臺南奎樓書院

July 27th, 2024

Established in 1726 by provincial governor Wu Changzuo (吳昌祚) as Kuixing Hall (魁星堂)¹, this school emerged as one of the four major academies of Qing dynasty Tainan. It was relocated to its current location in 1926 due to road construction, specifically the opening of what would become the present-day Zhongzheng Road (中正路). The new building had an imposing tower, which likely explains the name change, with “lou” (樓) indicating multiple storeys.

The contemporary appearance of an old academy in back alley Tainan.

Tiger Shrine Inside Tainan Kuilou Acadamy (臺南奎樓書院)

This part of the city was extensively firebombed over the course of March 1945 during the Tainan Air Raid (臺南大空襲)² in World War 2. The newly relocated school was not spared, and after the fires were put out, only some of the stone ornaments and a handful of relics survived. Ultimately the academy was reconstructed in 1955, albeit in a simplified single-story form that differed significantly from its previous incarnations.

The interior of the old kindergarten prior to renovations in the late 2010s.

Its use as a place of education continued in the post-war era with Kuilou Kindergarten (奎樓幼稚園校舍), a simple red brick and wood structure next to the old academy, that operated for decades before succumbing to neglect and abandonment. Nowadays the building is an academy in name only, with the main hall allocated for shrines to the five gods of literature (五文昌). More recently it has been subject of a bitter legal dispute among members of the management committee.

Kuixing (魁星) is the patron saint of calligraphers usually depicted as contorting his body into a series of brushstrokes. ↩
405 people were killed a huge swathe of the densely populated downtown core of the city was wiped out on March 1st, 1945. Taiwan Air Power has more details about this event and for a more human touch, consider reading this article (in Chinese or Japanese) based on an account of the raid by a Taiwanese doctor. ↩