Hakka Cultural Artifacts Exhibition Hall

Several small museums around Taiwan celebrate the culture of the island's Hakka minority, and the one in Pingtung County's Xishi isn't bad, even though there's very little English labelling.

For me, the most interesting sections are those displaying traditional clothing and dealing with a custom that existed throughout the Chinese world, but which used to be especially strong in Hakka villages - that of scouring the streets for scraps of paper on which words were written or printed, picking them up and then taking them to a special furnace for burning. This tradition is said to reflect a deep reverence for learning and literacy.

According to Francis L. K. Hsu's often stupendously dull but occasionally fascinating book Americans & Chinese: Passage to Differences, traditional Chinese communities lacked the broad range of voluntary non-kinship groups we find in affluent societies including 21st-century Taiwan. Hsu says there were three exceptions: Associations that provided free coffins to the indigent, teetotalers' groups, and associations that, "hired men to roam the streets with bags on their backs and pointed sticks in their hands. They collected any piece of waste bearing written characters in the gutter or on the ground and burned what they collected at the end of the day in the specially provided urn in the local Confucian temple."

The museum includes a pair of dedicated baskets once used for collecting written-on paper (pictured above left).

I'm pretty certain the custom has died out. Would modern-day practitioners collect every single item bearing Chinese characters - cigarette packets, candy wrappers and the like?

The Hakka Cultural Artifacts Exhibition Hall (六堆客家文化園) is in the heart of Zhutian Township's Xishi Village (竹田鄉西勢村) and it's open Tuesday to Sunday, 09.00-17.30. If you read Chinese, you'll notice the Chinese name is actually "Liudui Hakka Culture Zone." The term Liudui doesn't refer to specific place, but rather to the six clusters of Hakka settlements in Pingtung and Kaohsiung who raised a militia to protect themselves during the Zhu Yi-gui (朱一貴) uprising of 1721.

The zone's other feature is an Yimin Temple (忠義祠). Similar temples throughout Taiwan celebrate the sacrifices made by militiamen during various rebellions. The exhibition hall and the temple side by side, about 500m from Xishi TRA Station.

As seen in many temples...

The character 囍 (pronounced xǐ) is often prominent in temples and also on the red paper banners glued to household doorways around the Lunar New Year. It means "joy" or "double happiness," and is thus greatly auspicious.

SketchUp images of Taiwan landmarks

Drawings of dozens of temples, city gates, public buildings and other notable structures in Taiwan can be found on Google's SketchUp pages. However, doing a search isn't easy if you don't read Chinese.

Among them are Lukang Folk Arts Museum, the Japanese-era Assembly Hall in the same town, Taiwan's oldest Catholic Church, (in Wanjin, Pingtung County), and the ornamental gate of Donglong Temple in Donggang, also in Pingtung.

Religion and political correctness

This fascinating 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal relates how some temples in Kinmen County, an archipelago within shelling-distance of China, have toned down their anticommunist message in recent years, ever since tourists from the mainland - rather than ROC soldiers posted there to keep the communists at bay - have become a backbone of the economy.

A typical winter's day in the mountains of the south

Driving towards Namasia in Kaohsiung, on the final day of the Year of Tiger. Days like this - sunny yet not unpleasantly hot - are very common in the southern half of Taiwan between October and March. In the north, winters are decidedly wetter and colder.

Books: When Valleys Turned Blood Red

This book, written by an expert in Chinese and Taiwanese religions, explores a 1915 rebellion against Japanese rule in south Taiwan that left well over 1,000 dead. As author Paul R. Katz explains in his Introduction, the Ta-pa-ni Incident:

"[which was] named after the town where the fiercest fighting took place, was one of the largest acts of armed resistance to occur during the colonial era... [rebels] quickly overwhelmed numerous police stations in the mountains of today's Tainan and Kaohsiung counties. The uprising lasted for over one month and was put down only after sustained counterattacks by Japanese military and police forces."

That town is now known as Yujing (玉井). Fighting also convulsed the districts now called Nanhua (南化) and Jiaxian (甲仙). Because the rebels were led by a Kaohsiung native called Yu Ching-fang (余清芳), the revolt is also referred as the Yu Ching-fang Incident.

Japan did a great deal to develop Taiwan's economy and infrastructure. However, the beneficiaries were more often than not Japanese businessmen and corporations. (Most of the European and American firms active in Taiwan in the 1880s and 1890s found themselves squeezed out by World War I). As Katz explains, many local gentry resented Japanese rule for this reason, and ended up throwing in their lot with the rebels. He also explores how religion motivated the leaders.

It's a thorough and interesting book, but the subject matter is perhaps a little obscure for most readers.

Local colour VII

Morning mist settles over a betel nut plantation in the foothills of Chiayi County.