In 1928, 30 years after establishing rule over Taiwan, the Japanese colonial government made a three-year plan for founding the island's first university: Taihoku (Taipei) Imperial University. As the only university in Japan's southern colonies, TIU's "mission" was to aid the Japanese empire's southward thrust and to carry out research related to the tropics.

With regard to the university's mission to assist Japan's imperial aims, Shidehara Taira, the university's first president, was very clear: "In establishing Taihoku Imperial University, the governor-general's office aims to make use of Taiwan's geographical and cultural conditions in order to conduct research on the area of southern China and the South Seas centered on Taiwan."

Taihoku Imperial University had expansive grounds. Showing the law school at Hsuchou Road, this photo-graph provides a glimpse of the Taipei Basin before development.

University as imperial base

In order to fulfill its duties, the Liberal Arts Division (the divisions of that era correspond to today's colleges) focused on researching the culture of Taiwan, the southern Pacific and southern China; and the Agricultural Sciences Division researched tropical agriculture. But the university's basic teaching and research units were its "academic chairs," which were much like today's research laboratories led by one full professor with assistant professors, lecturers, assistants and staff under him. Over time, with the constant expansion and division of academic disciplines, new units were established, including divisions of medicine, engineering, and agricultural science, as well as graduate institutes of tropical medicine, southern civilization, and southern resources. By the time Japanese rule ended in 1945, the university had five academic divisions, a preparatory school, three graduate institutes, and 115 academic chairs, with 378 full-time academic personnel, 123 part-time personnel and 382 students.

Although Taihoku Imperial University educated talented native Taiwanese, including such notables as Tu Tsung-ming, Hsu Chin-chung, and Pan Kuan, must of the students were Japanese. Up to 1946, a total of 509 students had graduated from the university but only 38 were native Taiwanese.

Taihoku Imperial University's literature department had academic chairs in Japanese literature, Western literature and linguistics. It employed foreign professors and enjoyed ample resources.

The beat goes on

In August 1945, when Taiwan reverted to Chinese rule, TIU was turned over to the ROC national government.

The Ministry of Education, which had just returned to Nanjing after the Japanese exodus from the Chinese mainland, specially sent Luo Tsung-luo, director of the Academia Sinica's Institute of Botany, to accept the handover of NTU. Luo, who had received his doctorate in agriculture in Japan, had made an agreement with the Ministry of Education to strive to "receive it whole, avoid any damage or losses, make immediate plans to start up classes again, and temporarily retain Japanese professors." The expectation was that NTU would "become one of China's major universities, along with Peking University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, and Central University."

In order to keep things rolling, Luo advocated enrolling students and starting up classes again in short order, but it was no easy task under the prevailing conditions. Only a few months before (on May 31), 150 American bombers had attacked Taipei. The Governor-General's Office had burned all night, and the university had also been hit. Bombs had hit the main gate of the Liberal Arts Division and the University Hospital, and had broken the trees lining the university's famous Coconut Palm Boulevard. Apart from the structural damage to the campus, there was great social turmoil throughout Taiwan with virtually every industry hurting and inflation running rampant. As the population suffered, a dark cloud of discontent gathered. Finally, the February 28 Incident of 1947 erupted when the authorities enforced monopolistic control over the sale of cigarettes.

Luo Tung-pi, then a student at the TIU's preparatory school who would later become a dean at NTU, recalls that when the ROC government came to take over TIU, the Taiwanese students there all worried that they would not be allowed to continue with their studies. Everyone pushed Luo to go and negotiate, and somehow he got the courage to knock on the door of the NTU president's office on Fuchou Road. The result was that all were allowed to continue to work toward their degrees. Yet that was only one obstacle. Language proved to be another. The variety of regional accents spoken by professors from the mainland proved daunting to students just starting to learn Mandarin and Chinese characters. To this very day, Luo recalls how he got only 48 on a Three Principles of the People examination.

The start of research in Taiwan

TIU was in many respects a university aimed at supporting government policy and serving as a government think tank. NTU would carry on TIU's traditions of education and academic research, and many of its research focuses after the war can be traced back to the era of Japanese administration.

For instance, there were TIU's renowned "local anthropology chairs," which are regarded as having laid a foundation for pure academic research in Taiwanese anthropology. This anthropological tradition was bolstered when Fu Ssu-nien was appointed president of NTU. Fu, previously director of the Academia Sinica's Institute of History and Philology, had led archeological digs at prehistoric sites on the mainland. Fu recommended that NTU establish an archeology department. Furthermore, many of the mainland's best anthropologists (including Li Chi, Ling Chun-sheng, Jui Yi-fu, and Tung Tsuo-ping) went to teach there, so that the department's faculty was particularly strong.

Nevertheless, when the anthropology department was first established, there were very few students. The first year there was only one student, and the next year's freshman class had only two: Tang Mei-chun and Li Yi-yuan. The third year, there were three including Chang Kuang-chih. In the early years, the number of students in the department was about equal to the number of faculty. Perhaps as a result, there were close ties between the students and professors, and the early graduates of the department all became famous scholars themselves.

Because of Taiwan's special history and geography, the island's several hundred thousand Aborigines, members of the Austronesian language group whose ancestors had lived on the island since ancient times, became a focus of research for the anthropology department. Although TIU had published a book in 1935 entitled General Research into Taiwan's Mountain Tribes, Japanese research hadn't yet included the Thao tribe. Once NTU established its anthropology department, its professors would lead students conducting fieldwork in various villages in remote mountain regions. As for the question about whether the Thao, which had only 300 surviving members, was a lowland tribe, in 1953 Chen Chi-lu devised a plan to trace their roots and determined that the Thao belonged to neither the Bunun nor the Tsou. In 2001, the Thao were officially recognized by the government as Taiwan's tenth Aboriginal tribe.

