Qualla: Museum of Old Taiwan Tiles

Museum of Old Taiwan Tiles: Introduction

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 阿道, CC BY-SA 4.0. James Hsu didn't open a museum because there was demand for one. He opened it because the tiles were disappearing. The decorative ceramic tiles that covered the facades of homes, temples, and shophouses across Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period — particularly from 1915 to 1935 — were being stripped from demolition sites, broken up, discarded. Collectors were a small and scattered community. When Hsu and his friends pooled resources to purchase a former timber storage building in Chiayi City's West District in 2015, they were not so much founding an institution as rescuing an artifact, thousands of artifacts, before the last generation of buildings that had held them was gone. The Chiayi City Government provided renovation subsidies that same year. After two years of restoration, the Museum of Old Taiwan Tiles opened in late 2017: a two-story building in the city center holding more than 4,000 pieces of classical-style ceramic tile, and the story of why they matter.

Image: 阿道 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museum of Old Taiwan Tiles: Tiles as Historical Record

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mk2010, CC BY-SA 4.0. The tiles that the museum collects are not floor tiles or plain bathroom squares. They are decorative architectural ceramics — colorful, patterned, often hand-painted — that were produced primarily between 1915 and 1935, during the middle decades of Japanese colonial rule in Taiw...

Image: Mk2010 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museum of Old Taiwan Tiles: The Building Itself

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mk2010, CC BY-SA 3.0. The museum's home is a former timber storage building from the Japanese colonial period, which gives the site a doubled historical texture. The building that now houses artifacts of colonial-era decorative culture was itself built to serve the timber economy that the Alishan Fore...

Image: Mk2010 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Museum of Old Taiwan Tiles: More Than 4,000 Pieces

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Niceplaza~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The collection spans the full range of what decorative tile-making produced during the 1915 to 1935 period. Visitors encounter tiles arranged by pattern, by period, by provenance, and by architectural context — the washroom tiles that would have been installed in a prosperous hou...

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Niceplaza~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

Museum of Old Taiwan Tiles: Near the Railway Station

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 阿道, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Museum of Old Taiwan Tiles is within walking distance northeast of Chiayi Station on the Taiwan Railway network — the main-line station that connects Chiayi to Taipei and Kaohsiung. This location is convenient for visitors arriving from elsewhere in Taiwan, and it situates th...

Image: 阿道 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museum of Old Taiwan Tiles: Saving the Surface

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 阿道, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is something quietly urgent about what the Museum of Old Taiwan Tiles is doing. Architectural ceramics are vulnerable in ways that paintings and sculptures are not: they are attached to buildings, and when buildings fall, they fall. The institutions most likely to preserve ...

Image: 阿道 | CC BY-SA 4.0