Tainan 台南

(Off again!)

For this past month, Taiwan, like everywhere else, has been very busy with the special tract campaign about our website. We've been working really hard to get our entire territory covered, and actually we came pretty close- we got it about 85% done, and that's because we ran out of tracts, not time! Because we've been focusing so much on this campaign, most everyone's daily free time has been spent in some form of the ministry, so there hasn't been as many opportunities to hang out with the friends as there usually is.

Although we still have lunch together!

That picture, by the way, was the last sighting of Tom Vasey in Taiwan. He only stayed with us for a month, and during that time we were all very busy (especially with Pioneer School!), so we sadly couldn't hang out as much as I would have liked... but in that month, unsurprisingly, he fell in love with Taiwan and plans to come back. His plane took off near midnight that night, and I hear he's doing well back in England.

Although the daily amount of free time has been reduced, I was invited out of the blue to join a group heading south to the city of Tainan for a weekend... so I said, sure!

The group

The actual group from Taipei was only four people: myself, a Tainanese brother named Cary, and two Japanese brothers, Keiji and Yang Jie. Tainan is the oldest city in Taiwan, predating Taipei by about fifty years, and it has a reputation for having a slow pace of life and delicious food. Actually, we have several people from Tainan in our congregation, and if they are to be believed, Tainan has the best food in all of Taiwan!

We took a bus down the west coast of Taiwan down to Tainan, about a four hour ride, and arrived Friday evening. Cary's mom (I only ever called her Sister Liu) picked us up in her tiny little Yaris at Tainan Station and started the trip off with a bang by driving us to the old part of the city.

Warm summer night

The city has a couple layers to it. This layer was built by the Qing Dynasty back in the 1800s as a regional administration center- at the time, most of Tainan's industry was agriculture, and its rice, sheep and deer fed millions of Chinese citizens. It was a cool place, and really interesting to see the old style of houses. I'm not sure if you can see in the picture, but most houses have a door on the second floor that just opens to the air- in Qing times, whenever people would buy anything from the shops, they would tell the merchant on the first floor what they wanted, then wait outside for the workers to throw their item down to them!

After walking around for a while and eating some actually really delicious red bear ice cream, we went to eat some of the famous Tainanese food.

It was actually really good!

Tainan lived up to its reputation. The food was amazing, and compared to Taipei, very cheap. I ate a bit too much this trip...

Afterwards, we went to the city's old front gate.

Ignore the buildings behind...

In times gone by, Tainan was a port city. It was built on an isthmus jutting out into the South China Sea, and had a powerful position on the trade routes between China, Japan and Europe. Over the years, its river steadily silted up the harbor, until now the sea is a good ten minute drive outside the city- but a long time ago, this gate was built right next to the ocean, and was the dock where important officials disembarked.

We stayed with Sister Liu, who very generously provided a room for the three of us non-Tainanese people to sleep, and in the morning got up early for the ministry.

Nice group!

The ministry was really nice in Tainan! It was hot- we'd crossed into the tropics- but the people were really relaxed and laid back, and in my case really surprised to see a Westerner speaking Chinese. The congregation we went out with only has one other Western brother in it, and although his Chinese is pretty good it's still new to the locals!

After a couple hours in the ministry, we were taken off to see another layer of the city. Before the Qing, there was the Ming.

Confucius Institute

In the late 1600s, there was a Ming general named Koxinga who was far away from Beijing when the Ming Dynasty was overthrown. Despite his orders changing, he felt loyal to the now-deceased Ming Emperor and attempted to use his army to retake the throne. To make a long story short, he failed, and after a few years of essentially terrorism took the majority of the population of his fief and emigrated to Taiwan, where he built the city of Tainan (at the time called Fucheng) and began slowly building up power to take down the Qing. (He didn't.)

Nice buildings though!

He built this Institute to encourage Chinese-style learning in his new land, which he considered the "Real China". I feel like there's a parallel somewhere... anyway, after his death, the Qing finally got around to noticing there was a Chinese city in Taiwan and claimed it for their own.

Gifts from the Emperor

Each sign above this altar was a gift from the Emperor in Beijing, to set the mood for his reign and to remind everyone who was in charge. They're all written in really formal Traditional Chinese, right to left, and most of them have been adopted to a certain extent into the lexicon as a saying. Interestingly, Chiang Kai-Shek, the leader of the Guomindang, decided to add his own sign to the collection when he retreated to Taiwan after the Communist Revolution. Maybe he thought he was the true Emperor?

Nice Pagoda

At one time, that pagoda was the tallest building in Tainan... it's been dwarfed by the Far Eastern Hotel for a little while now.

Try as I might, I can't read the ancient Chinese

It was a really nice, very peaceful place, made more interesting because Cary knows quite a bit about the history of Qing China in general and Tainan specifically.

We went to the meeting afterwards, which was really nice. They only have two elders in their congregation who tried very hard to convince us to move down and help out. The real problem is that, as we discovered out in the ministry, about half of all the people we ran into can't speak Chinese- only Taiwanese. They even used some Taiwanese during the meeting. So if I were to move to Tainan to help out, I would need to start all over again and learn an entirely new language.

The food makes a convincing case, though...

After the meeting we went out to eat, of course.

Oh man!

All the food is served family style, of course, and it's the best traditional Chinese food ever. Fish, rice, noodles, stir fry, squid...

And, of course, new friends!

We stayed up way too late, got back to the house at about 3 am, and crashed.

The next day was Sunday, and unfortunately was the last day of our short trip. We wanted to go check out the next layer of the city, before Koxinga, but on the way we ran across these guys:

You know, just chillin'.

Turns out that Sunday was a religious festival in Daoist tradition. I tried to catch a video of some of it on my phone, but I'm not sure if it'll work very well on this blog. Here it is:

 Anyway, moving past the festival, we came to the original settlement of what is now Tainan: Fort Zeelandia.

Zeelandia!

Built by the Dutch East India Company in the early 1600s, it was a key port of resupply and trade between Japan, China and the Netherlands. They bought all the bricks from the Ming, but they couldn't find any way to get European mortar to the island reliably, which led to them improvising and making mortar out of lime ash and, of all things, rice. The Fort was under Dutch control for only about fifty years, and reliably protected them from the Formosan Aborigines...  until Koxinga's arrival with his thousands of troops forced them to abandon the fort and flee.

They probably had better cannonballs than we did.

Koxinga used it as his court for a while, paranoid about the threat from the Qing (who completely forgot about him once he left the Mainland), but after him it was more or less abandoned. Once the Japanese seized the island from the Qing in the 1800s, they used it as a barracks and built a spiffy tower in its courtyard to keep an eye on the city.

Obligatory, sorry.

...and once the KMT came back to Taiwan in the 1940s, it was forgotten again, until a few years ago it was turned into a historical exhibit.

It's interesting to note that most people in Tainan seemed nostalgic about Japan. In Taipei, people are either neutral or a bit bitter about being part of Japan in the past, but in Tainan most buildings had Japanese writing on them, they sold old Japanese maps of the city and island, and they loved talking with the two Japanese brothers with us. Imperial Japan was really nasty to most areas the conquered, but it would appear they actually treated Taiwan- at least, this part of it- pretty well. 

Part of the original outer wall

View from the central fort

After looking through the Fort, we went to "the oldest street in Taiwan", which is now a street market full of cheap clothes and delicious unhealthy snacks.

And lots of people.

...and then we had to go! It was a short trip, but nice. I made a lot of friends and got to see a different aspect of life and the ministry here in Taiwan. I hope to be able to go back sometime, for the food if nothing else!