Nov. 30 to Dec. 6 The Hunan Braves (湖南勇) are famous for their ferocity in combat. It’s said that while defending Taiwan against the French during the 1884 Battle of Tamsui, they would rush back to the battlefield immediately after having their wounds treated. The combined forces of Qing Dynasty troops, irregular warriors like the Braves as well as local resistance fighters eventually fended off the French in a shocking victory. The Hunan Braves, who belonged to the Zhuosheng Battalion (擢勝營) under Qing Dynasty general Sun Kai-hua (孫開華), himself a native of Hunan, were no strangers to Taiwan. They first arrived in 1876 to support the Qing’s “open up the mountains and pacify the savages” (開山撫番) campaign, setting up camp in Keelung and heading down the east coast to help crush Aboriginal resistances in Yilan and Hualien. After a brief return to China, they arrived again in 1879 as the Qing came into conflict with Japan over the Ryukyu Islands, and became embroiled in a border dispute with the Russians in Xinjiang. They didn’t see action on this trip, spending their time fortifying defenses in Tamsui and Keelung before heading back to China. At least six Braves didn’t make the return trip, dying in Taiwan between August and November 1881 for unknown reasons. Their modest graves have survived, and the surrounding grounds have been renovated and transformed into the Hunan Braves Historic Park (湖南勇古蹟園), which will hold its grand opening on Tuesday. IRREGULAR TROOPS The writing on the six graves is roughly etched using a blunt knife, probably done hastily as a temporary marker so they could one day be reburied in their homeland. However, that never happened for unknown reasons, according to their entry on the National Cultural Heritage Database. The writing is rough with the characters varying in size, and experts speculate that the
“Think of your bike as your child,” says Tsai Shih-chiang (蔡士強), “because you have to pay a half fare to take it with you on the train.” Tsai doesn’t have any children; no human ones at least. He has four bicycles. His current favorite is his trail bike because, after giving up triathlons, his favorite cycling is off-road. And since Taipei, where Tsai lives, is not great for trail riding, his weekends usually start and finish with a train journey to Yilan and back. Or Hsinchu. Or Taichung or further afield. TRAINS ... And, as Tsai says, the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) charges 50 percent extra for your bike. For local trains, you can pretty much turn up, buy your tickets and jump on, though space can be limited. On faster trains, which have a designated cycle carriage, booking is almost essential. You could always send your bike as freight, but unless you can persuade a TRA employee that your bike is really just a bike-shaped bag, it works out more expensive than paying the extra half-fare. Furthermore, this service is only available at a limited number of stations, which does not include Taipei Main. Another alternative is to put your bike in a bag, in which case it is free and can be taken on any train from any station. “That’s just a gender tax,” says Sophia Wu, whose slight build is useful on hill-climbing events, but who has enough trouble lifting her bike onto a train, “nevermind carrying a 10kg bag between the ticket office and platform.” “Bag” can be pretty loosely defined; many are really more of a cover. Picture a French artist in a smock with his or her legs (wheels) sticking out below and a beret (saddle) protruding out of the top. BUSES Take the wheels off your bike,
On the day I rode a 125cc two-wheeler to 2,312m above sea level, the northwestern corner of Taitung County wasn’t merely beautiful. It was “renounce all worldly possessions and walk out on your family, if that means you can stay” sublime. At first light in Chihshang (池上), I rode through jacket-dampening fog. Outside the town, I escaped the morning mists, and zipped inland on an empty road. In the space of just under 6km, Provincial Highway 20A (20甲) exits Chihshang, passes farms, crosses the Sinwulu River (新武呂溪), and merges into Provincial Highway 20. The latter road is also known as the South Cross-Island Highway (南橫公路). Turning right onto Highway 20, I spotted the 199km marker and a traffic sign that pointed to Tainan, 204km away and on the other side of the Central Mountain Range. That sign predates Typhoon Morakot, a once-in-a-lifetime storm that wrought disaster across the south in the summer of 2009. Since Morakot, the high-altitude section of the South Cross-Island Highway has been officially closed to through-traffic. In the first year or two after the typhoon, a handful of brave motorists got their vehicles all the way across, but further landslides occurred around 2012. These didn’t deter outdoors types, several of whom risked fines by evading the checkpoint outside Meishankou (梅山口) in Kaohsiung’s Taoyuan District (桃源). Some hiked to Taitung County; a few rode bicycles. I’m a law-abiding person, so I didn’t return to the stretch of Highway 20 between Meishankou and Tianchih (天池) — also on the Kaohsiung side, but higher in the Central Mountain Range — before it’s formal reopening to sightseers in January this year (see “Ascending to ‘heaven’s pond’” in the Feb. 21, Taipei Times). Between Morakot and last week, I didn’t once set foot or tire on the road’s eastern half. The Ministry of Transportation and
