Forget for a moment the Taiwan you know of derelict houses and vacant city lots strewn with trash. There is a place where this island's history has not been paved over with identical poured concrete buildings and covered with corrugated metal, where the present has settled comfortably among the past and swept away the cobwebs. Changhua County's Lukang owes much of its charm to a strict set of ordinances that have preserved parts of the town, but more still can be attributed to a sense of pride among its residents.
Lukang's boom time was in the 17th century, when Dutch settlers used it as a seaport for exports. It later became the sister port of Hanchiang harbor on the east coast of China and a gateway to central Taiwan. During this time, Lukang was Taiwan's second largest city, but two events altered that status forever.
First, the harbor silted up and separated the town from the sea with an expanse of uninhabitable marshland. The Lukang of today is a port in name only; the coastline is several kilometers away. Later, in the early 1900s, the town residents refused to allow passage of the north-south train line. These events effectively removed Lukang from the modern map, but they also protected it from the rapid modernization that the rest of Taiwan would undergo after World War II.
In cities like Taipei and Taichung, old buildings were razed and replaced with cement structures several stories high in order to house an influx of nearly 2 million Nationalist soldiers from China. These eyesore buildings are now the legacy of a regime that believed it would retake the motherland in five years, then 10 years, and so on. Lukang's legacy -- rows of traditional houses -- is noticeably different.
This is not to say that Lukang doesn't have derelict houses and vacant lots strewn with trash; it does. It also has its fair share of ugly concrete buildings, but ordinances put in place long ago prevent residents of the old buildings from dramatically altering the area's aesthetic.
"The people that live in the preservation districts aren't allowed to build high structures, or cover their roofs or walls with metal," said Chen Shi-hsian (陳仕賢), a Lukang historian and owner of a local bookstore. The preservation districts he's referring to lie to the west of the town's main street of Chungshan Road and include Chuanchou Street (泉州街), Putou Street (埔頭街), Youlin Street (瑤林街) and continue south to Nine Turns Alley (九曲 巷), Chinsheng Alley (金盛巷) and Lungshan Temple (龍山寺). Such historic landmarks as Half-side Well (半邊井), and Remembrance Hall (意樓) have long been off-limits to modern development.
But Lukang's respect for the past extends well beyond these preserved areas into the neighboring community and suggests that ordinances may have had a kind of domino effect.
"The old buildings look nicer and were made better," said a resident named Gao, whose own centuries-old abode borders a preservation district. "Many of the old houses belonged to our ancestors, so no one wants to simply get rid of them."
Goa's conservative values were echoed in talks with several of his neighbors and even the mayor. "Conservatism has allowed the preservation of the traditional face of Lukang," said Mayor Huang Chen-long (
But preservation and reverence for the past can sometimes be a nuisance to Lukang's present residents.
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