Island village going strong in Penghu

Sticks of incense drying in Erkan Village, Penghu. (Staff photo/June Tsai)

By June Tsai

Just 20 years ago, Erkan Village was seriously threatened by depopulation and the deterioration of its buildings. Today, travelers to the Penghu archipelago, one of Taiwan’s best-known tourist destinations, consider the site in the western township of Xiyu a must-see destination.

“This is all thanks to a strong sense of community and tradition among residents whose families have lived here for generations,” said Chen Rong-yi, president of the Erkan Association.

The story of Erkan may serve to show how Penghu can draw tourists while keeping its natural and cultural heritage intact, after its residents decided to throw out a casino-development plan in a 2009 referendum.

The quaint hamlet is noted for its well-maintained historic houses and the liveliness of the community, made even more attractive by its seclusion.

Xiyu is a separate island from Penghu proper, where busy Magong City is located, and was not connected to it until 1970, when a 2,494-meter bridge was completed.

Erkan is off the main road, surrounded by round hills on three sides, with a strip of intertidal zone on the northeast.

Visitors entering the village these days are first struck by a curious, warm fragrance, which they soon see comes from sticks of incense spread under the sun to dry.

The incense is pressed together by hand from powdered blanket flowers, Taiwan cotton-rose and Artemisia, which Chen described as Erkan’s three natural treasures. Burning the incense, he added, serves to drive away mosquitoes and, as local lore has it, bad spirits.

The incense sticks, mounted on colorful miniature ship models, are for sale, but at just one establishment in the whole village. In Erkan, each of the restored traditional buildings today is dedicated to one specific aspect of the settlement

Indeed, the incense reveals Erkan’s most important specialty—its tradition of herbal medicine.

The village can be dated back over 300 years, and early settlers, who were all surnamed Chen, came from Kinmen, other offshore islands to the northwest at the mouth of Xiamen Bay on mainland China, during the late years of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), according to Chen.

Difficulty in making a living due to the dry climate and harsh winds of Penghu caused many residents to emigrate further to Taiwan proper at the beginning of the 20th century. There, they concentrated their efforts in the field of herbal medicine.

Erkan villagers moving to Taiwan developed a business chain encompassing the cultivation of herbs, their manufacture into medicines, the importation of herbs locally unavailable and the operation of medicinal shops providing prescriptions.

Their businesses employed fellow villagers, and spread throughout Taiwan. Some Erkan natives became prominent practitioners of herbal medicine.

This business later played an important role in reviving Erkan in modern times.

“Outsiders always wonder why so many archaic residential houses still stand in Erkan,” Chen said.

“I asked myself the same question and started to collect oral histories. Actually, it became a custom among Erkan people to build fine houses in their home village after they had become successful elsewhere.”

The first people to do so were the brothers Chen Ling and Chen Bang. They had gone to Taiwan before the major exodus of villagers, and returned to build a house in 1901 after making a fortune in Chinese medicine.

Now known as the Ling Bang Memorial, the Minnan-style courtyard house with its baroque decorations was unspeakably magnificent at the time.

Others followed suit. Most of the 50 houses existing today were constructed between 1909 and 1938.

Throughout the years, the village did not grow bigger, and the number of residents remained below 100, yet the community persevered due to the close bonds between people, Chen noted.

“In time, the structures came to make up the village’s material legacy, and the knowledge [of Chinese medicine] accumulated over the years became Erkan’s cultural heritage,” Chen said.

When the government selected Erkan for preservation under a six-year plan in 1994, residents, along with relatives returning from Taiwan, set up the Erkan Association to communicate their views to the government. Chen, now 68, was one of them.

Chen moved with his family to Taiwan’s southern city of Kaohsiung when he was just five. He joined the association from its inception. “I began then to get reacquainted with my hometown.” He is now in his third term as president.

“Policy changed several times in the past, but we intended to revive Erkan, rather than just preserving it as a static museum,” Chen said.

In 2001 the village became the first traditional settlement in the country to be designated for conservation, protected by the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act.

“We make use of the government funding to help renovate houses and build local-specific industry so we can help ourselves survive and keep up tourism,” Chen explained. A total of 21 houses have been renovated.

The revival movement drew more Erkan people back home. Chen Jin-shih, who moved back to the village from Taiwan in 2007, said, “Originally I was just going to join in the community empowerment efforts.”

“When it came to settling down in my home village, I set out to restore the everyday functions of my collection of antiques.”


Now his Erkan Village No. 20 offers visitors a sample of traditional lifestyle, with old furniture, appliances and artifacts displayed as they were used in the past.

Different historic houses now showcase herbal medicine, traditional life, folk songs and intertidal activities. A field of herbs attracts many visitors, while around another corner works produced by local artists are displayed in an open space.

To enjoy the tempo of life in the village, one may choose to stay in Erkan’s only hostel—a traditional house furnished with modern amenities. The small village is also home to three temples, including the Chen family temple.

