Guanshan Police Museum

Housed in an old wooden building from the Japanese colonial era, this museum of police history sits behind the active station in Guanshan, Taitung. The county government identifies the structure as a former judo hall (柔道館), presumably the one superseded by the second-generation martial arts hall in 1934, though other accounts describe it as an early police branch office.

Its most notable holdings relate to the Sanchashan Incident (三叉山事件) of September 1945: days after the Japanese surrender, a converted B-24 Liberator evacuating prisoners of war from Okinawa to Manila flew into a typhoon and crashed near Sanchashan (三叉山), a mountaintop peaking at 3,496 meters elevation, killing all twenty-five aboard. After Bunun hunters reported the wreckage, Guanshan’s colonial police, not yet relieved of duty in the handover to the Republic of China, organized a search party; a second typhoon then struck the mountain, claiming twenty-six of the rescuers. The museum preserves recovered aircraft wreckage, relics, and photographs from the disaster; visiting hours are limited, so check in at the police station out front.