Opening Up Taiwan's Clam Heartland (Travel in Taiwan)

Taiwan is - no exaggeration - a paradise for lovers of seafood, with clams being a particular favorite. They appear in soups and stir-fries, and can also be grilled or pickled. Curious why Taiwan enjoys such an abundance of clams, and eager to sample some of the island’s best, Travel in Taiwan recently headed to the southern city of Tainan in search of answers.

Clams are found around the world, in freshwater as well as oceans. An Arctica islandica clam found in the sea off Iceland in 2006 turned out to be 507 years old, making it the oldest individual animal ever discovered whose age could be accurately ascertained. Clams, like trees, have annual growth bands, although the ones enjoyed in Taiwan’s restaurants are seldom more than two years old.

For as long as humans have been living on the island, clams have featured in Taiwanese cuisine. Clam shells have been discovered in middens around the island. Even now, at many points along the coast, some members of the older generation still gather and cook wild clams. But the vast majority of clams eaten in Taiwan nowadays are cultivated in coastal ponds along the southwestern coast. With over 100 hectares devoted to raising clams, Tainan’s Qigu District (台南市七股區) plays a major part in local shellfish production.

Outside Taiwan, Qigu is best known for Black-faced Spoonbills and other migratory birds which spend each winter here. The presence of so many birds is no coincidence. The mild conditions in which clams thrive also support shrimps, snails and small fish, staple foods for waterbirds.

Qigu’s clam-raising heartland is utterly flat. Compared to other parts of Taiwan the absence of buildings and greenery is striking. The region is criss-crossed by long straight roads and utilities poles; at least three quarters of the surface area is covered with water...

This article also appears in the May/June issue of Travel in Taiwan, and on the magazine's website.

Land of Salt, Sugar and Shrines (Travel in Taiwan)

Taiwan’s southwest is a treasure house of traditional culture and rural scenery. However, exploring beyond the major cities of Tainan and Chiayi is not easy for those without their own vehicle. The Taiwan Tourist Shuttle Southwest Coast Route plugs this gap. 

Stop I: Garlic Sugar Factor 

Both garlic and sugar grow well in south Taiwan, but they are not usually blended. The name of this factory actually derives from an unusual place name. Suantou (literally “garlic”) is a tiny village on the Chianan Plain (嘉南平原), and the sugar factory here is one of Taiwan’s oldest, having began operations in 1904.

Until the 1950s, sugar was Taiwan’s no. 1 export, with about one-fifth of the island’s farmland devoted to sugar cultivation. Since then the industry has been in steady decline because Taiwan’s sugar is too expensive to compete with cane grown in Brazil and elsewhere. Most of Taiwan’s sugar factories are shuttered and a few have been dismantled. Suantou’s has been idle for over a decade, yet remains intact. As such, it is a magnet for those curious about Taiwan’s industrial heritage.

It is also one of just a handful of places in Taiwan where sugar trains still run. At the industry’s zenith, diesel locomotives hauled wagons full of cane from plantations to sugar factories, and passenger cars from town to town. The network comprised about 900 km of 762-mm-gauge track.

Arriving with time to spare before the 10am train (there’s another at 3pm each day; extra services are put on when needed), we sampled some of unusual ice lollies sold here. The taro and pineapple flavors are popular, but I recommend the sugarcane juice lolly - refreshing as well as fitting.

After buying our tickets (NT$100 for adults, discounts for students, children and seniors) inside Suantou’s endearingly quaint passenger station (a relic of the Japanese colonial era, which lasted from 1895 to 1945), we boarded the train. The contrast with Taiwan’s high-speed railway - which is visible just to the east - could not be greater. With an average speed of 15 km/h, bench seats and open sides, it is a true “slow travel” experience. The on-board guide provided a stream of commentary in Chinese about local history, the sugar industry, flora and fauna. The rodents which inhabit sugarcane fields, she told us, grow big and healthy, and are quite the delicacy!

After trundling through nearby fields - some are still used for growing cane - the train returned to the factory [where the photo above was taken]. Wandering inside the main building, we saw massive machines formerly used to crush cane, and vats where the pulp was boiled. Engineers are sure to find the machinery fascinating, and anyone whose eyes appreciate the subtleties of shadow and light will be beguiled. There has been no effort to spruce up the interior for visitors - commendable honesty.

The area lacks both gradients and heavy traffic, so cycling is a popular pastime. Biking from Suantou to Dongshi’s Fisherman’s Wharf (東石漁人碼頭) takes two and a half hours, almost half of which is on a dedicated bikeway. Bicycles can be rented for NT$100 to NT$250 per day from a store just behind Suantou’s old railway station. The Tourist Shuttle stops at Fisherman’s Wharf before heading south to Budai. 

