Seeking first-hand accounts
In May 1948, the Gonglun Bao ("Public Opinion Journal"), a periodical edited by Chen Chi-lu, began publishing a weekly supplement on Taiwanese culture and customs. When the Nationalist government relocated to Taiwan in 1949, it reorganized the Taiwan Provincial Common History Historica as the Historical Research Commission of Taiwan Province. It also established historical research committees for each of the province's cities and counties, each of which had its own publications. Private-sector publications included the periodicals Taiwan Wenhua ("Taiwanese Culture") and The Taiwan Folkways. Taiwanese history and local customs had become a hot field of study and Tsao was intrigued.
Lian Yatang's General History of Taiwan and Kanori Ino's History of Taiwanese Culture both focus on the Qing Dynasty and offer only sketchy information about the pre-Qing period. Tsao therefore focused his first academic paper on Taiwan's deerskin trade, examining Dutch and Han Chinese trade with Aboriginal villages prior to the development of agriculture on Taiwan. After publishing the paper in Japanese in 1951, Tsao himself translated it into Mandarin. He ultimately chose not to publish the Mandarin version because he thought his Mandarin was too weak.
In secondary school, Tsao's Japanese was better than that of most native speakers and he became accustomed to thinking in the language. He says that when he switched to using Mandarin following the war, his thoughts often got muddled. "I had to think about things in Japanese first," he recalls, "then translate my thoughts into Mandarin, which made writing more difficult."
In 1952, Tsao became head of the NTU Library's collections section and continued his research into early Taiwanese history. Over the period 1953-1963, he published papers in Bank of Taiwan Quarterly and Taibei Wenxian ("Taipei Archives"), and received accolades from Zhou Xianwen, head of the economic research division at the Bank of Taiwan (BOT). After the two men got to know one another, they worked together to facilitate the division's publication of the very well regarded Encyclopedia of Taiwan (publishing 595 items on 309 subjects from August 1957 to December 1972).
While working on the project, Tsao and employees of the BOT's economics research division scoured libraries and archives around Taiwan. They also traveled to Japan, Hong Kong, the US and Europe to copy, collate, and translate documents, gazetteers, informal essays, poetry, prose and other information pertaining to Taiwanese history. In those days, all data had to be collated by hand, making it a daunting task.
Because so many different ethnic groups live together on Taiwan, the creation of a comprehensive, structured history of Taiwan requires setting aside notions of ethnic superiority. (below:) An 1859 drawing by a British journalist shows a religious ceremony. (right:) An 1870 engraving made from a photograph by British photographer John Thomson shows a Pingpu woman holding her child.