Europe is looking to keep the COVID-19 pandemic from ruining the Christmas holidays. From allowing sales of traditional carp in the Czech Republic to the prospects of Irish pubs reopening, the continent is exploring ways to let people celebrate without reigniting the pandemic. Leaders will be laying out plans for the holiday season in the coming days. After weeks of strict restrictions on contact, Europe has slowed the rapid spread of the disease, but hospitals remain stretched and authorities are wary of repeating the mistakes that led to a resurgence of infections in the fall. That means steps to ease curbs will be controlled and incremental. “We will make a proposal for a gradual and coordinated approach to lifting containment measures,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said last week. “This will be very important to avoid the risk of yet another wave.” With long winter months still to come, leaders will be under pressure to get the mix right. Any loosening risks more sickness and death, but voters are getting tired of restrictions all the same — police in Berlin last week had to roll out water cannons to break up protest against the latest lockdown. Here’s the latest on the fight for Christmas from across Europe: GERMANY Europe’s largest economy is moving toward extending and tightening its shutdown restrictions until Dec. 20, including further limits on private gatherings, according to a proposal from state leaders. Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet with the country’s 16 state premiers on Wednesday to agree on a plan, which could include a ban on firework sales for New Year’s Eve. UK Boris Johnson’s government is looking at ways to ease restrictions for a few days over the holiday period so that families can get together. Universities have been given access to mass testing so that students can be
Taipei Dance Forum (TDF, 舞蹈空間) first began working with Netherlands-based Spanish choreographer Marina Mascarell in 2010, and over the past decade and four productions, they have proven to be a formidable pairing. Their latest collaboration, Second Landscape (媒體入侵), was designed to be the culmination of the TDF’s 30th anniversary program, making its Taiwan premiere on Oct. 31. However, as with so many other things in this COVID-19 pandemic year, things did not go exactly as planned. The Oct. 31 performance turned out to be the show’s world premiere, as the Skanes Dansteater, which had been scheduled to premiere the work in March, postponed the show until January next year due to COVID-19-triggered shutdowns. Mascarell came to Taipei this summer to spend several weeks rehearsing with TDF’s dancers, which not only required going through the 14-day quarantine period, but led to her marrying her long-time partner so that he and their young daughter would be able to travel to Taiwan with her. Now it turns out that not only are audiences in Taiwan the first to see Second Landscape, they might be the only ones to see it, at least for several years as Skanes Dansteater have decided to cancel its portion of the production due the continuing uncertainties of the pandemic situation. Second Landscape, like all of Mascarell’s work, is an exploration of a crucial social issue, one that has only grown in importance in this shutdown, locked-down year: the digital media invasion of our lives, our minds and our senses. She is concerned that the focus on short-term gratification via social media and an overdependence on the Internet for news and information are robbing humans of their capacity for deep thinking and, for the younger generation, the ability to develop critical thinking skills. Second Landscape asks why are so many people willing to sacrifice their self-awareness
The National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts — Weiwuying is staging its biennial Circus Platform tomorrow and Sunday afternoons with a series of free performances in the Banyan Plaza and one absolutely not-to-be missed ticketed show in the Playhouse: Formosa Circus Art’s (FOCA, 福爾摩沙馬戲團) Moss (苔痕). The free “Circus Wonderland” performances, which start at 3:30pm and run until a little after 6pm, feature seven mini shows: Spinning Macarons (旋轉馬卡龍) by On. P. Young (紅鼻子馬戲團); Baby in Cart (新手爸爸) by Hsu Kai-hsuan (徐開炫), Master M and Boy Z by WHO Theatre (虎劇團); HEY NOW by 0471 Acro Physical Theatre (0471特技肢體劇場); Fall in love with you (與你相愛) by Hu Chia-hao (胡嘉豪); Step by Wu Haw-jong (吳顥中); and Ba~HaGa! (巴哈嘎不可不可) by Dai Yu-ren (戴郁仁) and Wu Zheng-ying (吳政穎) A run-down of the shows and their start times can be found on Weiwuying’s Web site (www.npac-weiwuying.org). FOCA’s Moss was not originally scheduled to be part of the platform, as