Havens Apart: Taiwan's Green Island and Lanyu (Unity)

Green Island and Lanyu are similar in some ways – and utterly different in others. Both lie off Taiwan's southeast coast, and both are nubs of solidified magma pushed up by ocean-bottom volcanic eruptions. Also, both are thinly populated. Lanyu has an official population of 4,700, while Green Island has just 3,400 registered residents.

Neither has any industry nor even much farming. This is bad news for the inhabitants – most adults spend several months each year working on Taiwan proper – but it also means the islands are unpolluted. There are no traffic jams, and visitors can find secluded coastal spots where they need not share the sea and sky with others.

Lanyu is unique among the ROC's islands in having an aboriginal Austronesian culture. Green Island's people are of Han Chinese descent, but its history and character have been influenced by those who stayed here unwillingly. Between 1951 and 1990, it was a place of imprisonment for those found guilty of political crimes.

No one can dispute the aptness of Green Island's name. Hilly and verdant, it covers just 15km2 at high tide. At low tide this expands to a little over 17km2 as coral platforms rich in fish, crabs and other creatures are revealed. Snorkeling is the best way to explore this tidal zone, and local tour operators have things set up so even non-swimmers can catch glimpses of what lives in the shallows.

Green Island can be visited as a day trip, although staying at least one night is recommended. Superb scuba diving can be had, especially in the winter when underwater visibility is often 20m. For non-divers, April and May are better months. Temperatures and humidity levels are comfortable, while the strong winds that can make winter ferry crossings unpleasant are seldom a problem.

Most tourists explore the island by motorcycle...

This is part of the article that appears in the July/August edition of Unity, the inflight magazine of UNI Air.

Seeing the Sights in the New Tainan (Taiwan Review)

Around 7 pm each Saturday, tour buses stop at a rate of more than one per minute outside Flowers Night Market in Tainan City, southern Taiwan. The peckish passengers they disgorge quickly join queues—some already a dozen deep—in front of the market’s 300-plus food and drink vendors. 

Many of those coming here to taste local delicacies like oyster omelets and dan zi noodles are outsiders, and not only from other parts of Taiwan. Mainland Chinese accents are often heard, and for most Hong Kongers and Singaporeans visiting Tainan, the night market is a “must-see.”

 
Tourism in Tainan, a special municipality created at the end of 2010 when Tainan City merged with Tainan County, is booming, and Flowers Night Market is not the only attraction drawing dense crowds. Tourist days spent in Tainan typically include visits to the city’s Confucius Temple and to Fort Zeelandia. The temple was founded during the Kingdom of Dongning, a mini-state established by Ming dynasty (1368–1644) loyalists who had fled from mainland China under the leadership of Koxinga. Better known to Chinese-speakers as Zheng Cheng-gong (鄭成功,1624–1662), Koxinga is remembered for forcing the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) to leave Taiwan in 1662. Fort Zeelandia, built by the VOC soon after the trading enterprise established a colony in what is now Tainan in 1624, is one of the oldest European buildings in Asia.

According to statistics from the Republic of China’s (ROC) Tourism Bureau, since late 2011 around 80,000 people per month have been visiting Fort Zeelandia; in 2008, the monthly average was just more than 52,000. During the same period, the number touring the Koxinga Shrine, a temple where Zheng is revered as a deity, has more than doubled to about 25,000 each month.

“The former Tainan City has a high density of monuments, characteristic architecture and traditional culture, while the former Tainan County has folk customs, agriculture and natural ecosystems,” says the municipality’s mayor, William C.T. Lai (賴清德). “In addition, there’s a diverse festival culture. Other cities and counties have unique orientations, but none of them has as many resources as Tainan. The integration of festival activities, ecology, customs and local industries will naturally attract more tourists and boost consumption, and this is Tainan City Government’s core development concept for the tourism industry...”

The whole article can be read online, or in the July issue of Taiwan Review. The photo above was taken on a typical Saturday night in Flowers Night Market (that's the official English name; many sources refer to it as Huayuan Night Market). You can see I wasn't exaggerating when I wrote about dense crowds and long queues.

A professor in Boston writes...

Last week, I received the following email:

Dear Mr. Crook,

Hi. I’m a law professor at Boston University, and I’m working on a book about examples from around the world where religious practices happen to harm the environment. One of the examples I’m interested in investigating is the practice of burning paper and incense in China and countries with significant Chinese populations (other examples include idol immersion in India, depletion of palm tree populations from Palm Sunday celebrations, and Native American uses of bald eagles in the US). 

