Last trip to Gu Chi Fung

I have written about the amusement park/museum/temple in HsinChu before:

http://tainanchineseclass.blogspot.tw/2010/02/hsin-chu.html

When my family spent 2 years in HsinChu from 1992-1994, we loved going to the GuChiFeng amusement park/Museum.

There was the Museum for the adults and the amusement park/mazes for the kids. It was such an eclectic place, that everyone could find something to do. Nowadays,with the internet, everyone can find something to do, but it is not as a group.

Florence and I recently went back to HsinChu to see GuChiFeng, but the park has fallen on hard times. They no longer collect an entrance fee, they just let visitors wander in and see what is left, several buildings are locked up, packing boxes are strune everywhere, what they contain we don't know. The Museum was famous for displaying items without a timeline or a space connection. Every corridor had no theme.

I heard the Museum obtained such an eclectic mix of items because the owner bought objects from the 1949 refugees from mainland China, as the communist forces pushed the nationalists to Taiwan. 

For me, the most interesting object from that time was a protoceratops skull. Here are my photos from 20 years ago.

 Where is that fossil now? I don't know. It is no longer on display at GuChiFeng. I really thought it was a unique item, even 20 years ago, but of course the provenance is nonexistent.

Still on display is the largest collection I know of the "3 inch lotus" slippers from the days of foot binding in China. The abolishing of "Foot binding" (see wikipedia) is only a 100 years old.

Everyone knows that Chinese invented gunpowder and at GuChiFeng, there is a wooden "canon" on display. It took the Europeans to make the canon into a more deadly weapon made of metal. There is a story that the Jesuits made little progress in China until they taught the Chinese to build canons of metal. for the greater good, the Jesuits taught the Chinese to make the weapons of war.

And there are strange exhibits, like the inhabitants of the Buddhist's version of Hell.

Well this was the last time we visit, the memories are better than what is still there.