Kaohsiung’s Yongan District Office (永安) and a local non-governmental organization (NGO) have invited students and staff from the Tungfang Design Institute to help decorate old houses in the city’s Yantian Borough (鹽田) to promote the former salt- producing community as a cultural tourism destination.
Houses on Sinsing Street (新興街) have been painted with murals depicting scenes from the township’s bygone days of salt manufacturing, such as workers laboring on the salt pans and police chasing salt thieves.
Netizens have praised the work, calling Yantian “Taiwan’s most dreamy salt village.”
Photo: Su Fu-nan, Taipei Times
Yongan District Administrator Ling Wen-chi (林文祺) said that the borough’s old-fashioned red-brick houses and their saddle-shaped roofs are particularly appealing to tourists.
According to Yantian Borough Warden Huang Fu-lai (黃福來), the township’s first residents came from Tainan’s Beimen District (北門) en masse to work on the salt pans.
At the economic height of Yantian, which means “salt pan,” 3,000 residents lived and worked in the township, which had houses for salt workers, a town commissary, library, kindergarten, barber shops and an infirmary, Huang said.
Photo: Su Fu-nan, Taipei Times
About 30 years ago, Taiwan Power Co bought the salt pans from Taiwan Salt Co to build the Hsinta Power Plant, closing the once lively salt town in the process, Huang said, adding that with their livelihoods gone, the townspeople moved out, leaving just over 100 people in the community.
A cultural tourism event titled “Colorful Yongan: Coloring Salt Village” was jointly held by the Yantian District Office and Yantian Township Development Association — a local NGO — on Sunday, which drew a large crowd.
Visitors queued to visit the township’s last running gamadiam (柑仔店) — the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) word for an old-fashioned corner store.
Yantian resident Wu Jung-cheng (吳榮正), 60, said the gamadiam has been open since his childhood and “represents a cherished shared memory to all of Yantian’s residents.”
As a part of its cultural tourism program, the district office has also prepared the Salt Village Artifacts Exhibition and visitors who want to see for themselves what work on the salt pans was really like can try their hand pushing around salt carts laden with a worker’s average load.
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