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2013
certainly felt like a busy year. Between January and early November, much of my
writing time was devoted to updating Taiwan: The Bradt Travel Guide,
the second edition of which will be published in spring 2014. This
naturally involved field research in addition to lots of time on the
Internet and telephone; especially enjoyable were my expeditions to
the Matsu National Scenic Area, Mount Dabajian (even though the
weather didn’t cooperate), the coastline and forts near Keelung,
and the eastern counties of Hualien (where, for the first time in
more than a decade, I slept in a temple) and Taitung. A long
motorcycle trip started in Taichung, took me on back roads to
Puli, then on to Sun Moon Lake, Shuili and Chiayi.
The
guidebook project caused me to turn down some work offers, but I
found time to develop additional content for Life of Taiwan (most of
the work for that site was done in 2012), and also write some longish
pieces for Taiwan Review (following the abolition of the Government
Information Office, this monthly is published by the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs) and Taiwan Business Topics (on bats, among other
subjects). I also contributed shorter articles to Culture.TW and
Travel in Taiwan, three inflight magazines, and for the first time
had my by-line in the South China Morning Post and Business Traveller Asia-Pacific.
In many ways, Beigang is a typical Taiwanese town. It functions
as a marketplace and religious center for the surrounding countryside;
there are factories, auto-repair businesses and clinics. However, in
terms of jobs and excitement, there is not enough here to stop young
people from relocating to Taiwan's major cities. As a result the town's
population (currently 42,000) has been shrinking and aging since the
early 1980s.
If the prospect of living in Beigang excites few people, spending
half a day in the town is a popular thing to do, especially around the
time of Mazu's birthday (the 23rd day of the third lunar month; in 2014
it falls on April 22).
Beigang's best-known place of worship is Chaotian Temple.
This folk shrine, founded in 1694, is one of the five most important in
Taiwan devoted to the worship of Mazu, the sea goddess who has long been
the island's most popular deity. Until the 1980s, Chaotian Temple was a
stopover on the annual nine-day, 300-kilometer pilgrimage that honors
Mazu before her birthday. But since a dispute between Chaotian Temple
and Dajia Jenn Lann Temple - the starting point and organizer of
the pilgrimage - the former has played no role in what is now
officially called the Taichung International Mazu Festival. Chaotian Temple is sacred in the eyes of its supporters, but no
place for quiet contemplation. The faithful burn so much incense inside,
and let off so many firecrackers in the grounds, that you may well cut
your visit short without seeing the temple's oddest curiosity: An old
iron nail embedded in a granite step...
The entire article can be read here. The photo shows Shunfenger (one of Mazu's retainers) inside Chaotian Temple.
These
days, Zuoying is a Kaohsiung suburb best known for Lotus Pond
and the colorful temples that surround this pretty body of water. But
back in the 17th century, just after Koxinga expelled the Dutch East India Company from Taiwan, it was the
military and administrative headquarters of Wannian County and thus a place of considerable importance. Today the toponym lives on in the
annual Kaohsiung Zuoying Wannian Folklore Festival.
There are times when people
on this island put their smartphones down and their 21st-century
concerns and ambitions aside, and a much older Taiwan bursts into the
foreground. The final day of the Kaohsiung Zuoying Wannian
Folklore Festival was one such occasion.
My friends and I were positioned in front of Zuoying's Cheng Huang Temple,
enjoying a form of entertainment that's hardly changed in hundreds of
years. Lion dancers, accompanied by drum-beating and gong-thumping
musicians, teased children, snapped their jaws shut inches from
spectators' faces, and threw candies into the crowd. But
the professional and amateur zhentou troupes who perform these and other stunts aren't slavish in their
adherence to tradition. Modern twists on old forms include Techno San
Taizi or Techno Prince performances. Another example followed the lion dancers. Five young men dressed to
resemble the key characters of Journey
To The West danced disco-style to pop music. Even if you've never heard of
this classic Chinese novel, you may well know the story (based on the
adventures of a seventh-century Chinese monk who traveled to India to
study Buddhist scriptures) because it inspired a Japanese TV series
shown throughout the English-speaking world under the title Monkey.
A
few minutes later we turned our attention to the real star of the
show – the Great Wannian Fire Lion.
This effigy, cute yet dignified, is far larger than a real lion. But
for a yellow underbelly, it was covered with red tinsel “fur.”
Red, of course, is an auspicious color in Chinese culture.
The lion is set ablaze at
the very end of the festival so as to carry the wishes of the
faithful up to heaven. Therefore it's designed to burn well. There's
a very real risk of premature destruction, however, because thousands
of firecrackers are detonated beneath and around it as it parades
through Zuoying's streets prior to its sacrifice. I wasn't surprised
to see a man following with a small tank of water and a hand-held
sprayer, ready to put out any fires...
