Ninety-five-year-old blacksmith Lee Hou-yung (李後庸) and his 69-year-old son, Lee Wang-pin (李汪彬), quietly sit on opposite corners of the family smithy at Nanfangao Fishing Port (南方澳漁港) in Yilan County’s Suao Township (蘇澳), each holding a welder as they make ship anchors.
At their shop, Yi Yuan Metalworks (億元鐵工廠), sparks fly about, rising and falling, seeming to underscore the boom and bust of Nanfangao’s fishing trade that the father and son have witnessed over the past 55 years.
The shop, devoid of a sign, is about 15 ping (49.59m2), with anchors of all sizes and harpoons hanging from its walls, with a hydraulic press in a corner.
Photo: Tsai Yun-jung, Taipei Times
Since its opening in 1958, Lee Wang-pin has been a part of the family trade.
At its peak, the shop had a staff of seven additional workers, who mainly worked on custom orders placed by fishing ship captains.
They manufactured anchors from as small as 4kg to as large as 700kg and also installed them, Lee Hou-yung said.
Nanfangao Township is not big — about 2km2 — but in its heyday, the fishing port was home to nearly 30,000 people, he said.
“The streets were packed with people, and the town had three cinemas, as well as two rows of night market stalls that never seemed to end,” he said.
Commercial trade was thriving, with so many vessels filling the harbor that they could cross it by walking from ship to ship, he said.
Fishing was hard work, and the younger generation did not want to take up the profession, Lee Hou-yung said, adding that as the population shrank, the township’s economy waned.
He turned the shop over to his son more than 20 years ago, but could not bear the idleness of retirement and returned to help, Lee Hou-yung said.
The secret to staying healthy at his age was to keep working, he said, adding that he treated work as a form of exercise and would continue as long as he could.
The prevalence of lightweight fiberglass as a primary material in making ships meant that their shop had less business, Lee Wang-pin said.
Nanfangao’s glory days were in the past, and more than one-quarter of the shops in the port had since closed, he said.
Some smithies remain, but once all the shops shut, ships would have to turn to large companies to fulfill orders and Yi Yuan would be unable to buy customized equipment at affordable prices, he said.
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