The Atayal village of Piyaway, deep in the mountains in Taoyuan County’s Fusing Township (復興), was once dotted with trash, and agricultural products grown by the villagers were full of pesticides, but these days, the village is ready to welcome visitors with its clean streets, cherry blossoms during the spring, friendly residents, organic fruit and vegetables and a bit of traditional Atayal culture.
“If you had come here 10 years ago, you would have seen a completely different village,” said Hama Silan, a villager who works as a tour guide. “You would see empty liquor bottles and other garbage filling the ditches on both sides of the road and elsewhere around the village.”
There was even a case in which a farmer in the village was hospitalized with pesticide poisoning, Hama said.
Photo: Loa Iok-sin, Taipei Times
However, things have changed due to the residents’ hard work.
“Ten or 11 years ago, a young man from our village decided that he wanted to move to the city,” said Atay Yukan, another villager. “Before he left, he said that he could not stay here anymore because he saw no hope in the village and he wanted to achieve something in his life.”
The young man was not the first young person to leave the village, but he was the first to point out how hopeless he felt life in the village had become, Atay said.
“We were actually quite shocked, and so elders and church leaders in the village began to figure out how to make a change so that the village’s children would stay and those who had moved away might return,” Atay said.
The first things they decided to do was to clean up the village and to stop using pesticides on their farming products.
“We wanted to make some changes in the village, but we actually did not make any changes, we just returned to the way our ancestors used to live,” Hama said. “Before chemical pesticides were developed, our ancestors grew things organically.”
However, Piyaway villagers did suspend their centuries-old hunting tradition.
“Hunters have become defenders of nature. They not only stopped hunting, but also began patrols in the mountains along their hunting trails to prevent anyone from harming the environment,” Hama said.
As hunting stopped, the wildlife returned, Hama said.
“Formosan blue magpies, an endangered native bird species that disappeared a long time ago, returned to Piyaway after we stopped hunting and started the patrols,” Hama said.
“The magpie is now a symbol of our village, and we’re proud of it,” she said, pointing to a handmade wooden sign that marked the entrance to the village.
To maintain Piyaway’s neatness, the residents implemented a set of regulations, including a prohibition on smoking in the village and a requirement that every resident should contribute two days a month to clean public spaces, Hama said.
However, Piyaway residents said that a clean village and a well-preserved ecology would not bring back the young people. They needed a greater incentive.
“If we wanted the young people to come back, we had to provide them with a way to make a living,” Hama said. “Therefore we decided to welcome guests from around the world so that they could experience for themselves how we Atayals have lived throughout history and how rich our culture is. We wanted to show them they could relax entirely here — mentally and physically.”
Piyaway residents came up with an itinerary that included a guided tour of the village, a traditional meal cooked with mostly locally produced organic fruit and vegetables and served with traditional tableware made from bamboo or wood, and do-it-yourself programs that allow visitors to make jams with village-grown fruit of the season.
“If you have enough time, you can stay a night in the village. In the morning, our former hunters will take you to hike the ancient hunting trails in the mountains,” Atay said.
“If you’re lucky enough, you can see animals that you can only find in Taiwan,” Atay added.
Besides Taiwanese visitors, Piyaway has also welcomed guests from Japan and Canada.
“They enjoyed their stay and some have returned for another visit,” Atay said.
The income from the tours does not go into anyone’s pocket, but is deposited into a collective fund for the education of the village’s children.
Although it is a small village set deep in remote mountains — dubbed “the forgotten village” because tourists often pass it by on their way to better-known attractions nearby — and has only 16 families and a little more than 100 people, Piyaway residents are certainly ambitious.
“After years of hard work, we’ve succeeded in having one young man return to the village, but I’m sure that if we carry on, more will come back,” Atay said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching