A Treasure Deep in the MountainsSanhsing

We head westward from Luotung, along Provincial Highway 7C. Autumn maples stand tall along the roadside, with fields spreading out beside the highway, the different shades of green spreading out, one after another, into a single beautiful rustic landscape. White herons dotting the fields, the whole area flanked by winding mountain ranges, and dotted with elegant farmhouses and field walls built of rough-hewn stone; all these illustrate the peaceful beauty of Sanhsing.

Reaching the T-junction at the end of the highway, we could immediately feel the cultured atmosphere of Sanhsing. To my right stood the elegant Atayal Bridge, stretching out toward the mountains, blue-green in the distance, while to my left was a signpost for "Lu Mei-li's Fine Carving Gallery," which had caught the curiosity of other visitors from the city. An art gallery in a remote village in rural Ilan?

Located at Tiensungpei in Sanhsing, the Fine Carving Gallery is more than just an exhibition center; there's also an elegant sales center and cafe where gallery head Chuang Han-chung brews tea to welcome his guests. "Coming here isn't just about looking at the exhibits-it's a place where everyone can chat and make friends," says Chuang, who was born and raised in the Ilan area. Years ago, having closed down their own business, Chuang and his wife Lu Mei-li came to Sanhsing and set up "Lu Mei-li's Fine Carving Gallery." As part of making their museum stand out, and to attract visitors from outside the region, Chuang took the initiative in tying together natural and cultural resources, promoting "Spirit of Tiensungpei" tours, offering tourists bicycles and beautiful guide-maps to help them enjoy the relaxing rural scenery.

"Tiensungpei sits at the highest point of the Lanyang Plain, and the drainage here is excellent. As well as the Lanyang River flowing down from the mountains and entering the plain here, the plentiful mineral deposits, and the fertile soil, the cold air coming in off the mountains provides the area with good air circulation," says Chuang. The constant supply of clean air makes the plants and vegetables of Tiensungpei grow particularly well-to use the human body as an analogy, you can feed a man and he will be well nourished, but if his energy circulation is poor, his health will be poor also. "Thanks to this air circulation, even people's lifespans are longer-there's one old lady here who's still selling vegetables at market in her 80s!"

(photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)

Sanhsing is just over 140 square kilometers in area, and is home to a population of just over 22,000. Although flat land only makes up one-third of that area, thanks to the lack of pollution, crystal-clear water, and abundant rainfall, Sanhsing's produce is always good quality; it's a classic farming village.

"We have the best green onions in all Taiwan," notes Lin Kun-tang of the Sanhsing District Farmers' Association proudly, pointing out some large green onions being weighed and packed by one of the farmers. The bulbs of Sanhsing green onions are 15 centimeters long and perfectly formed, and, what is more, have had the Council of Agriculture's "Good Agricultural Practice" (GAP) label conferred upon them, letting them sell for double the price of normal green onions.

"The conferral of GAP shows that our green onions are free of pesticide residue," says green onion farmer Chen Wan-sung. For the past several years, to uphold the good name of Sanhsing green onions, they've adhered strictly to regulations regarding pesticide spraying. "During times when we couldn't use pesticides, we've had to use manual labor or natural methods to control pests. That's hard work!"

Green onions can be grown all year, and the planted area in Sanhsing can reach 250 hectares, making up 70% of Ilan's total onion fields, and providing the main cash crop for Sanhsing.

"On average, one 10-are plot produces 2000 kilograms. Although the prices haven't been great this year, we've had a turnover of about NT$80,000, which is about NT$40,000 after expenses," notes Lin Kun-tang, adding that this income is still more than the NT$10,000 per plot for rice. The onion farmers can also rely solely on their plots to let them feed and clothe their families. Looks like the old Sanhsing saying "marry an onion farmer and you'll never go hungry" is still more than accurate, even in bad times.

Just as famous as their green onions are their sand leeks, although they can only be grown over the two or three months of winter. With the abundant rainfall of the plain, the leeks, too, grow large and well proportioned. Their scent is pungent and their flavor strong, which makes them well suited to the different styles of cooking around Taiwan, and for the past few years they have been a Chinese New Year staple throughout the Taipei area. At the fruit and vegetable markets of Taipei, these "Ilan green onions" and "Ilan sand leeks" have a great reputation, so the farmers of Sanhsing will never be short of work.

(Layout by Tsai chih-pen)

During July and August, the streets of Sanhsing are lined with signs for "Shangjiang" ("General") pears, and come the weekend, group after group of tourists will come to pick the famous fruits; people visiting from Taipei on two-day "tea and pears country culture" tours are a common sight.

These Shangjiang pears are plump and very juicy, and as soon as you bite into them, the juice practically pours out, covering your face. For this reason, the locals have a saying: "If you want to eat Shangjiang pears, you'd better not be afraid of making a mess of yourself." It's no surprise that in the markets Shangjiang pears can go for over NT$150 a kilogram, and yet still manage to pull in the customers.

"When growing pears, there's one important thing to remember-if there's a noticeable difference between day- and night-time temperatures, you'll get nice sweet pears," recalls Huang Shou-hua, the now-retired former executive director of the Sanhsing District Farmers' Association. Huang's excitement over the success of Sanhsing's pears is as plain as daylight. Thanks to the cool westerly winds that blow off the Lanyang River in the early evenings and the bright sunlight over the plain throughout the day, he says, the area has been blessed with a high temperature difference across the day. Farmers brought down Huaishan pear cuttings from Mount Li-"Pear Mountain"-and grafted onto them rootstocks from pear trees from colder areas, and then proceeded to breed them for five or six years. Throughout this time, they paid great attention to breeding techniques and methods to protect their plants from pests and disease, and they hired top experts for guidance. The result of all these factors was the high-quality pears of Sanhsing.