I came across a terrific article that you wrote about joss paper in Taiwan in Taiwan Today, and I was wondering if I could ask you a couple of questions about the issue that might help me in my research. At some point I’m hoping to make a trip to Taiwan and/or Singapore and/or Hong Kong to try and investigate the issue a little myself, but right now I’m at the very beginning of my research and just trying to figure out the basics...

Thanks so much in advance for whatever help you might be able to provide.

In my reply, I suggested "mercy release" as another angle he could look into. He responded:

I had not heard of the mercy release issue. It's exactly the kind of thing I want to talk about in the book. Thanks very much for pointing me to it. I might have some questions on that after I do some reading on it.

It's definitely true that many religions do a lot of good things for the environment. I'm going to be clear about that in the book, but that's not what the book is going to be about. Nor is it going to be about how some religious beliefs lead to bad environmental results (e.g., because some beliefs cause some people to devalue scientific findings on climate change, etc.). What I'm really interested in here are religious practices specifically that have environmental consequences and how society and government ought to deal with those collisions. That's why the mercy release issue is perfect...

Taiwan for Culture Vultures: Kindle version now available

Taiwan for Culture Vultures: Taiwan's Historical, Religious, Artistic And Architectural Highlights, the downloadable guide I wrote for Guidegecko in the second half of last year, is now out in kindle format.

On the trail of the Purple Crow (Travel in Taiwan)

Taiwan's butterflies have yet to attract the kind of international attention the island's birds now enjoy. But just as birdwatchers come to seek out species seen nowhere else in the world, butterfly enthusiasts who arrive at the right time of year can see a remarkable natural phenomenon: The annual 250km migration of purple crow butterflies (紫斑蝶).

To the untrained eye, Taiwan’s four Purple Crow species are hard to tell apart. Wingspans range from 60mm to 75mm. All four appear dark brown when stationary, but eye-catching patches of blue and purple become visible when they open their wings.

Researchers and volunteers are working hard to better understand the lepidopteran treasures that flutter in Taiwan's fields and forests. Travel in Taiwan recently met up with some of these dedicated individuals for a whistle-stop tour of two purple-crow hot spots – Linnei in Yunlin County (雲林縣林內鄉) and Kaohsiung City's Maolin District (高雄市茂林區).

Approaching Linnei by train, it's the hills inland of the railway line which grab your attention, and we soon learn that topography is one reason why this little township is a bottleneck along the purple crows' migration route. Prevailing winds and the availability of food also influence when and where the butterflies move, but in recent years a stretch of National Freeway No. 3 in Linnei has become famous for the vast number of purple crows (sometimes 500 to 1,000 per minute) who fly over it early each spring. In 2007 - in a move reported by the BBC, National Geographic Channel and other global media - the authorities closed one lane of the freeway and erected 4m-high fencing along one side in an effort to cut the number of butterfly road casualties...

The complete article is in the May/June issue of Travel in Taiwan magazine.

Traveling in Taiwan for Muslims

I've just received my copy of this new 104-page booklet issued by Taiwan's Tourism Bureau in conjunction with the Taiwan Visitors Association. I wrote half of the 17,000-word text, the bulk of which is no different to other guides to the island. There are descriptions of tourist attractions like Jinguashi and Lugang - plus also details of halal restaurants and information about mosques. Before working on this project, I had no idea there was a masjid in Tainan (it's located less than 5km from where I'm working at this very moment).

When I mentioned to friends I was helping write a guide for Muslim tourists, a common response was incredulity: Several people said, quite reasonably, that eating would be a problem for observant Muslims because so many Taiwanese dishes include pork. Nevertheless, I think publishing this booklet makes sense. Even though it doesn't contain a lot of fresh information, it sends a signal to potential visitors in Muslim countries that Taiwan welcomes then. Now that Muslim tourists aren't especially welcome in the US and some other places, it's a market that may well show lot of growth.

Writing about Thailand on Guidegecko.com

Since our three-week trip to Thailand over the Chinese Lunar New Year (the sixth time I've traveled there), I've been contributing to Guidegecko.com, adding pages about elephant riding, bamboo rafting, getting around on a rented motorcycle and other topics. I would happily contribute more, but I think spending time on projects for which the financial outcome is certain and guaranteed is more important than working on revenue-sharing webpages, even though the latter can be a lot of fun.

I seldom blog for the sake of blogging, but the Thailand trip did prompt me to note some differences between Taiwan and Thailand which concern Western tourists.