On Saturday, Taiwan was the focus of activities in Schipluiden, a small village between The Hague and Rotterdam in The Netherlands.
The occasion was the unveiling of a monument commemorating Reverend Anthonius Hambrouck, who was a pastor in the old church in the village from 1632 until 1647, when Hambrouck left with his wife and four children, and sailed to faraway Formosa (a journey of almost one year). The church and the pulpit in the church remain the same as when Hambrouck left in 1647.
In Formosa, the Dutch East India Company had established its Fort Zeelandia in 1624 and built up a prosperous colony. Part of the work of the colony was to bring the gospel to the Aboriginal Siraya people, and establish schools and medical clinics in the area around today’s Anping (安平) in Tainan.
photo courtesy of Gerrit Van Der Wees
The first pastor to work in the area was Reverend George Candidius, who arrived in 1627 but refused to live at the fort, and instead made Sincan (present-day Sinshih District, 新市區) his home.
When Hambrouck arrived in 1647, he set up his parish in Mattau (today’s Madou District, 麻豆區) which in the early years had been hostile to the incoming Dutch — and at war with neighboring villages such as Sincan — when Candidius had been the pastor.
Hambrouck started preaching, and also began a school, and initially had some 145 male students, who received education “from the cock’s crowing.” The education gradually expanded, and Hambrouck started classes for girls and women in the afternoon. He trained a number of Aboriginal men as assistant teachers.
photo courtesy of Gerrit Van Der Wees
The ceremony in Schipluiden honored Hambrouck for his work, and particularly his role in establishing the written version of the Siraya language, which is currently undergoing revival efforts.
The plaque that was jointly unveiled by Taiwan representative Tom Chou (周台竹) and current Schipluiden pastor Erika Dibbets-van der Roest shows text taken from the Bible’s Gospel of St. Matthew in both old-Dutch and the Siraya language. The piece of art was a work by a former resident of Schipluiden, Marcel Koeleman.
The village of Schipluiden also decided to honor Reverend Hambrouck by naming the square in front of the church “Hambrouckplein” (Hambrouck square). The mayor of the village, Arnoud Rodenburg, and the town’s councilmember for culture and monuments Wendy Renzen jointly unveiled the new name plate.
Hambrouck became most famous in his role as intermediary after the landing of Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功, also known as Koxinga) in late April 1661. Koxinga and his 25,000 invading troops had been able to occupy the countryside area around Fort Zeelandia, but not the heavily defended fort itself.
Koxinga arrested and imprisoned some 500 Dutch who lived in the 40 villages around Fort Zeelandia, and selected Hambrouck to go to the fort and ordered him to convince Governor-General Frederic Coyett to surrender. Koxinga kept Hambrouck’s wife, one daughter and son as hostages. The other two married daughters lived at the fort.
When Hambrouck met Coyett, he urged him not to surrender, but to hold out until reinforcements from Batavia (present day Jakarta) would arrive. His two daughters at the castle begged him to stay (a big painting at today’s Anping Old Fort depicts the scene), but Hambrouck wanted to safeguard the lives of his wife and son and daughter, and returned to Koxinga’s headquarters at Fort Provintia, handing Koxinga the negative answer of Coyett. Koxinga subsequently had Hambrouck killed.
Sept. 21 to Sept. 27 If word got out that you were planning a wedding during the Martial Law era, the “Committee for the improvement of Folk Customs” (改善民俗實踐會) might knock on your door. Each borough in Taipei had at least one “agent” who kept a pulse on community happenings. They would visit the family planning the wedding with a letter from the mayor, touting the benefits of being frugal and not wasting money on lavish ceremonies, even encouraging the families to donate money for scholarships. The authorities also discouraged them from hiring musicians and dancers, who were often loud and
Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is a way urban households can obtain healthy produce, while helping to build a more sustainable farming sector in Taiwan. King Hsin-i’s (金欣儀) transformation from advertising copywriter to social entrepreneur began in 2008, when she visited a rice farmer who practiced pesticide-free agriculture. “He explained that we have to leave space for other species. At the same time, I realized that while big companies have budgets to spread their messages, farmers have few chances to tell the public about their beautiful concepts,” she recalls. Inspired, she quit her job and traveled throughout rural Taiwan for a year. King went
Every day before she starts her shift at a government hospital in Singapore, Farah removes her hijab — the Islamic veil she has worn since a teenager. Although minority Muslim women can freely wear the hijab in most settings in Singapore, some professions bar the headscarf — and a recent case has triggered fresh debate on diversity and discrimination in the workplace. Now Farah has joined a growing number of Muslims — who account for about 15 percent of Singapore’s 4 million resident population — calling for the ban to end, with an online petition gathering more than 50,000 signatures. “They told me
If ever there was a reason to be inside on Mid-Autumn Festival, even for just an hour or so, while still celebrating the natural world, Cheng Tsung-lung (鄭宗龍) has provided one with his first full-length work for Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (雲門舞集) as artistic director, Sounding Light (定光). Judging by the excerpt performed for the press last week, Cheng shows he can be just as minimalistic as his mentor, troupe founder Lin Hwai-min (林懷民), while still forging his own unique path. Just as he did with last year’s Lunar Halo (毛月亮), his final work as director of Cloud Gate 2 (雲門2), Cheng
RSS