Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review E-Journal No. 17 (December 2015) • (http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-17) The Relics of Modern Japan's First Foreign War in Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwan, 1874–2015 Paul D. Barclay, Lafayette College This photo essay was inspired by two visits, in November 2014 and June 2015, to a cluster of related historical sites in southern Taiwan’s Hengchun Peninsula. These sites preserve the memories and relics of events surrounding the Japanese occupation of Taiwan’s southern extremity in 1874. I examined these sites with Dr. John Shufelt, a professor at Tunghai University and co-editor of the newly released scholarly edition of the Charles Le Gendre papers (Le Gendre 2012). Le Gendre was a U.S. diplomat, Japanese official, and internationally recognized factotum regarding the peoples and places of southern Taiwan in the early 1870s. He was also a key player in the events commemorated at the sites visited by Dr. Shufelt and myself. As this essay demonstrates, the memorials that dot southern Taiwan’s Highway 199 (one route of Japan’s 1874 invasion) have been subject to alteration, contestation, reconstruction, reconceptualization, and vandalism for 140 years. The historical vicissitudes of this mnemonic landscape have responded to local and individual initiatives, while also echoing the tectonic shifts in East Asian history. This study would not have been possible without John Shufelt’s guidance and love of Taiwanese history, and our long-term scholarly collaboration. As a number of scholars of late nineteenth-century Japanese-Taiwanese relations have shown, the 1874 Japanese expedition to Taiwan generated a great deal of media excitement in early Meiji-period Japan. Woodblock prints, kawaraban [tile-block prints], war correspondence, editorials, and maps of Taiwan, its inhabitants, and the Japanese troops circulated throughout Japan at this time (Eskildsen 2002; Yamaji 2007; Yamamoto 2007; Fraleigh 2010, 2012; Chen 2013). These texts and images set the tone for popular conceptions of Japan’s relationship to Taiwan as well as the young empire’s place in the world at a crucial historical juncture (Eskildsen 2002, 389; Chen 2013, 2). In addition to these paper-based media, stone monuments, See: https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-17/barclay for accompanying photo-essay.