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Meinong is one of the loveliest corners of south Taiwan. Blessed with fertile, well-watered farmlands and a backdrop of steep hills, its population is dominated by the Hakka ethnic minority.
Forty kilometers northeast of downtown Kaohsiung, but easily accessible thanks to Freeway 10 and frequent buses, it draws several different kinds of visitor. Gourmands come for authentic Hakka cuisine; outdoors types enjoy the seven color-coded bicycle paths; shoppers look for souvenirs that hark back to an era before plastic; while eco-tourists seek out beautiful butterflies.
Hakka cooking isn’t to everyone’s liking. It’s saltier, greasier and more vinegary than mainstream Taiwanese cuisine. Meinong’s most famous comestible is bantiao. These broad white noodles are made from rice flour, whereas conventional Taiwanese noodles are made from wheat. Bantiao may be fried with slivers of pork and carrot, or boiled and then served either in soup or dry with a few small slices of pork on top.
Another common dish in Meinong is ke-jia-xiao-chao, a stir fry blending dried squid, dried tofu, strips of pork and green vegetables. Meinong is no exception to the rule that much of Taiwan’s best food is to be found in the island's least pretentious eateries. Near Minsheng and Zhongzheng roads there are at least half-dozen places where customers sit on plastic stools. The service may not be polished, but the prices seldom top NT$120 per person.
Among Meinong's 45,000 inhabitants are a few dozen who make a living crafting oil-paper umbrellas. Few tourist destinations in Taiwan are so closely associated with one particular product as Meinong is with its colorful parasols.
Traditionally these umbrellas were used in both sunny and rainy weather. They als
o had a symbolic role – because the Hakka word for paper zhi is very similar to that for children zi, they were often given as wedding presents.
Made of thin strips of bamboo and varnished paper, the umbrellas are painted by hand – often with typically Chinese motifs like dragons, birds, delicate flowers or wise sages – and then dried under the sun. You should expect to pay around NT$1500 for a 19-inch umbrella...
Over the past few years, I've written several articles about Meinong, including this longish one, and another about the town's Hakka cuisine. The photo on the left shows a government-issued license to grow and dry tobacco, pasted to the door of one of Meinong's redundant tobacco curing shed. The photo lower right shows one such shed.
Nothing ever changes in Lugang (often spelled "Lukang"), and that's why so many people adore it. Halfway down Taiwan's west coast, the town is a place where tradition has stood firm against modernity.
For this we can thank the crude pursuit of profit that used to dominate the town, some stick-in-the-mud thinking, and the selfishness of a colonial power. Old school commerce made Lugang what it is. For over 100 years, from the early 18th century, the only settlement in Taiwan larger was the then capital, Tainan. Qing Dynasty mandarins seldom made their presence felt in Lugang, as disputes were mediated by the eight guild-like trade groupings called
The shape-shifting nature of Taiwan's coastline dealt the town a series of blows. Silt choked the harbor in 1717, but by 1740 it was again broad and deep. When times were good, thousands of vessels per year unloaded Chinese cloth and crockery, then shipped Taiwanese rice, sugar, hemp and ramie to the Chinese coast. In the late 19th century, sediment again blocked the port. And when the Japanese took control of Taiwan in 1895, they reoriented the island's economy, at a stroke rupturing ancient trade links between Lugang and Fujian. The town might have recovered were it not for the conservative outlook of local leaders. In the early days of the Japanese occupation, believing rail transportation would never catch on, they lobbied against a rail link...
This article appeared in the August issue of Verve, EVA Air's monthly inflight magazine.
Several museums in Taiwan celebrate the industries which transformed the island from an agrarian backwater to an economic powerhouse. Former sugar refineries have been converted into tourist attractions, and there are places where visitors can learn how saxophones are made, or how hot glass is blown to make lampshades.
Taiwan Balloons Museum focuses on a line of business that few people think about unless they are organizing a wedding or a birthday party. In most people's minds, balloons are the humblest of products – cheap, simple and thrown away at the end of the day. But, as anyone who tours this museum will find out, there is much more to making a good balloon than meets the eye...
To read the whole article, go here. I visited the museum as part of this project.
For the third year running, I joined one of the Research, Development & Evaluation Commission's judging teams for the English Emblem program. In recent weeks we visited two dozen businesses in the counties of Taichung, Changhua and Yilan, among them a winery, some homestays, a mushroom wholesaler and two hospitals.
A book I edited last year, Troy Parfitt's Why China Will Never Rule The World, has been picking up positive reviews on Amazon.com.
At the time of writing, 10 of the 33 reviewers had given it five stars, and 17 had given it four. One of the shorter five-star reviews says:
"This book is quite astounding. I hadn't realized when I started it that the book was so chock-filled with condensed and very informative and entertaining historical treatises. And I had thought that maybe the title was a little overboard given that the author had never lived for a substantial period in this sprawling toxic wasteland. Don't be fooled! Troy Parfitt knows his stuff, that is quite clear. He gives his subjects more than ample opportunity to prove themselves, and at every step they confirm his thesis. Of course, anyone who spends longer than a few weeks in China (4 years for me) will soon begin to have inklings of the same conclusion, that the Chinese are not, nor will probably ever be, ready for prime-time, and that we've been fed a steady diet of rah-rah China hype and BS in the Western media. Mr. Parfitt gives an almost scientific treatment to our suspicions. And one that is frequently laugh-out-loud funny. Old China hands will likely suffer a sore neck after extended reading from near constant nodding in agreement with the author's experiences and well-documented conclusions. But the dreariness of the landscape he paints is regularly interrupted with moments of keyboard-splattering hilarity, as I mentioned, and with lots of myth-busting history dealing with the big players (Mao, Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek) and major events (founding of modern China, the civil war, the war with Japan, and Taiwan). As the product description says, this book is vital for anyone wishing to understand what China is, what it has been, and what it is likely to become."
I heard about this a few days after the report appeared, but I didn't see a physical copy of the item until last week. On August 3, the China Daily News, a Chinese-language newspaper based here in Tainan, ran a quarter-page report and color photograph about my recent meeting with Yan Hong-sen, whom I was interviewing for a Hong Kong magazine. Professor Yan, an engineer and vice president of National Chengkung University, is quite famous in Taiwan for his collection of ancient locks. He's amassed almost 700 locks, and written a book on the subject.The English version of the press release on which the report was based is still online.
Meinong is one of the loveliest corners of south Taiwan. Blessed with fertile, well-watered farmlands and a backdrop of steep hills, its population is dominated by the Hakka ethnic minority.
o had a symbolic role – because the Hakka word for paper zhi is very similar to that for children zi, they were often given as wedding presents.
