The National Museum of Natural Science

It wasn't until the energy crisis of the 1970s that scholars finally awoke to the importance of environmental conservation and began to make calls for government to bolster understanding on this issue. As a consequence, museums devoted to natural science sprang up in nations around the world, including Taiwan's National Museum of Natural Science (NMNS). Modern in design, the museum is unique in Taiwan both for its exhibits that explain natural history and its hands-on interactive science center.

In 1980 the Executive Yuan announced that it would establish a natural science museum in the center of Taichung City. Han Pao-teh, then head of the College of Science and Engineering at National Chung-hsing University, was appointed to lead the planning for creating the museum on a 13-hectare site. The governing principle was to interest members of the public so that they would gain understanding about the natural environment and scientific principles and explore the relationship between man and nature.

A well-known architect and promoter of aesthetics in Taiwan, Han firmly grasped that most people find science difficult to delve into and understand. Consequently, in the design of the museum, he stressed that there was no need to put a spotlight on the building itself. Instead, the emphasis was put on functionality and accessibility, creating seamless interfaces that would allow people to approach science in a relaxed manner.

For instance, as a result of its design, the museum's garden is more than a space for recreation; it also quietly promotes science education. For instance, in the entrance to the "Path of Evolution," there is a 2.7-meter-wide, seven-meter-high windmill, whose conical blades can generate power even from the light breezes in the city. It demonstrates one of the oldest of humanity's power sources: Mother Nature's wind. Today, when we are facing dwindling oil supplies, it has a special significance.

Among the other garden exhibitions is a model of DNA's double helix that serves as a colorful climbing structure. In the exhibition on "anamorphosis" (which refers to deformed images that appear in their true shapes only when viewed in some unconventional way), visitors have the pleasure of watching a distored image become true through the use of a reflecting telescope.

Religion and science are two channels that humanity use to explore the universe. The Wanfu Temple on the second floor of the Human Cultures Hall offers a glimpse at the spiritual life of Taiwan's Han Chinese pioneers.

The scientific spirit: DIY

The Science Center of the NMNS was the first example of a museum in Taiwan to put an emphasis on interactive exhibits.

Yeh Kuei-yu, director of the museum's science education department, says the NMNS was influenced by the design of San Francisco's Exploratorium, which was founded in 1969 by Frank Oppenheimer (brother of Robert Oppenheimer). That museum stressed an exploratory approach that promoted experiential learning by engaging the senses and encouraging hands-on operation. It started a worldwide craze for exploratory science museums. When the NMNS was established in 1986, it likewise met with great public approval.

In the NMNS's "Exploratorium," which is located in the basement, one can hear sporadic cries of surprised young students. One needs only to flip a switch and the Tesla coil at the entrance to the exhibit turns 110 volts of electricity into 200,000 volts, which is transmitted through the air to light up an unconnected fluorescent light tube. Nikola Tesla, who was known as "the father of alternating current electricity," would conduct electricity through his body, light up his fingers in the dark, and do other cool tricks that made him an overnight sensation as an electrical magician.

"It is unfortunate that for a long time kids in Taiwan have excelled only at pen-and-paper science skills but aren't accustomed to hands-on experimentation." Only by investigating with their own two hands, Yeh says, can difficult, new concepts found in textbooks come to life, thus allowing knowledge to be firmly implanted.

For example, in the "hyperboloid slot" exhibit, one sees an angled metal club on one side, and on the other side an acrylic panel containing a C carved in relief. A museum guide encourages children to take the club and pass it through the C. The immediate response is: "How could that be possible?" But when the guide slowly twists the club, so that the metal pole somehow passes through the curved space, the place erupts in applause.

Ever since the Children's Science Park (aimed at kids ages three to eight) was opened at the beginning of last year, groups of children have surrounded "Mr. Skeleton" and pointed out various aspects of human bone structure. "Someone once asked the kids what the difference was between Mr. Skeleton and the auntie volunteer," a museum worker recalls with a laugh. "And the answer was that the auntie volunteer had pimples!" Kids' observations are totally blunt and unpretentious, and the museum intentionally encourages them to treat the skeleton as a talking character. This stimulates them to develop their imaginative powers, so that learning becomes a fun game.

The abridged armilla located in the museum's Human Cultures Hall is the oldest astronomical instrument in the world to include a representation of the equator. It was designed by Guo Shoujing in the Yuan Dynasty.

The mysteries of evolution

The museum's Life Science Hall also offers a fresh new take on old material. When Han Pao-teh was planning the museum, he paid visits to museum designers in various countries before finally hiring the British designer James Gardner to develop 13 exhibition areas for this hall, which separately reveal various natural phenomena. Aspects of evolution-from the beginning of life and proliferation of life forms, to evolution and adaptation, to the course of a human life from birth through death-can also be investigated and explored here.