it had been planned for earlier in the year, but was moved back due to COVID-19 restrictions. It should prove a fitting coda to Saturday’s activities. I saw Moss at the Cloud Gate Theater in New Taipei City’s Tamsui District (淡水) last month and was just blown away. The production is the final part of FOCA’s crossover trilogy, and was created in collaboration with the Germany-based Peculiar Man, founded by Tien Tsai-wei (田采薇), a dancer with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, and Jan Mollmer. Tien and Mollmer’s dance theater expertise gives the show its narrative structure — and its poignancy. The five FOCA members perform in front of an apparently abandoned construction site in alley, a setting familiar around Taiwan. A three-level metal scaffold stands in for the concrete house that inspired the work and serves as a launch pad for a series of drops, falls and swings. Moss at its heart
COVID-19 has been racking the world, and there’s hardly a person alive who doesn’t want to see 2020 in the rear view mirror. Taiwan of course has proven to be an island of safety during this epidemic. In appreciation of that as well as giving 2020 an early send off, Brandon Thompson, Adoga, and Taipei Next have prepared a fitting music fest, “Forget 2020” or in the vernacular, “F#ck 2020.” It’s a late-night-early-morning festival where you’ll hear some 30 vocalists and musicians performing many of your favorite songs from the past two decades. Expect hits from the rise of Bruno, Slim, Bieber, Hova, Beyonce, Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. It’s four hours of live music all inside the massive tent at Maji Square. In acknowledging Taiwan’s healthcare and vigilance in protecting against the virus, all are invited to both celebrate Taiwan as well as having only one more month of this awful year! “In celebrating the human spirit and Taiwan, this is for all those around the world who can’t raise a glass and dance to live music along with friends,” Brandon says. “We live in one of the safest, greatest countries in the world. We love you Taiwan.” Slawed Sticktrix, in charge of sound and lights, echoes that: “It’ll be a night of entertainment, hoping for better days to come.” As for sultry singer Risa Suyu, “It’s a show that will literally defy 2020 in all its craziness, bringing all kinds of people together to celebrate the music and life that Taiwan is able to give us.” Finally singer Tony Quander fills it out, “The upcoming show is full of amazing talent that has always brought versatile styles and sounds to the audience. It takes so much to keep a crowd jumping and shaking through so many genres of music, but I expect
Director Huang Hsin-yao (黃信堯) continues his irreverent, absurd commentary of the mundane struggles of ordinary people in Classmates Minus (同學麥娜絲), his second feature after breaking onto the scene with 2017’s The Great Buddha+ (大佛普拉斯). Classmates Minus won the Audience Choice Award at last week’s Golden Horse Film Festival, and is even more relatable to local viewers than The Great Buddha+ as it literally just follows the lives of four high school buddies in their forties who live in the same small southern town they grew up in. Huang plays himself in the film, a director who is shooting his next project after finding success with The Great Buddha+. He provides the same cynical yet humorous narration reminiscent of traditional Taiwanese storytellers throughout the film to tie everything together, adding to the surrealness by breaking the fourth wall at times to converse with the characters. At one point, he even hilariously explains to the audience why he cast the same actor in three roles. This narrative role is crucial to the pace and depth of the story, especially as many things are left unsaid with such male friendships. The antics do go over the top in some scenes and verge into tomfoolery, but overall the film presents the right amount of biting satire and silly laughs to keep the audience entertained while getting Huang’s vision across. Despite the loaded cinematic devices, the events and characters are very much rooted in reality, even painfully so, but life is more palatable when it’s not taken too seriously. On the cusp of entering middle age, the four BFFs all suffer from missed opportunities of some sort and struggle to make sense of where they stand in the world. Their youthful optimism and unbridled energy is long gone, but they’re still grasping for a better life and