Stop II: Budai  

Ask ten people what you ought to do when visiting this lively seaside town, and buying or eating seafood is sure to dominate the answers given by nine of them. Budai Seafood Market (布袋漁市), where dozens of seafood vendors sell live crabs, bucketfulls of shellfish, cuts of grouper and other ultra-fresh delights, is also a splendid place to enjoy lunch. Little English is spoken in the 40-odd eateries which surround the vendors, but photo menus do a good job of overcoming any language barrier... 

The full article (in all, four stops are described) can be read in the May/June issue of Travel in Taiwan, or on the magazine's website.

Bilingual Living Environment Commission of Kaohsiung City

In my (physical) mailbox yesterday: A letter from Kaohsiung City Government, notifying me that I've been reappointed a commissioner of the Bilingual Living Environment Commission of Kaohsiung City for the year of 2014. I've been a member of this committee since 2011. It's an honor and I feel flattered they value my opinions. Oddly, I was never asked if I wanted to join the committee – I was appointed, and sent a letter, and that was that! Also, this year isn't the first in which the reappointment notice has come long after January 1...

The commission meets every few months and it's work includes reviewing translations of places names (including tourist attractions) and the names of local government agencies. One place we haven't talked about is the Chen Jhong-he Memorial Hall, pictured here. 

You Don't Know China - A new book by John Ross

You Don't Know China: Twenty-two Enduring Myths Debunked is a brand new book by John Ross, published by Camphor Press.

Ross is a friend of mine, and I had the pleasure and privilege of reading substantial segments of this book while it was being written. His first chapter, titled “Five Thousand Years of History,” deals with a canard familiar to all who've been anywhere near China, and one which I encountered several times back in the 1990s when I was doing a lot of English teaching.

I was often told by adult students here in Taiwan that they were proud of their Chinese heritage because “China has 5,000 years of history.” Challenging dearly-held ideas is always fun, so I sometimes responded by pointing out that other civilizations around the world are just as old if not older. This seemed to make little impression, so I changed tack. I'd ask students how old their motorcycles were, then point to the one with the most ancient set of wheels and declare his was the most admirable because it was older than others. It's just possible my joke made a few of them ponder what Ross slams as “the hypocrisy of glorifying history yet so poorly preserving it.”

This is the kind of book where a dozen readers will likely have a dozen different favorite chapters. Ross takes his scalpel (and occasionally a hammer) to feng shui, traditional Chinese medicine, and the eagerness of some Westerners to relocate to China or study Mandarin.

Ross is on top form when discussing financier Jim Rogers' much-discussed move from the USA to Singapore (because Rogers thinks Asia is theplace to be and that his daughter ought to learn Mandarin):

The city state of Singapore is about the same distance from Shanghai as London is distant from a remote southern Saharan town called Timbuktu. Rogers chose to relocate to Singapore rather than to a Chinese city as he would have preferred because of China’s horrendous pollution and the potential effect this would have on his children’s health. Even for someone of Rogers’ enormous wealth, it’s impossible to find a city in China offering anything approaching a high quality of life. China is not the place to be. Comparisons with New York of the early twentieth century are laughable. In 1907 well over one-third of New York’s population was foreign born. Foreigners are not flocking to China; the numbers are miniscule even for the big cities of Shanghai and Beijing. According to local officials, Shanghai had 173,000 resident foreigners at the end of 2012. Far more people are trying to get out of China than trying to get in.

Elsewhere in the book, Ross concludes that Marco Polo did go to China (contra this school of thought), that isolationism has never been a Chinese trait, and that China's biggest cities are not nearly so huge as often portrayed.

Whether they agree with his arguments or not, readers are sure to learn a lot from this book. The chapter about opium, for instance, has some engrossing nuggets about the link between the prohibition movement and churches:

Arguments that opium was no worse than booze didn’t wash with many Western advocates of opium prohibition. The anti-opium movement grew out of the temperance movement, which had become very strong by the middle of the nineteenth century. Protestant churches were at the forefront of the fight against both the “demon drink” and its Chinese equivalent. It was no coincidence that the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade was founded by diehard teetotallers (in 1874, by a group of Quakers, to be exact). In contrast, the Roman Catholic Church, wisely tolerant in the ways of the bottle, was not active in the anti-opium movement. Missionary accounts [were] greatly exaggerated...

Sugar Heritage and Tourism in Transition

I've begun working on a lengthy magazine article about sugar-industry sites here in Taiwan which have been transformed into tourist attractions, and online research came up with extracts from a book called Sugar Heritage and Tourism in Transition (edited by Lee Jolliffe; Channel View Publications; December 2012). The chapter devoted to Taiwan – “Transforming Taiwan's Sugar Refineries for Leisure and Tourism,” authored by Abby Liu – begins with a 57-word quote from this 2006 article I wrote for China Post, one of Taiwan's English-language newspapers. It's always nice to see a sign that someone takes at least some of your work seriously...

2013 in review

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.

Sauntering Around Beigang (Culture.tw)

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.