Taiwan in Time: Jan. 11 to Jan. 17
The rice harvest was almost ready in early September, 1963 in Chungchuang Village (中庄), situated near the Dahan Creek (大漢溪) which was in the process of being dammed to create the Shihmen Reservoir (石門水庫).
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The Aboriginal Atayal villagers had already moved once when their original farming and hunting grounds were flooded in the construction process. Though the new place, rocky and muddy, was less suitable for agriculture, the villagers were able to make do.
Then Typhoon Gloria hit.
In a study of the tribe’s exodus by Aho Batu, a descendant of the villagers, an elder says that after the storm cleared, they had no idea that the reservoir’s flood gates were about to burst open, and carried on with regular duties until a policeman came running toward the people, warning them to evacuate right away.
Photo: Chou Min-hung, Taipei Times
“They told us not to take anything and just run,” Taguin Botu recalled. “I wanted to grab a pair of pants that had money in it, but when I looked back I saw that the water was rising. I didn’t bring anything, and we were left with nothing.”
This group of Atayals was among the almost 3,000 residents displaced by the construction of the Shihmen Reservoir, about a third of them Aborigines.
Approved by the government on Jan. 14, 1954 and completed 10 years later, Shihmen is considered the first multi-purpose reservoir in the country — not only supplying water to millions of people in northern Taiwan but also serving as flood control and generating electricity. It’s also a tourist destination, and even though its popularity has waned in recent decades, it still sees about 1 million visitors per year.
There had been discussion about damming the Dahan Creek since the 18th century. The Japanese colonial government conducted research on the possibility in the 1920s, and reportedly produced a rough plan in 1929, which was derailed by the outbreak of war. According to a publication by the Northern Region Water Resources Office, locals were lacking water to irrigate their crops and they wanted a reservoir like Wutoushan (烏頭山), which the Japanese built in the south.
The dam was constructed with US technical and financial support, utilizing more than 7,000 workers with 34 fatalities and more than 2,000 injuries over eight years.
During times of low water levels, some submerged structures could be seen — most recently in February last year when an Earth God Temple (土地公廟) reappeared for the first time in 10 years.
The temple is a reminder of the residents who were displaced by the project, whom are not mentioned in several official publications about the reservoir. However, quite a few studies have been made on the topic.
Most concur that the residents were “partially forced” and coaxed to leave their ancestral homes with promises of monetary and land compensation. But official records from the government’s construction committee show that the compensation plan wasn’t even finalized until 1957, two years after construction began.
According to a study published in National Taiwan University’s Journal of Geographical Science by Chen Chi-peng (陳其澎), the people were moved in four groups between 1958 and 1963 to various locations near the coast, with the last group being the 82 Atayal families who moved to Chungchuang.
The official account states that it was a necessary sacrifice for the greater good, and that these residents were in fact moved to much better conditions than before.
But Chen writes that Datan (大潭), where one of the groups ended up, was former ocean land and it took about 10 years to turn its saline, sandy soil into proper farmland. These Han Chinese residents would soon be joined by the Atayals after Chungchuang was flooded.
After losing their home a second time, Aho Batu writes that the Atayals waited almost eight months to be relocated again, in the meantime building makeshift homes in the flooded area or staying with relatives.
About half of the people chose to remain nearby or relocate on their own, and the other half was moved by the government to Datan.
Life was tough as many people had to find work elsewhere because it was so hard to farm, but they carried on until the late 1970s, when it was found that the water and crops had been polluted with cadmium from a nearby factory, causing people to fall ill and die. After years of struggle and protests, they were reportedly finally compensated for their losses in 1990. This time, they didn’t move as a group, and instead scattered into villages nearby, spelling the end of both communities whose homeland sat in the bottom of the reservoir.
To end on a lighter note, a once popular local saying when someone’s fly is open was that they “forgot to close their Shimen Reservoir.” The expression is still understood today, though not as often used. The first person who publicly uttered the phrase was allegedly a contestant on a televised beauty pageant in the 1970s.
Taiwan in Time, a column about Taiwan’s history that is published every Sunday, spotlights important or interesting events around the nation that have anniversaries this week.
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