Taiwan has long been accustomed to Chinese influence operations. Even during the period of martial law (1949-1987) when China was still fighting the tail-end of the Chinese Civil War against Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), it used a variety of ways to influence society here. But since Taiwan became an open and free democracy in the early 1990s, China’s ways have changed: with money and “opportunities” it is trying to sway the minds of people, while through news media and economic means it is attempting to convince the undecided that closer ties with China will bring a better life, and that in any case “re-unification is a foregone conclusion.” But Taiwanese have built up adequate defenses, and through their own experience under martial law, know that they need to work hard to preserve their hard-won freedom and democracy. However, in the rest of the Western world, there were less than adequate defenses: since China “opened up” after the Cultural Revolution, the US and Western Europe started a policy of engagement in the hope that economic development in China would bring about political liberalization. By now, it is rather clear that this expectation has been shattered, and that many nations are now readjusting their policies. But it is also becoming increasingly clear that during these past four decades, the Chinese government has built up an incredibly widespread network of influence operations in many parts of the world. Earlier works on this network in specific countries were Clive Hamilton’s Silent Invasion (2018) on the influence operations in Australia, and Jonathan Manthorpe’s The Claws of the Panda (2019), describing how China had been able to infiltrate the Canadian political system, exerting undue influence on the Canadian government, educational institutions and business. But now there is a comprehensive work that covers Chinese influence operations in many
Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context is a collection of chapters by 14 authors on a wide range of topics related to Taiwan, including literature, migration, food, travel and cinema. The two female editors are Lin Pei-yin (林姵吟), associate professor in the School of Chinese in the University of Hong Kong, and Chang Bi-yu (張必瑜), deputy director of the Center of Chinese Studies at SOAS in the University of London. The former is the author of Colonial Taiwan: Negotiating Identities and Modernity through Literature, while the latter wrote Place, Identity and National Imagination in Post-war Taiwan. Each editor contributes an item to this book, Lin on the topic as a whole (the introductory chapter), Chang on tourism to Taiwan in a chapter called “From ‘free China’ to sunny paradise.” The book takes its place in Routledge’s Research on Taiwan series. By and large it’s an academic book of an easily-recognizable kind, characterized by plentiful references to intellectuals such as Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault. There’s no doubt that university libraries will be tempted to buy this volume. The only set-back for the individual consumer — as with Routledge’s Victorian Contagion (reviewed in the Taipei Times, June 18, 2020) — is the inordinately high price. This new book is, on amazon.com, priced at US$107.68 (hardback) and US$49.10 (Kindle). In a piece on Japanese tourism to Taiwan by Lillian Tsay, the writer opines that this tourism is often food-based, while noting that the Japanese were not allowed to travel abroad for pleasure between 1946 and 1964. In the 1930s they had often come to Taiwan under the influence of their government’s encouragement of visits to Japan’s East Asian colonies, Korea, Manchuria and Taiwan. Another chapter, “Getting to Know Taiwan” by Adina Zemanek, looks at the processes by which Taiwan was offered to visitors as a place in its own
In terms of the amount of electricity that can be generated from the solar irradiation falling on each square meter of land or water, Taiwan’s southwest is one the most promising regions in East Asia. Despite setting ambitious renewable-energy goals, the government isn’t willing to compel factory bosses and real-estate developers to install photovoltaic (PV) arrays on every suitable roof. Efforts to unlock the country’s solar-power potential have therefore focused on putting panels on schools and other public buildings, while offering incentives to property owners. South of Taichung, PV systems atop chicken coops, pigpens and warehouses are now a common sight. At the same time, a growing number of farmers are accepting subsidies to convert their fields into solar power plants. The environmental ramifications of covering farmland with PV arrays aren’t as bad as sealing it beneath concrete. But any shift away from growing crops makes it less likely Taiwan will achieve a target set in 2011, and reiterated earlier this year by President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), of boosting the country’s food self-sufficiency rate to 40 percent. In these circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that solar-energy entrepreneurs have turned their attention to ponds and fish farms. Floating photovoltaic (FPV) plants have proliferated since 2017, when a system on Agongdian Reservoir (阿公店水庫) in Kaohsiung began supplying Taipower. The setup at Agongdian — which comprises 34,013 electricity-producing panels — is equipped with technology owned by Ciel et Terre, a French floating solar solution supplier and developer of large-scale FPV plants. According to Hannah Wang (王詩涵), a senior saleswoman at Ciel et Terre’s Taiwan branch office, the system’s floats are manufactured in Taiwan of high-density polyethylene (HDPE), a plastic polymer that is 100 percent recyclable. Wang says Ciel et Terre technology can resist UV degradation for at least 25 years, and that all their products meet drinking-water
