Aug. 14 to Aug. 20
A happily retired Su Ching-liang (蘇清良) was planning a trip to the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt when a call from his son launched his second career.
Su Shen-nan’s (蘇神男) company had won a bid to restore Taipei’s Zhongshan Hall (中山堂) and needed his father’s expertise in Japanese-era ceiling molding techniques. It was 1998, and the younger Su had trouble finding someone who still possessed the skill.
Photo: CNA
Trained as a cement construction craftsman (土水師), Su started out working on traditional structures in the 1950s before moving on to modern buildings, making a comfortable living that allowed him to retire in 1996 to travel the world with his wife. But the Zhongshan Hall project ignited his passion in historic restoration, joining more than 30 projects across Taiwan over the following two decades. It also gave a newfound purpose to his skills that were once considered obsolete.
Su’s proudest work is the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office Transportation Bureau (台灣總督府交通局鐵道部, today’s National Taiwan Museum’s Railway Department Park). During the reopening of the building, he got to meet President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文).
“I never thought that as a cement worker, I could ever have the chance to speak to the president,” Su says in a Central News Agency article.
Photo: Chen Wen-chan, Taipei Times
The accolades kept coming in, however, and last year he was named a “Living National Treasure” as a preserver of cement repair and construction techniques.
Su died last month, and at his memorial service last Sunday he received a presidential citation. He never got to see the pyramids, however.
CRAFTY BEGINNINGS
Photo courtesy of Wikmedia Commons
Su was born in 1935 in a farming village in Kaohsiung’s Hunei District (湖內). After a few years of elementary school, he was forced to quit due to incessant air strikes during World War II and find work to support his family. He hoped to find a stable job at a factory, but since there weren’t many opportunities in the area, he helped out on the family farm until he turned 16.
At that time, his father had invited a builder named Han Chi-fu (韓其福) to construct a bamboo cage house on the farm. His father asked if Han could teach Su some skills, which turned into an apprenticeship that lasted three years and four months. Due to Su’s diminutive stature, Han made a small stool for him to stand on when he applied plaster to the walls.
They worked on many traditional Taiwanese structures, as well as buildings that fused Japanese-Western features. Upon completing the apprenticeship, Han gave Su a full set of cement work tools. Su continued working with Han afterward, but the nature of their work shifted quickly with the times, moving on to shophouses, modern buildings and factories during the 1960s. As Taiwan’s economy improved, many wanted to renovate their local shrines, leading to a proliferation in temple work as well.
Photo courtesy of Wikmedia Commons
Wu Shao-yin (吳紹尹) writes in “A study on Su Hsieh-ying and Su Ching-liang, their cement techniques and life history” that after losing money on a temple project, Su temporarily left the trade and tried his hand at raising chickens for a few years — the results were disastrous, and he returned to construction in 1965. This time he staked out on his own, and although he had to mostly eschew his traditional artistry for modern techniques, business was booming. His wife Su Hsieh-ying (蘇謝英) and young son also began helping out.
“At that time, I worked on 99 out of 100 houses in Hunei,” he tells Wu.
Su took on three apprentices during this time, who continued to work with him during his cultural restoration period. He also hired 15 local craftspeople and paired each with a migrant worker.
Photo courtesy of Kaohsiung Museum of History
His motto to his disciples was “It’s fine to take your time doing things, but once you finish, do not change it.”
RESTORATION CAREER
Construction was becoming saturated in the 1990s, and Taiwan’s economic boom was slowing down. Su and his wife retired in 1996 to travel the world, visiting nearly 50 cities in two years. Sources differ on whether Su’s son first asked him to work on Zhongshan Hall or Taipei Guesthouse (台北賓館). But Zhongshan Hall restorations began in 1998, which fits the timeline, whereas the government did not begin fixing the Taipei Guesthouse until 2003.
Photo: Chen Wei-jen, Taipei Times
In any case, Su didn’t return to traveling after completing the project, remaining in the field and collaborating with the company their son worked for.
“Su carefully studies the structure and lines of each building, as well as the construction methods, materials and cultural spirit behind each component,” a Ministry of Culture document states.
The Hsinchu Prefecture Hall in was among Su’s most challenging projects. While working on it in 2002, he met Yeh Chun-lin (葉俊麟) from Chung Yuan Christian University (中原大學), who was there to document the process. Through Yeh’s encouragement, Su realized the value of his traditional skills.
Photo: Su Fu-nan, Taipei Times
“He told me that my tools were very valuable, and that’s why I kept them until now,” Su says, proudly displaying them whenever people visited to learn more about him and the trade.
But it’s the Railway Department Park that he considers his crowning achievement. The Western-Japanese fusion structure was in bad shape; the layered, complicated ceiling flourishes had mostly collapsed and much of the intricate stucco decorations were damaged.
Su made dozens of molds to try to recreate the molding for the ceiling, and asked people to find old photos of the decorations so he could reproduce each one authentically.
“When dealing with cultural relics, we must bring them back to life using techniques from their time,” he says.
Other notable projects include the Wufeng Lin Family Mansion (霧峰林家) and the Hengchun Old City (恆春古城).
Already recognized as one of the few remaining traditional cement craftsmen proficient in both Han and Western architecture, Su further diversified his talents by working with different experts. He learned more about Japanese plastering techniques at the Taipei Guesthouse and southern Taiwanese (especially Hakka) architectural details while helping rebuild traditional structures destroyed by the massive 921 Earthquake.
Over the last decades of his life, Su went from just an ordinary construction boss to a venerated preserver of traditional crafts. In 2018, he began teaching his cement construction craft at a program hosted by the Tainan National University of the Arts, continuing through 2021 when he semi-retired once more.
And in 2017, he found a willing young disciple to carry on his work — his grandson Su Chien-ming (蘇建銘).
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