Khan Lee (李崗) is interested in history, but not the kind in textbooks. He wants to know what Taiwan looked like before the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) came, and how people ran businesses, went to school or trained an army. In 2008, the film director and producer came across a descendant of Wufeng’s (霧峰) Lin (林) family — one of Taiwan’s five great historic clans — and believed he had found everything he ever wanted to know.
“The family has experienced and survived a tumultuous chapter in modern history. Through it, we can see the changing relations between Taiwan and the rest of the world,” he says.
Five years and more than NT$30 million later, Khan Lee and a top-notch team including five historians released Attabu (阿罩霧風雲). The documentary film, which hit the mainstream market earlier this month, follows the fascinating history of the Lin family, starting from the Qing Dynasty when its founding ancestors migrated to Taiwan. The clan subsequently took root and thrived in Greater Taichung’s Wufeng, called Attabu in the language of Lowland Plains Indigenous Peoples (also known as the Pingpu Aborigines, 平埔族), who inhabited the region before they were killed, displaced or assimilated into Han Chinese society.
Photo Courtesy of Encore Film
Seeking history
It’s not surprising that the tale of the Lin clan — an immigrant family — strikes a chord with Khan Lee.
He belongs to the so-called Mainlander Second Generation (外省第二代): His father moved to Taiwan with the KMT troops from China after World War II.
Photo Courtesy of Encore Film
“But I am not going to spend five years making a film about the Lee family in China. I was born and grew up in Taiwan. I want to love Taiwan, but I suffer from amnesia. I don’t remember my history, my home. I need to know exactly what I love,” Khan Lee, the film’s producer, told the Taipei Times.
So Khan Lee studied the Lins.
He compares the clan with the Corleone family in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, in which the first-generation settlers “needed to kill and fight over resources in order to make a place for themselves in a hostile, foreign land.”
Photo Courtesy of Encore Film
The Lins, however, took their fight for survival to a professional level.
Noted for their military prowess, the militia family was recruited to help suppress the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) against the ruling Qing Dynasty.
During the Sino-French War, the Lins were recruited again to Keelung, where they successfully stopped an invasion by the French army. In return, they were awarded titles by the imperial court and tremendous wealth in the form of a camphor monopoly, until the cession of Taiwan to Japan in 1895.
Photo Courtesy of Encore Film
To Khan Lee, Wufeng’s Lin family is the epitome of Taiwan, which is forever caught in between the world’s great powers.
“The family always has to make choices — choices to side with the central government or regional forces, to become Japanese or Chinese, to side with Chinese nationalism or communism,” he notes.
Filling the void
Photo Courtesy of Encore Film
Khan Lee expects the film to face intense scrutiny, not just by clan descendants but also by people in academic and political circles. That’s because Attabu deals with a controversial chapter of Taiwanese history that is often distorted — or altogether ignored — to serve different political interests, he says.
“The KMT doesn’t mention the family because its members were killed during the White Terror era, while the DPP has no interest in the part of Taiwanese history when men wore queues,” he adds. “Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist party makes television drama in which the inhabitants of Taiwan speak with a perfect Beijing accent and love their fatherland.”
In Attabu, Khan Lee tries to depict the era faithfully. Using historically accurate props and costumes, Khan Lee and his team are able to craft meticulous reconstructions of bygone events, allowing viewers to “actually see what Taiwan looked like and then fill in the blanks.”
Photo Courtesy of Encore Film
Early in this process, Khan Lee was saddened to find that Taiwan’s film industry — after two decades of decline — had largely lost the knowledge, skills and talent required to make a convincing historical film. Khan Lee turned to veteran art director Lee Pao-lin (李寶琳), who has mostly worked in China and whose portfolio includes Lust, Caution (色，戒) by Khan Lee’s older brother, Ang Lee (李安). Lee Pao-lin helped decide how the buildings, people and the surroundings should look in the Taiwan of over a century ago. Every prop was made by a team in Beijing and shipped back to the Taiwanese crew as a loan.
“It is truly tragic when a place can’t even tell its own story,” Khan Lee laments. “Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖) certainly wouldn’t have had to spend NT$700 million to make Seediq Bale if we still had the knowledge and skills.”
With the release of Attabu, Khan Lee wishes to attract enough funding to complete the second part of the project, which tells the story of the Lins under Japanese rule and after the arrival of the KMT.
Photo Courtesy of Encore Film
“I was 51 years old when I first started the project. Now I am 56,” Khan Lee says, “I feel an anxious need to speed up and tell our own stories. Otherwise, they may be lost forever or told by others who will interpret our history differently.”
As mega K-pop group BTS returns to the stage after a hiatus of more than three years, one major market is conspicuously missing from its 12-month world tour: China. The omission of one of the group’s biggest fan bases comes as no surprise. In fact, just the opposite would have been huge news. China has blocked most South Korean entertainment since 2016 under an unofficial ban that also restricts movies and the country’s popular TV dramas. For some Chinese, that means flying to Seoul to see their favorite groups perform — as many were expected to do for three shows opening
A recent report from the Environmental Management Administration of the Ministry of Environment highlights a perennial problem: illegal dumping of construction waste. In Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) and Hsinchu’s Longtan District (龍潭) criminals leased 10,000 square meters of farmland, saying they were going to engage in horticulture. They then accepted between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic meters of construction waste from sites in northern Taiwan, charging less than the going rate for disposal, and dumped the waste concrete, tile, metal and glass onto the leased land. Taoyuan District prosecutors charged 33 individuals from seven companies with numerous violations of the law. This
Taiwan’s semiconductor industry consumes electricity at rates that would strain most national grids. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) alone accounted for more than 9 percent, or 2,590 megawatts (MW), of the nation’s power demand last year. The factories that produce chips for the world’s phones and servers run around the clock. They cannot tolerate blackouts. Yet Taiwan imports 97 percent of its energy, with liquefied natural gas reserves measured in days. Underground, Taiwan has options. Studies from National Taiwan University estimate recoverable geothermal resources at more than 33,000 MW. Current installed capacity stands below 10 MW. OBSTACLES Despite Taiwan’s significant geothermal potential, the
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) returned from her trip to meet People’s Republic of China (PRC) dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) bearing “a gift” for the people of Taiwan: 10 measures the PRC proposed to “facilitate the peaceful development of cross-strait relations.” “China on Sunday unveiled 10 new incentive measures for Taiwan,” wrote Reuters, wrongly. The PRC’s longstanding habit with Taiwan relations is to repackage already extant or once-existing policies and declare that they are “new.” The list forwarded by Cheng reflects that practice. NEW MEASURES? Note the first item: establishing regular communication mechanisms between the Chinese Communist Party
RSS