2022 International Museum Day Open House Serial Activities: Treasure Trove (1) NTU Insect Museum Tour

In response to the International Museum Day in 2022 and in conjunction with the "Revisiting the Site of Early Natural History Research in Taiwan: The Selection Project of University Museum Collections Before 1945", the TAIDA Museum Provisional Office planned two training sessions with visit tours for museum talent cultivation. In this session, we invited the curator of NTU Insect Museum, Chi-Wei Tsai, and the program manager of NTU museums, Hsin-Yu Wu, to lead the participants to visit the university museum and get to know its architecture, library, collection room, and exhibition room. Participants include illustrator designers, students, parents, and many teachers in the science domain.

The lecturers of the event synthesized materials, such as historical documents, photos, construction materials, specimens, and archive equipment to introduce to the participants: Shiraki Tokuichi, who was graduated from Sapporo Agricultural College (the predecessor of Hokkaido Imperial University), was the professor in the Lecture of Entomology and Sericulture at Taihoku Imperial University (holding a concurrent chief in Applied Zoology Division at Central Research Institute). The Entomology Classroom he planned (current NTU Entomology Building) was established nearby the building of the Applied Zoology Division (now governed by the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology). Due to the different research focuses of the two units, specimens belonging to Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, butterflies, etc. were preserved in Applied Zoology Division; and specimens belonging to Orthoptera, Hemiptera, Diptera, and Moths were preserved in Entomology Classroom. In 1936, the Entomology Classroom was completed. The collection room was arranged by referencing the setting of the Hokkaido Imperial University's collection room. There are two floors for the interior, three specimen cabinets against the walls reaching to the ceiling, with a large desk set in the center. After World War II, specimens have been continuously accumulated by teachers and students in the Department of Entomology at National Taiwan University, to enlarge the collection of specimens. The center of the collection room is now full of specimen cabinets, gradually accumulating up to about 330,000 pieces in the collection. 【For the detailed event record, please refer to the FB fan page.】