Nagasaki Submarine Cable Museum

A modest red-brick building on the Nishidomari (西泊町) waterfront in Nagasaki, built in 1896 as the power plant for the Army Ministry’s Provisional Taiwan Telegraph Construction Department (臨時台湾電信建設部), the body that laid the first submarine telegraph cable to colonial Taiwan. Steam boilers and pumps here drove the machinery that shifted cable between the adjacent storage tanks and the laying ships, a role the building served until 1968. Preserved for its early Meiji Western architecture, it reopened in 1977 as the Submarine Cable Museum, run by the cable engineering firm on whose grounds it still stands. The museum appears to be open to the public after checking in at the gate.