In June 1858, the Qing dynasty signed the Treaty of Tientsin in Tianjin, and among its many consequences was the opening of several Taiwanese ports to international trade. Anping, the harbor district of what is now Tainan, became one of them. Foreign merchants flooded in, and Tait & Company -- a firm with deep roots in East Asian commerce -- was among the first to establish operations. By 1867, the company had built this two-story merchant house along with an adjacent warehouse. From here, they managed the export of granulated sugar and camphor, two of Taiwan's most valuable commodities. Camphor, derived from the island's vast camphor laurel forests, was in global demand for pharmaceuticals and the emerging celluloid industry. Sugar moved in bulk. The building was the nerve center of a colonial trade operation that connected Anping's harbor to markets across the world.

When Japan took control of Taiwan in 1895, the new colonial government moved quickly to monopolize the island's most profitable trades. Camphor and opium became state enterprises, and foreign trading houses like Tait & Company found themselves squeezed out. The company left Taiwan, and by 1911 its Anping properties had been converted into offices and storage for the Japan Salt Company. The merchant house that had once managed exports to the British Empire now tracked domestic salt production. After Japan's defeat in World War II and the handover of Taiwan to the Republic of China in 1945, the building entered yet another phase, becoming the office of the Tainan Salt Works. Salt, it seemed, was the one constant across colonial transitions.

In 1979, the building was transformed into the Taiwan Development Historical Materials Wax Museum. The ground floor now tells the story of immigration to Taiwan -- the waves of settlers from mainland China, the indigenous peoples who preceded them, the Dutch and Spanish colonizers who arrived in the 17th century, and the Japanese who governed for fifty years. Upstairs, wax sculptures depict humans, animals, and artifacts from Taiwan's layered history. The building was designated a Class 3 historical site, its western colonial architecture -- designed with a center pathway and three rooms on each side at ground level -- preserved as an artifact of the treaty port era. The upper floor's arcade railing, decorated with green-glazed vase-shaped balusters, reflects the aesthetic preferences of 1860s British commercial architecture adapted to a tropical climate. Next door, the warehouse that Tait & Company built alongside the merchant house has become the Anping Tree House, consumed by a banyan tree over decades of abandonment.