A dancer in harem pants moves down a Berlin street next to a skinhead wearing a “Reich” flag: Germany’s escalating anti-mask protests in the coronavirus pandemic draw from a wide, seemingly contradictory range of political camps. A rally of nearly 10,000 opponents of government-imposed social restrictions to curb the spread of COVID-19 in Berlin last week brought together a motley band of demonstrators with ostensibly little in common — apart from crumbling faith in institutions and representative democracy. The scene in front of the Brandenburg Gate Wednesday marked a dizzying confluence of LGBT rainbow flags and Gandhi banners intermingled with posters for the increasingly international QAnon conspiracy movement. Marchers wearing red Trump “MAGA” hats could be spotted in the crowd next to evangelicals, climate activists and “peace”-shouting hippies. Most of the protesters remained peaceful while they railed against vaccines and dismissed the dangers of the virus, but a violent hard core attacked police. Some 77 officers were injured at the demonstration, with Berlin police chief Barbara Slowik saying that “the brutality of the violence was immense.” “Some have told me that we have not experienced something like that in decades,” she told the Tagesspiegel daily. “We are moving away from a very colorful public and are now increasingly dealing with a spectrum of people who generally reject our system and are prepared to use extreme violence.” Repeating a common but false refrain of the demonstrations, one protester, Ina Meyer-Stoll, claimed: “The death rate isn’t higher than ones you see for flu outbreaks.” Another activist on the streets, Achim Ecker, an erstwhile Greens voter in his 50s, said he had “lost confidence in the political parties” particularly with regard to potential approval of a vaccine. Others’ harmless appearance belied jaw-dropping views. Grandmother Birgit Vogt, 75, denied the existence of the pandemic and didn’t hesitate to draw a parallel between
A row over a Thai woman who held up a placard alleging sexual abuse in schools has put a spotlight on harassment in the education system even as she draws threats of legal action for misrepresentation and attacks for soiling Thailand’s image. The issue is the latest on which discussion has become more vocal as an anti-government protest movement seeking reform of the monarchy also emboldens people in a society where conservatism has often constrained criticism of the powerful. “I hope my case will raise awareness for people in society, for students in schools, for adults who send children to schools, for teachers and for the Ministry of Education,” Nalinrat Tuthubthim, 20, said. Nalinrat, now a university student, had made allegations on social media of being sexually harassed at school several years ago. But she grabbed attention at the weekend when she dressed in a high-school uniform at a protest in Bangkok, put black tape over her mouth and held up a placard that read: “I have been sexually abused by teachers. School is not a safe place.” Detractors criticized her for not being a real high-school student and she was bombarded with abusive messages. Some shared screengrabs of her Instagram account showing recent pictures in which she had modeled revealing outfits. “When a non-student wears school uniform, when you draw this much attention from society and from social media, you need to take responsibility for it and what follows,” said Pareena Kraikupt, a member of parliament for the Palang Pracharat Party of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha. Pareena said she was planning to file a police complaint against Nalinrat for wearing a school uniform when she was not a school student, but also to call for a police investigation into her former school over the alleged harassment. Senator Somchai Sawangkarn condemned Nalinrat for damaging Thailand’s image and said
One often hears that the people of Taiwan are 98 percent Han, a complicated cultural term that is often used to imply a certain genetic relationship as well. Yet among the pre-1949 population of Taiwan, roughly 45 percent are descended from immigrants from Quanzhou (泉州) in China. Who might these people be? In medieval times Quanzhou was one of the world’s greatest ports, a melting pot of peoples from India and northeast, southeast and central Asia, along with Han and other peoples we now identify as “Chinese.” Merchants from Quanzhou competed in the southeast Asian textile trade, shipping cottons from India and silks from China, and their domination was so complete that in the pre-modern era commercial terms in many southeast Asian languages were either of Chinese or Indian origin. The wealthy Indian merchant community there erected a Hindu temple in Quanzhou, with Tamil merchants building temples to Shiva and Vishnu. It