Cheng Yen-nien, a curator with the museum's geology department, displays a keichousaur (Keichousaurus hui) fossil that is 230 million years old. The fossil demonstrates how ancient animals reproduced-a topic that has always interested people. Under pressure from other species, it was a matter of life and death for every species to do all it could to adapt to its environment and develop ingenious reproductive strategies. This is the best entree for understanding the concept of evolution.

From examination of unearthed fossils, it is thought that the mesosaur, a distant relative of the dinosaurs that lived 300 million years ago in what is now Brazil, was the first reptile to go back into the water, where its amphibian ancestors had originally lived. A discovery of a fossil of a pregnant keichousaur in Guizhou, China in 2002, however, gave natural scientists their first knowledge about how these animals reproduced.

The museum is involved in a joint research project with the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa and the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in Beijing. In a paper published in the November 2004 issue of Nature, the researchers, noting the four to six embryos in the keichousaur, theorized that all of the reptiles that returned to the sea may have been viviparous, just like those familiar marine mammals the whales and dolphins. It is quite a different method of reproduction from the laying of eggs employed by land reptiles.

"This adaptation must have been in response to the dangers of the ocean environment," Cheng postulates. "They needed to produce offspring as quickly as possible." But why did these reptiles that had already established themselves on the land go back to the sea and make a home for themselves in the ocean? And why did they go extinct? There are many questions that still await answers.

This area also displays something that incites the envy of museums all around the world: an ancient Egyptian mummy and sarcophagus. These are the first to be found in an Asian museum's collection. The exhibit also includes photographs and illustrations that reveal ancient Egyptian embalming techniques, giving us an insight into the mysterious world of death that the ancient Egyptians spared no effort to explore, which combined both flesh and spirit.

All four construction phases of the museum, which occupies a 13-hectare site, have been completed. The museum will now focus its development efforts on promoting understanding of nature and ecological concepts. The staff is also visiting schools to aid in the museum's mission of promoting science education.

Nature and spiritualism

The Human Cultures Hall acquired its current name only last year. It used to be known as the Chinese Science Hall. Apart from maintaining some permanent exhibitions on the history of science in China, other permanent exhibitions were successively installed last year on Oceania, agricultural ecology, and Taiwan's Austronesian language groups. These help to provide a richer and more diverse look at human culture.

When you walk into the Human Culture Hall, the first thing you see is the "abridged armilla," the first astronomical device to feature an equator. China had been producing astronomical instruments since the Warring States era (453-221BC) of the Zhou Dynasty, when the first armillary sphere was built. Improvements were made until Guo Shoujing, a famous Yuan-Dynasty astronomer, created the abridged armilla in 1276. With the exception of the extreme northern portion of the sky, the armilla could be used to chart the entire night sky. In Europe, a similar device was invented by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in 1598. The fact that his invention came more than 300 years later demonstrates the advanced state of science in ancient China.

Uncovering nature's mysteries

Exhibited on the second floor, the 100-year-old "Wanfu Temple" makes people do double takes: Have I gone to the wrong place? Aren't science and religion supposed to be in opposition?

Museum officials explain that the old temple (one can almost smell the sandalwood incense) was originally located in Wanfu Village in Kaohsiung County's Chiehting Township. Built in 1877, it held the Five Generals as its primary deities. It was faced with the wrecker's ball 20 years ago, right when the NMNS was hoping to include some exhibits that touched upon spiritual life, in addition to those that demonstrate natural science. Religion is not only rooted in man's first attempts to understand nature; it also reflects the deepest longings of the heart and soul. Consequently, the museum decided to purchase the entire intricately carved temple to serve as the focal point of its exhibition on spiritual life.

Chen Yi-tsung, who works as a restorer of traditional architecture and was responsible for reassembling the temple at the museum, recalls: "Because they hadn't numbered the pieces properly before disassembling the temple, it made it very hard to put it back together again. It was harder than reassembling the bones from a grave for reburial. It took four months working day and night to finish!"

Because the ceilings of the museum were only six meters high whereas the temple originally reached seven meters, it was decided-out of consideration for the proportions of the exhibition space and the potential impact on pedestrian flow-that only the pillars of the main shrine would reach the ground. The remaining ones were cut off, and suspended from the ceiling. The whole temple was split into three parts-the Prayer Pavilion, the San-chuan Hall, and the Main Hall-which give visitors a glimpse at the reverence with which the Han Chinese pioneers in Taiwan paid their respects to the dead.

