Yilan Is a Museum 01: Lu Li-cheng on the Magical Place Where Hometown Dreams Are Built

Text / Chang Ya-yun

Anthropologists are always on the road to other places, studying, understanding and representing others, yet for Lu Li-cheng, who is skilled at breaking new ground and establishing national museums, his hometown of Yilan is always on his mind.

In the early 1990s he helped plan and bring into being the National Museum of Prehistory in Taitung; in early 2001 he returned to Yilan to serve as director of the Lanyang Museum preparatory office, laying the foundation; in early 2002 he continued on to preparatory work for the National Museum of Taiwan History in Tainan. Amid the heavy and painstaking work of museum planning, he still set aside time to accompany Yilan's museum movement with warmth and resolve, and he established a conviction: "Yilan is a museum."

Yilan is a museum: it treats the whole county as a territory-wide museum, with communities and residents as the participating subjects of the museum movement. Through the process of building the physical Lanyang Museum, it sets in motion local museums large and small across all of Yilan, linking them into a mutual-learning support network of the local museum family. "Yilan is a museum" has quietly circulated on the Lanyang Plain for 20 years, and this unique Yilan experience is still rolling forward.

Yilan Is a Museum 02"Beyond the Lanyang Museum, the "Lanyang Museum Family" You Should Get to Know

Yilan Is a Museum 03"From Tourism That Draws Attention, a Museum Cluster That Extends "Local Knowledge"