is worth noting that Quanzhou was so ignorant of Taiwan, just a few days sail away, that camphor was obtained from islands south of Philippines, though it existed in abundance in Taiwan. MUSLIMS OF QUANZHOU Central Asia poured immigrants into the city. Quanzhou eventually hosted an enormous Muslim population, well over a hundred thousand in its heyday when something like a million people inhabited the sprawling port. Muslim and Nestorian Christian inscriptions are known, and outside what is now Fujian city, in Jinjiang, there is a Manichean temple now reconstructed as a Buddhist temple. During the Yuan Dynasty the Mongols stationed foreign troops there, who were allied to the local Persian community. As the Yuan waned they rose against the Mongol leadership in a 10 year revolt known as the Ipsah rebellion. The immediate cause of this revolt in a city in what is now China was Muslim disapproval of the
NOV. 23 to NOV. 29 Japanese researchers initially thought that the Saisiyat Aborigines’ Pasta’ay festival was a New Year celebration. A drawing of a Saisiyat man dancing with a kirakil, a ceremonial headdress used during the Pasta’ay, appeared in a 1906 issue of Record of Taiwan’s Customs, where the author noted that it “represented reverence to their ancestral spirits.” Ten years would pass before the Temporary Taiwan Old Customs Investigation Committee published the earliest description of the ceremony. “The Pasta’ay is held to worship the Ta’ay people, who were a diminutive race living in the caves of the Maiparai Mountains,” the committee writes. “This group of short people became embroiled in a dispute with the [Saisiyat], who tricked them into plunging to their deaths in the river below … This festival is held to placate the souls of these short people.” The appendix of the report elaborated on the story, describing the Ta’ay as a people shorter than 100cm but possessed great physical strength and magical powers. The Saisiyat were afraid of them, but invited them to join their annual ceremonies since they were good at singing and dancing. However, resentment arose when they found that some Ta’ay had raped their women. One day before the Ta’ay arrived, the Saisiyat booby-trapped the tree-bridge leading to their village, and all the Ta’ay perished save for two, who later taught them the songs used in the Pasta’ay festival to avoid disaster before they departed. The report contains a second version of the story, where two surviving Ta’ay told the Saisiyat that due to their deeds, their crops would be damaged by mice and sparrows each year, and their raids on Han villages would fail. Each version of the story seems to be slightly different — some say the Ta’ay taught the Saisiyat how to farm
“Easy-peasy,” you’re probably saying, “I should have done this years ago.” Such are the joys of riding with a strong wind at your back, which, at this time of year, should be pushing you southwestwards for a second successive day, like a 19th-century clipper racing to deliver Queen Victoria’s favorite Oriental Beauty tea (東方美人) from New Taipei City’s Tamsui District (淡水) to London. Enjoy it while it lasts. The Tourism Bureau’s handbook Cycling Around Taiwan sends you off down Provincial Highway 61, which is about as exciting as it sounds. In any case, you’ll have plenty of time in days to come to share the roars and fumes of fossil-fueled vehicles, so why not spend most of today on leisurely coastal paths? The only downside is that food options are fewer, but this just presents the chance to ride retro style, that is, to carry cheese sandwiches, an apple and a vacuum flask of tea in the Nelson longflap hung from your Brooks saddle. In fact, today’s main activity is not so much for visiting places along the route, but more for enjoying the views and pondering times past, when local people harvested both land and sea, and when hopefully in the future they can harvest the wind too. Leaving Hsinchu downtown, follow the railway line southwest towards the coast. After about 2km you’ll pass a weirdly time-specific statue depicting 47-year-old, Jiangsu-born Sergeant Tang Li-fa (唐立法) saving the life of a 15-month-old baby who had crawled onto the tracks in front of a speeding south-bound train at 2:26pm on Jan. 4, 1976. Tragically, Tang himself was hit on the head and died. Another 4km brings you to the Siangshan Wetlands (香山濕地), where you join the 17km Hsinchu Coastal Bike Path. Turning south, you will see the first of the numerous wind turbines