One house-turned museum is dedicated to Erkan’s special musical and literary heritage—praise songs.

“These songs were written by different generations of local people. They are not only about love and separation, but also about Erkan people’s struggle to survive and prosper in strange lands,” Chen Rong-yi said.

Travelers may follow the lead of a local guide and recite praise song texts in elegant Holo Taiwanese.

“We promote one trade per house—this stems from a consensus among residents to work together to rejuvenate the village, sustain local businesses and preserve our way of life,” the association president said.

Chen revealed that before granting funds for Erkan’s revival plan, the government asked residents to sign an agreement guaranteeing that they would not sell their property to the private sector after renovation.

“There were indeed developers eyeing the village and its surroundings, but we are bent on running the place ourselves,” he said.

“Culture takes time to grow. You don’t build culture in a day. And we are trying hard to continue on the path we chose.”


This article is published in Taiwan Today Aug. 10, 2010.

Commitment beyond nationality: Taipei Ricci Institute

Jesuits and staff members work on the Chinese-French dictionary project in their Taichung office. (Courtesy of Taipei Ricci Institute)


By June Tsai

The Taipei Ricci Institute, founded in 1966 to support a huge Chinese dictionary project, has since realized that its mission is inseparable from Taiwan and the island nation’s mixture of cultures and changing social faces.

The institute, officially the Taipei Ricci Institute for Chinese Studies, takes its name from Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit who arrived at the Chinese Ming court in 1583 and planted the seeds of cultural exchange between China and the West.

During the 1940s, as a way to sum up the Society of Jesuits’ 400-year presence in China, a Hungarian Jesuit, the Rev. Eugene Zsamar, gathered a team to compile an encyclopedic multilingual dictionary of Chinese and Hungarian, English, French, Spanish and Latin.

The Chinese civil war disrupted the project in its initial stages, and foreign missionaries were expelled from the mainland when the Communists came to power. Zsamar took refuge in Macau in 1949, and the project officially got underway. More people joined the effort, supported by some 200 dictionaries and related works Zsamar and others had brought with them.

“Two years were spent inventorying all the basic documentation on 8-by-12 centimeter cards, and it ended up with 2 million entries,” the Rev. Jacques Duraud, current director of the institute, told Taiwan Today. He displayed some of the yellowing cards, carefully mounted and preserved. On each card is recorded all possible translations of a Chinese character and related idioms in different languages.

The political situation dictated the project’s relocation from Macau to Taiwan in 1952, first to Taichung, then to Taipei. Under the French priest Yves Raguin, who succeeded the ailing Zsamar, the research institute was established to offer a stable base for the lexicographic work, as well as for the educational and missionary endeavors of the Jesuits in this new location.

Though financial difficulties and lack of manpower slowed the work, lexicographers still managed to produce separate medium-sized Chinese-French, Chinese-Spanish and Chinese-Hungarian dictionaries during the 1970s.

Gradually, only enough Jesuits and coworkers remained in the French section to carry on the lexicographical project.

“Thanks to the advent of the computer, data were processed in a systematic way, facilitating dictionary compilation and future uses.” Duraud, who came to Taiwan in 1986, was able to witness the completion of the seven-volume, 9,000-page Chinese-French dictionary in 2002.

Known as the “Grand Ricci,” it is believed to be the world’s largest bilingual dictionary, containing 300,000 entries.

Through this work the Jesuit lexicographers at the institute developed unparalleled knowledge in specialized fields. The Rev. Jean Lefeuvre, for example, in charge of the dictionary’s etymological section, became expert in oracle bone inscriptions, while Raguin completed books on meditation in the Buddhist and Taoist traditions.

Even more significantly, a library with 50,000 books was accumulated on traditional Chinese studies, religion and philosophy, as well as major fields in the humanities and social sciences.

In addition, a digital version of the “Grand Ricci” was made public in April. According to Duraud, specialized follow-up dictionaries, including one of Chinese medical terms, will also be published.

Although local people may not be aware that Taiwan has played host to such a massive cross-cultural undertaking, during the 50 years of the dictionary project, those at the Ricci Institute have been participatory observers in Taiwan’s passage from its colonial past to its democratic and prosperous present.

“The people of this country have overcome considerable political and economic challenges in the past decades,” said Duraud, who began to live and work in Taiwan in 1986. “I think it is now of great significance for Taiwan to position itself in the world on the basis of its specific achievements, to see the world from Taiwan’s perspective.”

Adopting this view, members of the Ricci Institute, besides serving to bridge cultures East and West, found their own ways of involving themselves with Taiwan.

One of their forms of engagement, according to Duraud, is the magazine Renlai, meaning “the sounds of humanity,” launched in 2004. Published in Chinese, the monthly deals with cultural, social and spiritual concerns. It also introduces European views through collaboration with the Paris-based cultural magazine Etude.

Later on, “eRenlai,” an electronic version, was made available in English and Chinese, to address Chinese communities and interested readers around the world.

