To showcase the cultural and historic heritage of Taiwan's capital city, the National Taiwan Museum played host to 12 TED speakers who were in Taipei for the TEDxAmbassadors Meetup 2018 program.
To accommodate TED Ambassadors from nations including Greece, Pakistan, Russia, Thailand, and Vietnam, the National Taiwan Museum customized its monthly "Blast to the Past" walking tour of Old Taipei, and introduced the speakers to the National Taiwan Museum's Land Bank Exhibition Hall, 228 Peace Memorial Park, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei Guest House, Presidential Office Building, and the museum’s Nanmen Park.
Moreover, they were accompanied by trainees of the National Taiwan Museum’s international docent program, which invites foreign students studying in Taiwan to help introduce Taiwan's cultural wealth to overseas visitors. These docents from Indonesia, Malaysia, Romania, and Russia were able to field questions in their respective native languages, much to the delight of the TED speakers.
Hong Shi-you (洪世佑), director of the National Taiwan Museum, noted that in line with the TED motto of "ideas worth spreading," the museum's collections of artifacts and anecdotes serve as an ideal window for getting to know Taiwan's natural and cultural history.
The museum's international docents now organize two ongoing initiatives of the National Taiwan Museum — foreign-language guided tours of the museum and its affiliated exhibition halls, which were all renovated from historic sites such as camphor factories and Japanese-era buildings, and the "Blast in the Past" monthly walking tour that aims to promote the lesser-known stories of Old Taipei.
The guided tours are now available in Cantonese, English, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese. Follow NTMtour on Facebook for information on the latest available outings.