The centennial anniversary of founding of a Chiayi-based Oushe (鷗社) poetry club was celebrated by the Huochiuan Center on Saturday last week with a tea ceremony entitled “Tea and Travel — Odes to Chuluo’s Eight Great Scenes” at the old Chiayi City Hall building
Chuluo was the name of Chiayi when Taiwan was ruled by China’s Qing Dynasty.
Fang Ting-ting (方婷婷), the director of Da Tong University of Technology and Science’s department of tea culture and business management, said at one point there were more than 290 poetry clubs in Taiwan during the colonial era.
Photo: CNA, courtesy of the Chiayi City Cultural Affairs Bureau
The clubs attracted members from all walks of life, with tea and poetry seen as a way to socially connect with others, Fang said.
Oushe, which was founded in 1919, was very popular and included such local Chuluo gentry as Fang Hui-lung (方輝龍), a physician who became the club’s president, Fang Ting-ting said.
The club hosted an island-wide poetry gathering in 1934 that drew 300 participants, and was one of the biggest literary events in the area, Chiayi Bureau of Cultural Affairs Director Lin Ching-ping (林青萍) said.
The Huochiuan Center has been collaborating with the city government to promote tea culture, as well as rediscovering the poetry club culture that was once so prevalent in Chiayi, Lin said.
The center uses a building that once housed the Hungjen Clinic, where Fang Hui-lung practiced, as its base for promoting tea and poetry, Lin said.
Using selected works from those published by Oushe members as an example, the center encourages those who attend its workshops to write poetry, either in traditional form or the style called New Poetry, based on scenes described in the book Poems on Chuluo’s Eight Scenic Sites (諸羅八景詩旅), which was published in 1948.
The book was published in 1948, and features photographs and pictures of the sites alongside poetry praising the scenery.
Some of the poetry written during the Huochiuan Center’s workshops was recited during Saturday’s event, Lin said.
There was also a “sealing tea leaves” ceremony, a traditional practice where unused tea leaves from a year are sealed away for the future to symbolize the keeping of good memories and blessings as well as expectations of the future, Lin said.
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