Red brick has been a key feature of Taiwan’s built environment since the 1895-1945 period of Japanese rule. The elegance of several colonial-era landmarks — including the Red House (西門紅樓) in Taipei’s Ximending and Kaohsiung’s Wude Hall (高雄武德殿), also known as Takao Butokuden — derives in large part from the use of red bricks in conjunction with concrete. Possibly the oldest red-brick building standing in Taiwan is Oxford College (牛津學堂). Commissioned by George Mackay, a Presbyterian missionary from Canada, it was completed in 1882. It’s now a museum on the campus of Aletheia University (真理大學), in a neighborhood dotted with century-old red-brick structures in New Taipei City’s Tamsui District (淡水). During the Japanese era and for some years afterward, few people could afford to build a house entirely of bricks. Even now, in the countryside it isn’t difficult to find single-storey abodes where the external walls are brick from ground level to waist height only. The upper section is sometimes wood, but more often wattle (a woven lattice of bamboo slats) and daub (a mixture of mud, rice husks, and pig dung). By the time central Taiwan was ravaged by catastrophic floods in August 1959, the country had become somewhat more prosperous. Rebuilding efforts began as soon as the waters receded, but were stymied by a shortage of bricks. Even though the authorities urged brickworks to step up production, huge demand caused brick prices to rise. Seeing an opportunity, the founders of what’s now called Jinshuncheng Bagua Kiln (金順成八卦窯) in Changhua County’s Huatan Township (花壇) established a new brickworks on a plot of land 1.5km east of Huatan Railway Station. The Huatan area has the right kind of clay for making bricks, and Jinshuncheng Bagua Kiln was neither the first nor the last brickworks to operate in the township. The “bagua” in its
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a disaster to so many artists, performers and dance, theater and opera troupes around the world, shuttering venues and tossing many people out of work. However, it has also been a boon in some ways, as artists and companies explore new ways to connect with audiences through virtual performances, or provide grist for their creative process, inspiring new works. While Taiwan has been spared some of the ravages and turmoil of its international counterparts, the pandemic has become a source of inspiration for many in the creative industry, including Luo Wen-jinn (羅文瑾), artistic director of the Tainan-based Scarecrow Contemporary Dance Company (稻草人現代舞蹈團). For her latest work for the company, Hideout (巢), Luo returns to one of her favorite sources of inspiration: plumbing 19th and 20th century philosophy and literature to ponder the complexity of life in a 21st century crisis and the depths that people are willing to go to feel safe. The work was created in collaboration with the musicians of Musica Lequio Pequeno, with stage design by Tseng Chi-ting (曾啟庭) and Sun Chia-hsuan (孫佳暄) Luo cites a quote from French poet and dramatist Paul Claudel from his Position And Proposition: “We lack the wings to fly, but we still find the strength to fall.” The piece also raises questions about what the different classes in a society truly feel, Luo said. Hideout is set in a nameless, placeless colony, where the inhabitants roam about — uneasy, restless, and cut off from the outside world and their larger community, worrying if they will remain safe. Luo challenges her five dancers — led by Li Pei-shan (李佩珊) — by having them explore a variety of materials and objects in their movements, from thick, carpet-like pieces of cloth to web-like drapes to lengths of flexible aluminum ventilation ducting. French and
BTS’s leader RM looks up from under a black baseball cap, then stares back down at his hands. “Doing the promotional interviews, [I kept saying], ‘Music truly transcends every barrier.’ But even while I was saying it I questioned myself if I indeed believe it.” It’s late September, and the rapper is confiding in over one million fans live from his Seoul studio. His “complex set of feelings” about the explosive, record-breaking success of Dynamite — the first fully English-language single from the South Korean megastars — is not the celebration you’d expect from a band that just topped the US Billboard Hot 100, the first K-pop act to do so. But this kind of frank, unfiltered conversation is exactly what their global “Army” fanbase love: BTS’s candid social media presence has included their fans in every step of their artistic journey, and, as they release new album Be this week, has made them the biggest pop group on the planet. Since their debut in 2013, the seven-piece boy band — rappers RM (Kim Nam-joon), Suga (Min Yoon-gi) and j-hope (Jung Ho-seok), and vocalists Jin (Kim Seok-jin), Jimin (Park Ji-min), V (Kim Tae-hyung) and Jungkook (Jeon Jung-kook) — have prioritized self-reflection in their music. Inspired by US hip-hop, they drew on RM and Suga’s reputation as underground rappers and j-hope’s credentials as a street dancer to push an emotional, rebellious image: debut single No More Dream attacked societal expectations for their generation, quipping: “What’s your dream? / Number one future career as a government official?” Although they’ve since ditched the sleeveless shirts, heavy chains and regrettable hairstyles of their earliest years, the group’s ability to ask weighty questions of themselves remains. Inspired by philosopher Carl Jung, BTS’s most recent album Map of the Soul: 7 used seven solo tracks to showcase each member’s
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