It's a quiet morning for elderly Chu Lao-cheng. He's making grass crickets, the kind of traditional toy that you never see in the big cities of Taiwan these days.
Despite the China Times article displayed proudly on his knee-high stand, where he sits phlegmatically with his crickets, there are not that many buyers these days, despite the NT$20 price.
"I've been here for more than a decade," he says slowly in a heavy southern Taiwanese accent, "but business is not like it used to be."
Business is not like it used to be all around in Anping, a small district half an hour outside Tainan and one of the most historically significant areas in all of Taiwan. Taiwan's oldest Chinese settlement and oldest shopping district has lost much of its character due to modernization and a road widening job, while the old Dutch Fort Zeelandia looks more like a municipal museum mounted with a post-modern lighthouse.
`That's progress'
Locals seem to have mixed feelings about the changes that have come to their small community. On the one hand they unanimously welcome the arrival of modern conveniences. The widening of the once historic, cobbled and narrow Yenping Street -- so that most of the century-old stores have been displaced by the cement boxes that meet the eye at every corner in urban Taiwan -- is summed up with a shrug of the shoulders and the words "that's progress."
But you sense there's regret all the same.
Mr. Chang, who's in his fifties and runs the Chunghua Hair Salon, sums up the contradictory spirit of Anping when he explains to me that "hardly anyone objected" to the widening of Yanping Street when it happened a couple of years ago but then goes on to proudly point out the oldest of the shops still standing on the street and takes me on an impromptu tour of the neighborhood that he has lived in since he was born.
"There's hardly anything left from the old days," he says. It sounds like a complaint. "The stuff the tourists see, most of that is new. The old fort, they made a mess of rebuilding it. Even the Haishankuan (perhaps Anping's most winning attraction) has been rebuilt and isn't even very authentic any more. If you want to find something authentic you've got to find a local like me."
He takes me on a short walk to a hole-in-the-wall Qing dynasty Buddhist temple. "This is original," he pronounces.
But the doors are locked and we can only peer in through a window.
He apologizes. "There are probably regular hours when people pray here. If they were here I'm sure they would let you in for a look."
And then all of a sudden Mr. Chang gets wistful. "You should have seen it when I was a kid," he says. "It was all Japanese-era buildings and some Qing dynasty buildings too back then. They're gone now, or they're deserted. People want modern buildings. They're easier to look after. You're not repairing them all the time."
I leave Mr. Chang back at his hair salon. We wave to each other and he calls out after me, to go to the Chaohsing Sweet Shop, the longest-running shop on Yanping Street.
Traditional sweets
Inside a diminutive Mrs. Lee tells me she has been living on the premises since she was born 63 years ago. She presides over a selection of sweets that would make no sense to a child who grew up in the West, or even to the average city-born Taiwanese child. Plums are the staple in this collection of sticky, jarred traditional sweets -- most of them sweet or sour, or perhaps both.
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