A garden cottage
Strolling down the alleys and lanes off Taishun Street in the Gongguan area of Taipei, it is easy to miss the former home of the liberal scholar Yin Hai-kuang (1919‡1969).
It is a Japanese-style cottage with a large yard, which Yin built by himself after applying for permission to National Taiwan University. When he passed away in 1969, this had been his longest abode in Taiwan.
Yin Hai-kuang was a major liberal scholar during the 1950s and the 1960s, and a lifelong exponent of liberalism. Unafraid of the powers that be, he bravely voiced concerns about the social issues of his time, becoming a model for his generation of intellectuals to follow. Though he is now long departed, the example he set lives, and the traces of his daily life remain in his humble residence.
The pool in the garden was built by Yin Hai-kuang for his newborn daughter soon after the family moved in. Next to the pool is the cottage. Often mistaken for a work of the Japanese era, the house was built by Yin himself. In this nearly 100-square-meter cottage, the biggest room is Yin’s sunlit study, a place for him to indulge his passion for thinking and reading. With the passage of time, the cottage remains the same, but the décor has changed: old photographs, manuscripts and letters now bring Yin’s bygone era to life.
In one black-and-white photograph, Yin, wearing an undershirt with a shovel in hand, is building the paddling pool for his newborn daughter. Another is of Yin and his wife Hsia Chun-lu on their wedding day. On the other side of the room is a display of Yin’s manuscripts. Besides his letter of appointment from National Taiwan University, one can see a draft of a letter to the traditional scholar Chien Mu. The draft, smaller than an A4-size sheet of paper, is replete with red, black and blue edits, exemplifying Yin’s serious, rigorous personality.
In the letter display are examples of Yin Hai-kuang’s correspondences with Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell. Naturally, one can also find many articles of Yin’s, published in the Free China Journal, in which he expressed his liberal philosophy.
This year, the once-tranquil former residence has been livened up. Not only has it become a gallery space for the art organization Bio Apartment, but reality adventure games, so popular among young people, have also arrived. The main organizer, Kiwi Fruit Studio, has creatively designed and released a semi-fictional “reality game” based on Yin Hai-kuang’s life. City Game Studio, a company from Tainan, has combined elements of puzzle-solving, exploration, travel and gaming to set a game here, as an invitation to the public to come treasure hunting.
Since he succeeded as director of the Yin Hai-kuang Academic Foundation, Lu Kuei-hsien, associate professor of sociology at Fu Jen Catholic University, has tried to give the serene former residence a higher profile. Most events at Yin’s house have been held in recognition of Yin’s humanistic spirit. Besides regular lectures, a Hai-kuang Reading Group has been held once every two years, with professors from National Taiwan University and Academia Sinica meeting weekly over a period of two months to guide group discussions of works such as Democracy in America by the 19th-century traveler Alexis de Toqueville or The Pasteurization of France by the contemporary French sociologist of science Bruno Latour.
After six years of discussion and preparation, the Yin Hai-kuang Foundation officially opened the house to visitors in 2008, as part of the celebrations surrounding the 80th anniversary of National Taiwan University. The opening was particularly meaningful for the members of the foundation, who had worked hard to see this day for years. “The preservation of the house is a symbol of Yin Hai-kuang’s legacy, and it is also very important for preserving his spirit,” says executive secretary Hsieh Chia-hsin.
The Lin Yutang House (photo by Lin Min-hsuan)