The decision to donate rather than sell was significant. The Koo family could have converted the property to other uses as Lukang modernized around it — the town's historic core was undergoing its own transformation by the mid-20th century. Instead, the compound was opened as a museum dedicated to the folk arts and everyday life of Taiwan's Qing dynasty and early Republican periods. The museum holds objects that range from the ceremonial to the intimate: lacquerware, porcelain, carved stones, embroidery, musical instruments, vintage photographs. Household items, travel gear, religious implements, and celebratory artifacts sit side by side, tracing the texture of life across social classes and occasions. The collection does not celebrate only the elite — it preserves the everyday alongside the exceptional.

The museum compound contains two principal structures, each carrying a different architectural lineage. The Yang Building, completed in 1919, exemplifies Meiji-period construction: its design and materials reflect Japanese craftsmanship of that era, and it stands as one of the better-preserved examples of Meiji-influenced architecture in Taiwan. The Ku Feng Building is older in spirit if not in date — an 18th-century-style structure in wood and brick built in the Min-nan manner of southern Fujian. Walking between these two buildings is a kind of compressed history of the cultural currents that shaped Taiwan: the deep roots in Fujian immigrant tradition, overlaid with the Japanese colonial period that followed. The unusual pairing of Asian vernacular and Western-inflected Japanese architecture within a single compound gives the museum its distinctive character.

Moriyama Matsunosuke was among the most prolific architects working in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period. His buildings can still be found in Taipei and across the island, often distinguished by their confident handling of Japanese and Western classical forms. The Koo mansion represents his engagement with local taste and context — a design that doesn't simply import Japanese forms but blends them with the strong regional character of Lukang, a town that retained a deep connection to its Fujianese roots. The result is a building that looks Japanese in its structural logic but feels rooted in Taiwan. This quality of layered influence without loss of local identity is precisely what makes the museum's architecture as interesting as its collection.

Lukang's decline as a trading port in the late 19th century — when the harbor silted and the railway bypassed the town — paradoxically preserved its historic fabric. The Koo family mansion, like many of Lukang's old structures, survived because there was less pressure for redevelopment than in faster-growing cities. The Folk Arts Museum is the most formal expression of this accidental preservation: a private home that became a public trust, its contents spanning the mid-Qing dynasty through the early Republic. More than 6,000 objects from everyday Taiwanese life now have a home here — rescued from dispersal by an act of family generosity and civic commitment that created one of the country's most atmospheric regional museums. Lukang's loss of commercial relevance turned out to be its greatest cultural gift.