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Shihmen tourism takes flight

By Vico Lee
STAFF REPORTER
Sunday, Sep 01, 2002, Page 17

Examples of some marvellous kites that appeared in the two previous Taipei International Kite Festivals - a giant flying crab from Bali.

Tourism-oriented festivals are never in short supply in Taiwan. The Sakura festival takes place in February in Nantou County and March on Alishan. Hualien County hosts its lotus festival in May and Tainan and Taoyuan counties host theirs in June. Aboriginal harvest celebrations take place in July and September, and the black tuna festival is currently underway in Pingtung. For the most part, these festivals are designed to promote local tourism and are an excuse to eat a lot.

Shihmen township has seen an opportunity to follow suit, making a bit of money and attracting publicity by hosting the Shihmen International Kite Festival, which will enter its third year when it opens on Sept. 28. The organizers hope that there will be something more than food to attract people.

The festival this year will be on a bigger scale than last year, incorporating ecological guided tours and kite-making workshops as well as promotions of local specialties. It is part of the Council of Cultural Affairs' Integrated Community Development project, which, in Shihmen township, is aimed at promoting kite-making and kite-flying as one of Taiwan's cultural activities.

A traditional dragon kite from Singapore. COURTESY OF HUANG TIN-SHENG

Discovering tourism

Located on the outskirts of the greater Taipei area, Shihmen is a fishing village which, like many rural villages, has become depopulated due to lack of economic opportunities. Tourism has been limited, with the obvious activity of swimming restricted by strong coastal currents in the area.

What resources there are have not, until very recently, been developed. At present, one out of every three elementary school students cannot afford a school lunch and high school kids spend their weekends either helping their parents sell snacks or fishing.

A patchwork kite from The Netherlands.

For these people, spending money to buy kites is too much of a luxury. The creation of a local kite-flying culture therefore comes as something of a surprise and is due largely to the work of Hsu Chu-kuan (許主冠), host of the festival and director of the Integrated Community Development project.

Initially, Hsu persuaded locals to participate using financial incentives. The festival organizers assisted villagers in making kite kits, which they can sell to schools or tourists. "Although it's not much money, there's something about kite-flying that villagers see as instantly making money for them," Hsu said. So far the idea has been well received. Hsu's next step is to persuade them to make painted kites, "so that the kites have their own lives," he said.

Shihmen is far from the only place in Taiwan that people fly kites, Hsu said, but he wants to add a humanistic value to Shihmen's kite industry. "Japan's Sinshuu apple gained its status from local craftsmen's exquisite designs for apple candies. Without them, the apples do not show the spirit of the place," Hsu said.

All these efforts are trying "to offer something characteristic of Shihmen, in addition to seafood, to make tourists spend a few more hours there before moving on to other destinations. That's where the future of Shihmen's economy lies," Wu said.

Entering the competition

Although Taiwan has the coastal and seasonal wind required for kite flying, the activity has not been popular here. The historical reason is that the activity, which was popular in the Ching dynasty, was banned during the Japanese occupation of the island from 1895 to 1945 for fear that civilians might use kites to send signals.

Decades of neglect made the activity obsolete. After that, Taiwan's dense population deprived most people of the chance to enjoy flying a kite in open spaces. Due to this lack of kite flyers here, international kite-flying competitions trace a route that goes through Japan, Korea, Thailand to Malaysia and countries down south, skipping Taiwan.

Taiwan's competitive kite flyers are scattered across the island in 10, four-member amateur teams. There are a number of sites in and around Taipei where kite fliers now gather, but most are surrounded by buildings, electricity poles and other structures that make them far from ideal. While plenty of people are happy with an NT$200 mass produced kite, Hsu wants to develop something more.

"On the international level, kite flyers design and make their own kites. Making a kite that you are proud of is as important as flying it with skills. That is the spirit of kite flying," he said.

In the past, Hsu would often spend his weekends near Huachung Bridge marvelling at the beauty of kites people would fly there. Among the many plastic kites, he saw some handmade works of art. These kite flyers, he thought, desperately needed an occasion where they could meet their counterparts from the rest of Taiwan and other countries to broaden their horizons. From these small beginnings, a kite-flying festival in Taiwan was born.

In 2000, Cheng Geng-ho (鄭庚和), former township commissioner of Shihmen, offered the beachfront location for the festival. In its first year, the festival attracted 100,000 visitors over the two-day event, which featured kites flown by 100 kite flyers from 16 countries. On the strength of its success, last year's festival was able to draw such high-profile international kite flyers as Archie Stewart and Scott Hampton from the US.

Hsu attributed the success to the fact that professional kite flying is so new to people in Taiwan that visitors to the event were amazed at practically anything these kite flyers could achieve, giving the kite flyers the sense of achievement they could not find elsewhere.

Into the community

Before the festival, few people in Shihmen knew anything about highly specialized kites made of aeronautical materials that could cost as much as NT$10,000 to make. This was hardly the sort of thing that could make kite flying a local pastime in Shihmen.

With great enthusiasm, Chiu Kuo-chung (邱國鐘), the coach of Shihmen Junior High School Stunt Kite Team, invented an affordable version of the stunt kite using paper napkins and fishing rod and flew them at last year's festival. With a donation of second-hand stunt kites from stunt kite teams here and abroad, he created a local team that is already performing quite well.

This year, the association has decided to promote jar-shaped kites made of craft paper and bamboo for entry-level kite flyers. They cost NT$25 a set and take 20 minutes to assemble. In addition to being a popular kite shape in the Ching dynasty, a jar is the symbol of ancestral spirits in the religious belief of the Pingpu Aborigines in Shihmen.

As Shihmen's coastline became a major route in the Executive Yuan's national eco-tourism promotion program this year, Wu Yin-huei (吳盈慧), secretary general of the association, hoped that tourism would continue to increase.

"Right now villagers think of the event as a money making opportunity for two days in the year. We want them to know that with this festival, the tourism industry can take root in their village," Wu said.
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