The complete article appears in the November-December issue of Travel in Taiwan, a magazine sponsored by Taiwan's Tourism Bureau.
With my permission, MataTaiwan has republished my recent article on efforts to revive the language of the Sirayan lowland aboriginal tribe on their website. MataTaiwan is an indigenous-themed website mostly in Chinese, and I'm very glad they want to bring my article to more readers.
Taiwan aujourd'hui, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' French-language color monthly, translated two of my articles and published them in their September and November editions. The first piece, Le saumon formosan sur le fil, is about Taiwan's endangered Formosan landlocked salmon; the original English-language version is here. The second, Le Reveil du Siraya, hasn't yet appeared on the magazine's website.
Spiritually motivated travel is perhaps the oldest form of tourism.
In Greater China, Taiwan remains the most vibrant religious culture
centre, where centuries-old folk temples, especially in Tainan and
Lugang, add colour and beauty to urban landscapes.
Taiwan's tourist industry is booming - international arrivals more
than doubled to 7.31 million from 2006 until last year - and religious
sites have reported growing numbers of visitors from Hong Kong, the
mainland and Singapore.
The monastic and educational complex at Dharma Drum Mountain (DDM),
23km northeast of central Taipei, received about 12,000 non-Taiwanese
visitors last year, says Bhikkhuni Guo-jiann Shih, director of DDM's
department of international relations and development. DDM is also the
global headquarters of a Buddhist foundation with affiliates in North
America, Britain and Hong Kong. According to Bhikkhuni Guo-jiann Shih,
non-Taiwanese visitors are especially interested in tours of the
complex, retreats and how the Chan form of Buddhism is practised.
At the end of 2011, another of Taiwan's major Buddhist organisations
opened to the public what is perhaps the island's most striking
religious monument. Fo Guang Shan's Buddha Memorial Centre houses a
tooth, which the faithful believe was retrieved from the ashes after
Buddha was cremated in 543BC. The centre, which cost an estimated US$300
million to build, welcomed 8 million visitors last year. At the
original monastery next to the centre, monks, nuns and volunteers gave
guided tours to more than 240,000 people last year, including more than
150,000 from the mainland...
This article appeared last Friday in a special report on Taiwan published by the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's leading English-language newspaper. To read the whole article, click here. The photo above was taken at dawn recently at Henan Temple, Hualien County.
In the summer of 2005, Chun Jimmy Huang (黃駿), then a doctoral student
at the University of Florida, visited the National Museum of Prehistory
in Taitung, eastern Taiwan. Accompanied by his parents and his sister,
Huang was expecting to learn about the people who lived in Taiwan
thousands of years ago. By the end of his visit, however, he was feeling
somewhat perplexed.
“Inside the museum, there was a display titled ‘Siraya tools’
that included fishing equipment, bamboo utensils and a cradle,” recalls
Huang, now an assistant professor of English and Applied Linguistics at
the University of Guam.
The Siraya, an Austronesian-speaking group, dominated Taiwan’s
southwestern lowlands before and for some decades after the Dutch East
India Company’s (VOC) 1624–1662 occupation of what is now Tainan City in
southern Taiwan. In fact, the word Taiwan, many believe, is derived
from the Siraya language. The Executive Yuan’s Council of Indigenous
Peoples (CIP) recognizes 14 ethnic groups as aboriginal tribes, but in
recent years has rejected petitions seeking formal recognition for the Siraya.
“I realized I’d seen several of the museum exhibits in my home in
Jiali,” he says of Tainan’s Jiali District. “Until then, I’d thought of
myself simply as a ‘Taiwanese’—someone of Southern Min descent,” he
explains. Southern Min is a term used to describe the people and
languages of one part of Fujian, the mainland Chinese province closest
to Taiwan. The majority of Taiwanese trace their ancestry to that part
of China.
“I called relatives on my father’s side to ask about our
identity. To my surprise, a great uncle told me, ‘Oh yes, our family is
actually huan-a,’” says Huang, using a Taiwanese word which
literally means “barbarian.” Commonly applied to Taiwan’s indigenous
minority in the past, the term is now considered offensive.
This discovery surprised not only Huang, but also his father.
“When he was little, his mother, my grandmother, used to take him to
worship a pot like ones we’d seen in pictures in the museum. His
grandmother called the deity Alid, and exactly the same name was
in the notes beside those pictures,” Huang says. “My father, then 54
years old, was rather confused. Like me, he’d always thought of himself
as a Southern Min Taiwanese. But later he remembered having wondered why
his home religion was different from that of his childhood friends.” In
the Siraya language, the word alid originally meant “deity” or “spirit” in the general sense, but in Siraya religion, Alid
is also the supreme spirit that is above all other gods. It is the
water contained in the pot, rather than the pot itself, that embodies
the spirit of Alid...
The rest of this article, which appears in the October issue of the central government's Taiwan Review magazine, can be read online.
