Return of the Red-Headed Barbarian!

Aloha compadres,

Cultural Class: Trip to Tainan.

 For our next cultural class we studied up on our religious vocabulary to take a field trip down south to Tainan. We were paired up with two of the other Chinese teachers, Chen Laoshi and Xie Laoshi. Chen Laoshi went with Paul, Tek, and me on the train down to meet Xie Laoshi.  Originally some of the Japanese students from the last few trips were scheduled to join us, but luckily they weren’t able to go so we didn’t have to rely on public transportation, instead, we all squeezed into the back of Xie Laoshi’s car. Paul is about 6’6”, an entire foot and a half taller than Chen Laoshi (and only a little over a foot taller than me…) so he crawled into the front. His height actually drew more attention than my hair (and we all had fun at his expense) but he’s been in Asia for years so he was used to it.

Our first stop, after braving the enormous four lane roundabout in the center of town, was the very first Confucius Temple built in Taiwan in 1665. It is comprised of a thick wall surrounding a park, a pagoda, a school for Confucian scholars, and the actual temple in the center. The roofs are all red which, according to our tour guide, Xie Laoshi, represented the Qing Dynasty in which it was built. The door frames are about six inches thick even on the ground so you have to intentionally step over the door stop to enter rooms and buildings. This is a Confucian trick to make you more aware of where you’re going; I guess you enter with your left foot and leave with your right foot (or maybe vice versa; I was focused more on not getting my shoe caught on the frame so I didn’t face plant in front of all the Chinese tourists than on listening to the running Chinese narration provided by my teacher). 

Scholar's Wall

There was a room full of traditional Chinese instruments, pictures of previous students, and shrines to filial sons inside the perimeter. When you leave the temple, you can also tack a prayer request to the main door. I’m not entirely certain what this has to do with Confucius, but China’s ‘Three Religions’ (Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism) all tend to get mixed together with local religious practices so the fact that it’s a school means that hoards of students come to ask for good test scores by writing it on the paper, stamping it, then pinning it to the door as they leave. I took one of the papers as a keepsake but didn’t actually write on it, Confucius seems to have enough to answer without mine.

After the Confucian Temple, we wandered over to the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, a Japanese-designed building built in 1916. It has a hall of authors and a library in the basement; the building itself is impressive but unless you are interested in Taiwanese literature there’s not much to see inside.  There was a nineteenth-century character press on one wall which was used for Chinese newspaper printing.

My favorite building was the next one on the itinerary: Chi Kan Lou. In 1653, a fort was built by the Dutch near a Taiwanese village and they called it Provintia. It didn’t last long under Dutch control, however, as the Ming general Zheng Chengkung, 

the son of a Qing-supporting pirate (that sounds like more of an insult in English than it did in Chinese…) took it from the Dutch because he wanted to keep Taiwan as a port to defend the Ming Dynasty from the Manchu usurpers. 

After the Chinese kicked the Dutch out, as represented by the acquiescing statues of Dutch men who seem to be saying, ‘Oh go on then, have the fort, we don’t mind,’ they built Chinese styled towers on top of the fort and painted the roofs red. This red did not represent the Qing Dynasty this time, however, nor was it because red is a lucky color in China, but because it’s all part of the Chi-Kan Lou pun. ‘Chi’ is a formal word for red in Chinese and the Dutch were considered red-haired (though a bit blonde in my opinion), red-skinned (because it’s so dang hot here, and they tan like I do: lobster) barbarians so another name for the tower is Hong-Mao Lou: Furry Red-haired Barbarian Tower. Naturally, I got my picture with the roofs just to feel connected to history! I got more stares than usual at this one, especially when we walked next to the picture of the main Dutch leader who conveniently had red hair and blue eyes….

 

We went to grab lunch afterwards over in Anping District at a restaurant called Anping Gu Ji where the tables were quite low and Paul’s knees were a good couple of inches above the table top. One of the Tainan specialty foods is called ‘coffin bread’ which is less wooden and has fewer worms than one would expect. They are little hollow rectangular pieces of bread with the top cut out so it can be filled with corn chowder, then the ‘lid’ of the coffin is placed back on top and there you have it. They do look like tiny coffins and they’re really tasty bread-bowls. For our drinks, we had little green plastic bottles of Sprite-like soda but the exciting part, and I know you were all wondering where I was going with this, is the clear marble at the bottom of the bottle which rolls around when you drink. I have absolutely no idea why it’s in the bottle and we all had fun trying to get it out of the top.