Another permanent exhibit, Oceania, also integrates nature and religion into the history of a civilization. With displays of spirit figures, tools with which they wrested their living (such as canoes), and various kinds of masks, the exhibit offers a comprehensive look at Austronesian culture, giving one the sense of entering a mysterious world-like Harry Potter's-that blends magic and marvelous fantasy.

The items included in the Oceania exhibit are mostly cultural artifacts collected by Max Liu in Papua New Guinea. In 1993 he donated 240 items to the museum. Four years ago they received another group of items from his son Liu Ning-sheng, also an explorer. Those gifts, in combination with other recent acquisitions of the museum, bring the total number of items in this collection to 325.

At the mention of this pride-instilling new exhibition, museum director Lin Tsung-hsien explains, "The people of Taiwan need to change their perspective and turn east and south toward Oceania. What they will behold is something entirely different-a cultural realm that has been overlooked."

With the extremely high definition of the IMAX theater, the nervous system of a fruit fly is transformed into weird and colorful abstract art.

A cornucopia of wonders

Built at a cost of over NT$5 billion, the NMNS, which is the best natural science museum in all of Taiwan, holds a collection of about 950,000 items in four main categories: anthropology, geology, zoology, and botany.

Deputy director Liang Kuang-yu notes that there isn't much of a tradition of private donations to museums in Taiwan, but the NMNS is an exception: academic institutions and individuals from both Taiwan and abroad have been happy to provide items to the museum that were fruits of a lifetime of research. For instance, Masataka Sato, a Japanese professor known around the world for his study of beetles, donated 124,300 insect fossils to the museum. And professor Yang Hung-yi of National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan gave many thousands of rock samples to the museum before he retired. These included a large collection of samples he had gathered on successive trips to the northern reaches of the Tibetan Plateau in China.

The earliest marine reptile thus far revealed by the fossil record is the mesosaur, which lived 300 million years ago in what is now Brazil.

Bringing knowledge to your door

In recent years the NMNS has often coordinated with foreign museums to host such major exhibitions as The Millennial Exhibition on Ancient Egypt, The Mysteries of the Pyramids: Ancient Egyptian Art from the Louvre, and Flying Dinosaurs-Solving the Mystery of Their Origins.

With regard to the promotion of education in Taiwan, in order to reduce the gap between the cities and the countryside and spread educational resources more evenly, the museum not only gives grants to elementary and secondary schools in remote areas and central Taiwan so that their students can visit the museum, but it has also taken steps to bring its offerings to the schools-truly implementing the concept of "bringing knowledge to your door."

From things so small that they can only been seen with the aid of a microscope, to large, true-to-life ecologies; from embryos at the start of life, to mummies that represent an attempt to meld spirit and flesh in the afterlife; from fossils and minerals brought out of the earth, to high-tech 3D worlds; from the conservation and revitalization of shattered landscapes to measures to save and rehabilitate endangered species... the NMNS does a magnificent job of opening people's eyes to the richness and diversity of the world's environment and the specific and marvelous ways in which nature and science intersect.

National Museum of Natural Science

Address: 1 Kuanchien Rd., North District, Taichung City

Open: Tuesday-Sunday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Botanical Garden and outside areas open free of charge until 10:00 p.m.

Admission free 9:00-10:00 a.m. every Wednesday (excluding the Space Theater, 3D

Theater and paying special exhibitions)

Tel.:(04) 2322-6940

Website:www.nmns.edu.tw

The exhibit on Oceania in the Human Cultures Hall features masks of the Anariman tribe from the East Sepik Delta in Papua New Guinea.

Located in Taichung City, the National Museum of Natural Science is a modern museum that is unique in Taiwan for blending traditional exhibitions of natural history with installations in its Science Center that take a more experiential, hands-on approach to science education. It attracts nearly 3 million visitors a year.

The Space Theater, which is an IMAX cinema that shows nature films, allows the audience to feel that they are almost part of the action. Watching a film here is a highly stimulating experience. In the photo the theater is screening Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure.

Exploring conceptions of life and death, an exhibition in the Life Science Hall includes the first Egyptian mummy and sarcophagus to be part of an Asian museum collection. It offers insights into Egyptian ideas about the afterlife, which encompassed both the flesh and the spirit.

The fruit of the Roxburgh fig (Ficus auriculata). Native to the Indian subcontinent, Roxburgh figs provide excellent shade with their large evergreen leaves. The species is a new favorite of Taiwan's horticulturists.

The main theme of the Life Science Hall is the mysteries of nature. The hall's 13 exhibition areas each features different natural phenomena or aspects of evolution.