This thesis examines difficult heritage in Taiwan through the architectural afterlives of Japanese colonial sites and infrastructures, focusing on former Shinto shrines, sugar factories, and the Alishan Forestry Railway. While existing scholarship has approached Japanese colonial heritage primarily through frameworks of nationalism, postcoloniality, and geopolitical tension, this research argues that the “difficulty” of such heritage can no longer be understood solely through ideological conflict or binary positions of acceptance and rejection. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, spatial observation, questionnaires, mapping, architectural analysis, and grounded theory methodology, the thesis investigates how colonial sites have been gradually absorbed into everyday cultural landscapes, adaptive reuse strategies, tourism economies, and processes of architectural inheritance. Through the concepts of “Curated Postcoloniality” and “Lived Inheritance,” the research explores how colonial architecture is selectively preserved, reformulated, commodified, and reinterpreted under contemporary conditions, revealing that the difficulty of such heritage may reside not only in political contestation but also in what becomes transformed, obscured, or lost through the very processes of inheritance, adaptation, and reuse.

Zihui Huang is a PhD candidate in Architectural History and Theory at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA), London. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Southeast University, China, and a Master’s degree in Architecture from Newcastle University, UK. His doctoral research focuses on the reinterpretation and inheritance of colonial architecture in Taiwan and East Asia. Alongside his doctoral studies, he has contributed to Jiageng Architecture, a forthcoming book examining the architectural legacy of the overseas Chinese philanthropist Tan Kah Kee. His research interests include architectural history, heritage studies, adaptive reuse, and East Asian built environments.