The gallery building

The History Gallery, the Women's School, Truth Hall

This plain red-brick Western-style building is the earliest school building still standing at Tamkang Senior High School, formerly known as the Women's School and as Truth Hall. Dr. George Leslie Mackay founded the Tamsui Girls' School in the late Qing, the beginning of women's education in Taiwan. After it was reorganised as a girls' middle school in 1907, in order to preserve the former Girls' School's function of providing education for adult and married women and of training Bible women, the “Women's School” was founded here in 1910, becoming the earliest mothers' classroom in Taiwan, able to hold at most close to twenty students.

In 1927 it was renamed the “Women's Charity School” to comply with registration law. After the Japanese took over Tamkang Senior High School in 1936 it was gradually discontinued, and the building became the East Wing of the girls' dormitory, given the name “Truth Hall”; together with the Tamsui Girls' School and Oxford College it made up the three girls' dormitories of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. After the war the name Truth Hall continued in use among the people of Tamkang, and the building was converted into quarters for teachers and the dormitory supervisor.

The Truth Hall building was completed in 1910 and was designed by the Reverend William Gauld, the church's noted builder. Its style comes from Europe and America, with Rev. Gauld's consistent characteristics of fine proportion and exquisite brickwork; the red bricks are said to have come from Songshan and the large trusses to have been of Fujian fir. Truth Hall has been repaired many times over ninety years but has always kept its original appearance; the most recent renovation was carried out in 2000, when it was also converted into the Tamkang Senior High School History Gallery, formally completed and opened on 9 March 2002.