“Because of this magazine, the institute began to have regular contact with various sections of the society, including nongovernmental organizations, academic institutes and private companies,” said June Lee, the institute’s executive director, who has worked on Renlai from its inception.

The magazine has initiated symposiums on religion, aboriginal languages and sustainable development. In 2007 and 2008, the institute organized an award for sustainability, conferring prizes on people engaged in grassroots social causes related to community, the environment and nature.

Indeed, the TRI has made a transition toward broader engagement with local society. According to the Rev. Benoit Vermander, who succeeded Raguin in 1996, the concept of Chinese studies referred to in the institute’s publication was static.

“It implies a concentration on the ‘grand narrative’ of the Chinese tradition and pays little attention to the specificities of Taiwan, where the Institute is located,” Vermander wrote in “Communication and Jesuit Mission in Chinese Context,” published in eRenlai in 2005.

Under Vermander, as the dictionary project was brought to completion, the institute set out to “work with the pluralist cultures and peoples within China and Taiwan,” as well as implementing research projects “that purposefully address issues and concerns common not only to China and Taiwan, but to all in the global community,” according to his 2005 article.

In addition to engagement through publications, the TRI supports a primary school in an ethnic minority area of Sichuan Province in the mainland and organizes teams of volunteer Taiwanese, American and French students to work in that area.

Now, it is in the local indigenous cultures that the TRI has found Taiwan’s great relevance to the global community.

Over the last two decades, the institute’s Jesuit priests have been engaged in aboriginal community work and education. The Austrian priest Fredric Weingartner, for example, has helped document 10 aboriginal languages and even published a Saisiyat language textbook in 1998. Duraud, who took over the helm of the institute in 2003, has been organizing activities fostering exchange among youth of different ethnic groups.

“The cultural diversity of the island, rediscovered in the process of the country’s democratization, and its links to the Austronesian world, documented in many studies, tie Taiwan very closely to other Pacific countries,” Duraud said.

“Issues concerning the Pacific in the new century, such as the challenges of climate change, could even highlight Taiwan’s role and efforts,” he stressed.

In view of this, the TRI is expanding its mission to include Pacific studies. In January, its book collection was transferred to the National Central Library, where the Matteo Ricci and Pacific Studies Reading Room opened to the public in April to mark the 400th anniversary of Ricci’s death in May 1610.

According to Lee, the institute will soon establish a center for Pacific studies, engaging researchers from Academia Sinica and National Taiwan University. “The goal is to spearhead international Pacific studies,” she said, adding that the center’s first international conference on Pacific-Austronesian cultures will be held in February next year.

For Duraud, Taiwan’s cultural diversity and tolerance of differences are manifested in many ways. He used a church in Taipei County’s Xindian City as an example. “The congregation of this church is one-third mainland Chinese descendents, one-third local Taiwanese and one-third aborigines,” he said.

Differences between the three groups need to be taken into consideration when it comes to the Eucharist and holidays.

Despite possible problems ensuing from their different identities, they are willing to come together under the same roof, he said.

“For people outside the church, this situation should serve to encourage creativity in finding peaceful and constructive ways of living together,” he said.

“I enjoy the diversity of Taiwanese society, and hope the institute can help nurture peace, understanding and sympathy between different cultures.”

This article is published in Taiwan Today Aug. 31, 2010.

Czech jazz star woos Taipei fans

The Prague Conservatory Jazz Orchestra performs in Taipei Sept. 30. (Courtesy of Taipei City government)

By June Tsai

Musical luminary Milan Svoboda and his Prague Conservatory Jazz Orchestra played in Taipei Sept. 30, captivating local music lovers with their trademark silky sounds and continental flair.

“I am very happy to have performed in Taiwan and had a wonderful experience,” Svoboda said. “Our countries are so far apart geographically and culturally, but music brings us together.”

Svoboda, 59, is one of the most important figures in the development of jazz music in the Czech Republic. His eclectic musical style, which fuses comedic expression with jazz and hip-pop, has won the artist accolades around the world during a 30-year career.

The orchestra comprises students from Prague-based Jaroslav Jezek Conservatory and College, which is considered the top tertiary institution for jazz music in Central Europe.

According to Svoboda, he began playing jazz a few years after Soviet tanks rolled through the streets of Prague in 1968. “For me, the music was a way of sharing stories during these hard times; it was also one of the few ways I could be free.”

The orchestra’s one-off gig in Taipei was part of a cultural exchange event organized by the Taipei and Prague city governments.

Svoboda and his band were accompanied by a delegation from Prague, including Deputy Mayor Marie Kousalikova, Assemblyman Ivan Bednar and conservatory deputy director Jiri Kulisev.

“This is the first time for such event to take place and we hope it will not be the last,” Kousalikova said. “Czech jazz has a unique sound and we hope to bring it back to Taiwan in the future. We also welcome Taiwanese groups to play in Prague.”

This article is published in Taiwan Today Oct. 1.