Well, at this rate I'm not going to get this paper done any time soon. Today I spent more time reading than writing. (OK, so that's an understatement. These are actually the first four sentences I've written today!) 😭
On the bright side, this evening I came across a new website (via Twitter) that contains a lot of digitized historical books from Taiwan: it's called the Taiwan eBook Database, and it's from the National Central Library in Taiwan. So far it contains over 32,000 books from 1900-1950 or so, and it's free, so that's a good thing! It doesn't seem possible to download the ebooks, but you can view them online.
Given my interests, I was digging around for some Guoyu textbooks and came across one from undated book entitled 《臺灣暫用小學國語課本甲編》 (roughly, Temporary Elementary Mandarin Textbook for Taiwan, First Edition). The first couple of lessons are interesting:
第一課 臺灣人
Lesson One: Taiwanese
我是臺灣人
I am Taiwanese
你是臺灣人
You are Taiwanese
他是臺灣人
He is Taiwanese
我們都是臺灣人
We are all Taiwanese
第二課 中國人
Lesson Two: Chinese
我們的祖宗 是福建人 是廣東人
Our ancestors are Fujianese. are Cantonese
福建人 廣東人 臺灣人 都是中國人
Fujianese. Cantonese Taiwanese all are Chinese
They kind of threw me off with the first unit, but then they were back to my expectations with Unit 2. Later on, in Unit 16, they get to 中華民國 and tell us that everyone has a name, and schools have their names too, and so do nations.
爸爸說 我們的國名是中華民國 我們應該記住我們的國名
Father says Our country's name is the Republic of China We should remember our country's name.
Unit 17 is about the beautiful flag, Unit 18 is about Sun Yat-sen, Unit 19 is about commemorating Sun, Unit 20 is about how a young Sun Yat-sen dealt with foreigners who made fun of his queue.
But I think my "favorite" part is in Unit 24:
第二十四課 日本侵略中國
Lesson 24 Japan Invades China
老師站在地圖旁邊 拿著一幅圖給大家看
Teacher stands next to the map holding a picture for everyone to see
上面畫著一片秋海棠葉 又畫著一條毛蟲
On the picture are a begonia leaf and a caterpillar
老師說 這裡秋海棠葉的位置 正式地圖上中國的位置
Teacher says The location of this begonia leaf is where China is on the map
這裡毛蟲的位置 正式地圖上日本的位置
The location of the caterpillar is where Japan is on the map
這裡畫著毛蟲爬去吃秋海棠葉 就是表明從前日本想侵略中國
In this picture the caterpillar is climbing up to eat the begonia leaf. This shows that Japan wanted to invade China before
From there, the rest of the book is about the war between China and Japan. It's an interesting read...
[Update, 6/4/21: I found an interesting post on an "extinct" blog, "活水來冊房," about the postwar "Mandarin fever" in Taiwan: "台灣戰後國語熱"--it includes some images of this book, but it appears to be a different edition than the one in the NCL? There's also a book entitled《文白之爭──語文;教育;國族的百年戰場》that mentions this textbook. I also came across an article entitled "戰後臺灣山地教育教科書初探（1951~1958）" that explores an Indigenous perspective on some of the units in this textbook.
Here's another edition of the book. And another.]
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