In 1969 an NTU agricultural team discovered a cultural stratum under Pahsien Cave in Changping, Taitung. Investigation showed that it was Paleolithic. It was the first prehistoric site discovered in Taiwan.

The explorations conducted by NTU's archeology department into Taiwan's Aboriginal tribes and prehistory could be described as the start of "Taiwan research." This has since become an important academic field.

From barren to blooming

NTU's research teams turned an unpopular field into a hot one, allowing the university to ascend onto the stage of international research. In 1921, Tu Tsung-ming, a Taiwanese graduate of the Viceroy's School of Medicine who had gone to Japan to obtain his doctorate, returned to Taiwan and forsook the affluent life of a doctor to organize the Taipei Imperial University's pharmacology chair, completely throwing himself into research. Farsighted, Tu chose three topics of research closely connected to Taiwan: traditional Chinese medicines, opium addiction, and poisonous snake serums. The results of his research into snake serums won some prestigious awards for homegrown Taiwanese research.

Because Taiwan is located in the subtropics, and snakes can be found all over, several hundred people were dying each year from snakebites. Developing antidotes for snakebites was an urgent public health objective.

After the war, Tu Tsung-ming served as head of NTU Hospital, but he left in 1953 because he didn't see eye to eye with Chien Ssu-liang, the president of NTU. Fortunately, Li Chen-yuan, a TIU medical graduate who had joined Tu's research team at about the time of Taiwan's return to China, took over as a driving force of the next generation for continuing that research. Tu had extracted painkillers from snake serum, and Li Chen-yuan advanced this research to the level of physics and chemistry.

As a result of Tu Tsung-ming's farsightedness, the snake serum research was extended from the medical school to TIU as a whole, and then was passed along to NTU. This research area has been pursued at the university for 70 years without interruption, and was the first field of academic research in Taiwan. From the early period of categorizing the kinds of venomous snakes; to using the serums clinically; to researching the poisonous components, to extracting toxalbumin, purifying and sequencing; to the 1990's research in molecular biology and biophysics-one could say that the history of research into snake serums reflects the history of life sciences research in Taiwan.

Small particle, big universe

In 1926 Nozo Tetsuo boarded a boat for Taiwan, and ended up staying for 22 years. This unexpected outcome to a personal journey was not only a turning point in his own academic career; it was also key to NTU's chemistry department being built on solid foundations.

At the time Nozo was researching how to extract new chemical products from camphor oil produced from Mt Ali's forests. He had experimental results showing that its organic heteroaromatic compounds had six-sided as well as seven-sided varieties. From this he built a basis for trophone chemical research and earned a Nobel nomination. Apart from working hard at his research, he was also a strong teacher. Several of his students, including Luo Tung-pi and Liu Cheng-lieh, would follow in his footsteps and pursue research themselves. NTU's chemistry department's strong research tradition encouraged youths to dream about conducting scientific research.

In 1955 Lee Yuan-tze graduated from Hsinchu High with an outstanding record, and entered NTU's chemical engineering department, which has long been regarded as a sure route to financial security. But he never forgot his dream of engaging in basic scientific research. He saw how hard the professors in the chemistry department worked at their research, and so, against his parents' objections, he transferred to the chemistry department. In 1965 Lee earned a doctorate at UC Berkeley, and in 1986 he became the third Chinese person to receive a Nobel Prize. In 1994 he ended his more than 30 years of work in America and returned to Taiwan to serve as president of the Academia Sinica.

Among the talent cultivated in the chemistry department of NTU, Lee is the most well known, but in reality the department has numerous heroes. Of the more than 200 members of the Academia Sinica, over 90 graduated from NTU before going on to make outstanding contributions in such fields as bio-, protein, and inorganic chemistry, as well as pharmacology and toxicology.

Four decades of change

Although the various science departments at NTU grew in step with Taiwan's rapid development from an agricultural to an industrial and finally to a high-tech economy, some departments that had known glorious periods in the past were over time eliminated or transformed.

When NTU absorbed the Agricultural Division of TIU, it changed its name to the College of Agriculture (CoA). With seven academic departments it was NTU's largest college. Later, the Department of Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Medicine was split into two, and the mechanical engineering group in the agricultural engineering department became a separate department. The CoA gradually expanded to 12 departments. But times change, and now the study of agriculture has a passe image.

The CoA later renamed the agricultural machinery department the Department of Bio-Industrial Mechatronic Engineering, which has expanded into such realms as bioproduction and the monitoring of biosystems. The Department of Agricultural Engineering was also rechristened, and is now Bioenvironmental Systems Engineering. After many years of discussions, the CoA itself had its name altered in 1999 to the more marketable "College of Bioresources and Agriculture."

The College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science was originally just the Department of Electrical Engineering, but after 40 years of expansion the number of its students and faculty surpassed 1000, and it could no longer be handled administratively as a department. It was thus turned into its own college.

Today NTU has ten colleges, 52 academic departments, 82 graduate institutes, 1778 full-time faculty, and more than 27,000 students, and firmly holds onto the title of Taiwan's top research university.

In the history of education in Taiwan, NTU's development is worthy of its own chapter, for its great accomplishments over the course of three quarters of a century. No doubt NTU will hold true to its historical legacy by continuing to press forward and making ever more glorious academic accomplishments.