Pingtung Folk Art Museum Introduction
Pingdong Hometown Art Museum is located in Tienliao Lane, Pingtung City. It was originally the Qiu family's old house, known as "Zhongshi Di," which was initially built in 1896 by Qiu Yuan-shou, the son of the Hakka general Qiu Feng-yang who led the Six Piles Hakka militia against the Japanese. Later, Qiu Yuan-shou and his son Qiu Qiu-shun operated the Taiwan Sugar Company, accumulating significant wealth, which allowed them to renovate Zhongshi Di in 1915, a project that took three years to complete. In 1991, due to the expansion plans of the Zhongzheng Junior High School in Pingtung City, the Qiu family donated two old houses and their land to the school. One of the old houses was demolished for the construction of a sports field. In 1993, as the school prepared to demolish Zhongshi Di, local politicians, academic figures, and cultural historians campaigned vigorously for its preservation, which ultimately succeeded. In 1995, Zhongshi Di was transformed into the Pingdong Hometown Art Museum and was later designated as a historical building in Pingtung County. The Pingdong Hometown Art Museum covers an area of about 220 ping and has a "four-character" layout, being a traditional Hakka siheyuan (courtyard house) with two halls and two side wings. The center of the house is a courtyard surrounded by a front hall entryway and a back hall main hall corridor. The entryway is the most ornate part of the old house, featuring a roof ridge adorned with clay sculptures and paintings shaped like waves, a central screen door embellished with intricate gold carvings, and decorative features such as hanging floral carvings, hanging cylinder carvings, bird-rest carvings, and lion seat carvings in the eaves. The side corridors showcase plaster sculptures and colorful paintings, which highlight the outstanding wealth of the Qiu family at that time. This shows that the decoration techniques of the Pingdong Hometown Art Museum are exceptionally rich, including stone carving, wood carving, pebbled washing, painting, Chaozhou pottery, paper cut, and clay sculpture, all of which display exquisite artistic decorations. Additionally, the museum retains complete features such as the gate tower, horizontal lane, ancestral hall, half floors, courtyard, and corridors, all of which demonstrate that the Hometown Art Museum is a uniquely characteristic historical building.
