Xindong Elementary School Office and Principal’s Residence

Two timber buildings at Xindong Elementary School, which opened in 1939 as a branch campus of Jingliao Public School (菁寮公學校) after local residents petitioned for a school at the meeting point of three villages. Both are post-war work, the principal’s residence dating to 1953 and the office to 1958, but local craftsmen constructed them with Japanese colonial era methods, erecting bamboo and clay walls clad in weatherboard over brick footings. The office is planned as a single open hall, its entrance porch a simplified karahafu (唐破風), while the residence keeps the standard sequence of Japanese domestic rooms around an engawa (緣側) veranda. Both were registered as historic buildings in 2008, by which time the rest of the wooden campus had long since been modernized and rebuilt in concrete.