraries of the routes taken by each of these visitors as well as information about the areas they visited. "Regrettably, due to financial limitations, out of the 500 items I have collected only 100 are online, and around half of those are only excerpted," says Fix with a smile. "As for the next step, aside from putting up more material on the web page in complete form, the Chinese translation will hopefully come out in book form before the end of 2006. In this way we can make the material more available to the public, especially the Chinese-reading public."

This plate appearing in the American publication Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper was long thought to depict Tanshui. Before Professor Fix put the picture up on his web site he checked it out and ascertained that the spot shown was actually Keelung.

In the blink of an eye

"In the space of 30-plus years much previously unobtainable material has been made public and now more and more people are going into Taiwan history. This is very exciting." Taking advantage of a break in an academic conference that has drawn him back to Taiwan, Fix gets together with his history colleagues and enjoys reminiscing about the past.

"Now there is a great deal of material, it's easier to get hold of than ever and there are no restrictions on research topics. Yet there are still many historiographical debates going on," says Fix. "Take the February 28 Incident. The number of victims, Governor Chen Yi's responsibility in the incident as well as whether foreign forces like the Japanese or the Communist International were involved--there are many differences on these questions, both in Taiwan and overseas academic circles, that result from different historical views and political positions."

"For a perfect retelling of history there remain many blanks to be filled in," says Fix. "We still have a lot of work to do."

From youth to gray hair--pictures of Professor Fix with his wife, Luo Hsiao-te (below) and with his fellow students from the history department at NTU (above, left to right: Hu Chung-hsin, Wu Mi-cha, Douglas Fix, Chiu Wei-chun) bear witness to the historian's love affair with Taiwan stretching back more than 30 years.

General Charles Le Gendre (center) had a deep influence on Taiwan and is regarded as the most famous foreigner to have come to Taiwan in the 19th century.

The contribution to Taiwanese historiography made by Professor Douglas Fix who speaks flawless Cjinese is gaining increasing-tion.

William Pickering--a simple sailor who came to represent the interference by the Western Powers in Taiwan affairs during the 19th century.