After lunch we walked over to a foreign trading house and the Anping Tree House which was once a warehouse for Tait & Co built out of bricks from the nearby Anping Fort; it was left to revert to nature and is currently covered in tree roots which weave in and out of the nineteenth-century building. There’s also a wax-museum which tells the history of Tainan starting from the native Taiwanese minority groups through Dutch/foreign imperialism, Chinese usurpation, and finally Japanese occupation in the twentieth-century. We weaved in and out of the rooms skirting confused Taiwanese school children who were intrigued at seeing real foreigners next to the fake wax Dutch statues; there were a few other foreigners lurking about, but the majority of tourists in Tainan are from mainland China or Japan, so Paul and I just looked a bit more obviously non-native.

Anping Fort, which ironically means Peace or Harmony Fort (I guess War really is Peace), was built in 1624 by the Dutch and called ‘Fort Zeelandia’. Funnily enough, until I was meandering around Fort Zeelandia, I never put it together that New Zeeland was based off of an Old Zeeland which is in Holland (you learn new, incredibly obvious, things everyday). Formosa, the former word for Taiwan, is also Dutch and it means ‘beautiful island’. Anping Fort has old canon surrounding the top layer of the fort which looks out over Tainan. Some of its original walls were made out of oyster-shell ash bricks and cemented together with sticky rice, sugarcane syrup, and clay mortar still holding up in one section.

 

We headed over to one of the oldest Matsu Temples in Taiwan. Matsu (Ancestral Mother) is a local goddess who, as with many Chinese/Taiwanese gods, was based off of a real person. Her name was Lin Moniang and, according to legend, she used to guide fishing boats into safe harbors during storms by wearing bright red robes. Her father and brothers were fishermen; one day, during a typhoon, she fell into a trance and saw them in the storm. She managed to save all but one of them whom she accidentally dropped when her mother attempted to revive her from her swoon. When she awoke, one of her brothers had drowned, but the rest returned to safety. After her death, her story changed into legend which eventually deified her throughout southern Taiwan and Southeast Asia.  This Temple is quite large, extremely ornate, and includes an enormous golden statue of her as well as some water king gods and the demon-pets she subdued and trained to be her loyal guards.  

 Our teachers also introduced us to some Matsu religious practices while watching some of the locals asking questions to the gods. You take two wooden half-moon blocks which are flat on one side (kind of like a cashew half) and you kneel before the mother statue, ask your question, and throw the two halves onto the floor. If they are both side down, the answer is no; if one is up and one is down, the answer is yes; if they are both face up, then the gods are laughing because it wasn’t a serious question (like, will my skin turn purple tomorrow?). I think you go for a two out of three to make sure it’s true.  If you have more complicated questions which can’t be answered by the magic-eight ball yes/no/just kidding tactic, then you can also use divining sticks. You ask your question, drop the sticks standing up in a bundle and the tallest one is your answer; you take that stick out and find its correspondingly numbered drawer and take out one of the papers. The paper has several topics listed, you find your category, and get your answer.

We had just enough time to run over to a local street-market which was more like an open walking mall than a market because all the little shops lining the streets were actually permanent buildings instead of booths. Towards the end of our wanderings, the typhoon weather kicked in. It was raining so fiercely we had to duck into a local leather shop to hide out and debate whether or not it was worth waiting for a break in the rain. The weather only seemed to get worse so the boys equipped themselves with umbrellas and held them over the teachers’ heads (I had my trusty ‘Sun is my nemesis, I’m a ginger’ umbrella on hand) and we made a run for the car. We managed to make it back to the train station just in time to catch our ride home. All in all, it was a good trip.

So, that’s a brief introduction to the wonders of Tainan and southern religious practices.  Talk to you soon!

Love,

Amanda