With the growing reputation of Sanhsing's pears, imitations have started to appear in the markets. "To protect product standards, and keep the trust of the consumer, the farmers' association had no choice but to intervene," says Sanhsing Farmers' Association Head of Promotions Tuan Peng-fu. Once the pears have all been harvested, they are all sent to a grading and packing plant, where their weight, appearance, texture, and sweetness are examined, and they are then graded and packed accordingly before being sent to cool storage. The farmers' association also plans to register a label, "Genuine Shangjiang Pears," as a trademark, which will help protect the investment of the farmers' association and put consumers' minds at ease.

Sanhsing has been vigorously promoting organic farming, involving the lack of pesticides. Their free-range chickens eat only natural feed, resulting in lean, tender meat, which the Farmers' Association is marketing to the fitness-conscious and new mothers.

As well as monitoring the quality of its members' produce, the Sanhsing Farmers' Association has also been able to double the size of the area's tourism industry in recent years. During the July-August Shangjiang pear harvest period, the area is inundated with tourists. "We're so busy we have to run everywhere," says Lin Kun-tang of the farmers' association. In order to keep control of the quality of the activities visitors will experience in the village, and to make sure the profits go back into the community, the farmers' association opted to handle the work itself rather than leave it in the hands of travel agencies. "It used to be that it was enough for the farmers' association to provide assistance to the farmers on their farms; now there's so much we need to do!" says Lin, who has been witness to great changes in Taiwan's agricultural industry over the past 20 years.

After Taiwan's entry to the WTO last year, the price of Shangjiang pears started to slide, leading to less-than-great profits for some of the farmers and a wait-and-see attitude toward production. As Tuan Peng-fu points out, last year 5000 tons of Korean pears were imported, which inevitably impacted the market for Shangjiang pears. However, despite the onslaught brought by WTO entry the farmers still consider it a turn for the better. "If we establish a unique identity for ourselves, we've still got a chance," says Huang Shou-hua. "In this age of the WTO, the need to raise the quality of goods has led to the problem of rising production costs in Taiwan. As such, it's now a matter of 'You haven't got what we've got; and if we both have it, ours is different.'"

Tachou train station is one of two stations along the Taipingshan Forest line that are lucky to have survived. Thanks to the efforts of the community of Tachou, their dilapidated train station was demolished and rebuilt in its original style, a reminder of times long past.

The farmers and the farmers' association have been working diligently to promote Sanhsing's boutique farming and leisure farming industries. A group of locals with a great love for Sanhsing's traditional culture have also been working hard to revive it.

One Friday night over the summer break, while others were enjoying the end of the week, the six-member "Parisanan Association" assembled for a meeting. The Ilan County Government was about to send their "Parisa Road Naming" proposal to a referendum, and the meeting was to plan a door-to-door leaflet distribution to each and every household, imploring the people to back the restoration of Highway 7C's original Aboriginal name, "Parisa."

As the association's executive director Huang Jui-chiang points out, the full 12-kilometer length of Highway 7C had been divided into 13 sections, each with their own name, which had long confused visitors from outside the area. Taking this into consideration, the county government proposed earlier this year to rename the entire highway "Parisa Road," but this proposal met with strong opposition. Caught between a rock and a hard place, the county government decided to open the proposal to public submissions.

"'Parisa' in the Atayal language means 'beautiful bamboo fence,' and was the old name for Sanhsing. During the Japanese occupation, since the Japanese deemed the pronunciation inappropriate, they added a 'nan' to the end. Then, somehow, this beautiful name for the road got twisted into 'balesai' [roughly, 'mashed guava'] for no apparent reason. It's unbelievably annoying," explains Huang Jui-chiang. But Huang, along with others, didn't just settle for being annoyed-they were stirred to action in the face of the political battle of wills over the area.

To find the historical origins of "Parisa," Huang Jui-chiang-a teacher of Chinese literature at Ilan Senior High-spent days poring through historical documents. He discovered that from Liu Mingchuan's term in office as governor of Taiwan during the Qing Dynasty, over 100 years ago, until the Japanese occupation, the area was administered under the name "Parisa." Thus a basis for the struggle for that name was found. Although the vote to change the name "Highway 7C" to "Parisa Road" failed by a narrow margin, Huang isn't in the least bit disheartened, instead feeling that this is a necessary step in developing local residents' cultural consciousness.

The Parisanan Association was established in 1999, with an eye toward conservation of Sanhsing's culture and environment, and community building, amongst other things. Among their members they count teachers, doctors, clergymen, entrepreneurs, and orchardists. From this association came the establishment of a community choir, a tree rescue effort, and a fight for the restoration of the Taipingshan Forest Railway-the association holds high ideals.

"Our position is to build community consciousness, and to provide impetus for community action," explains current association head Wen Shu-ling. Although they currently exert limited influence, this consciousness is not something that grows overnight, and over her four years of participation with the association, she herself has learned a lot and her own community consciousness has grown greatly through their activities.

For example, for the "Restore the Honor of Stonework" effort by the association to promote the old "stonework culture," they encouraged the townsfolk to put the abundant stones from Lanyang River to use in their everyday lives. If, going along the roads, one could often see stone-crafted flowerpots and stone-crafted replicas of local-style haystacks, the rustic charm of Sanhsing would be greatly increased.

Bunch after bunch of full green onions, bearing the GAP seal of approval demonstrating the high quality of Sanhsing onions, are leading Taiwan's trend toward boutique farming.

Of all their cultural preservation projects, a plan to restore the Taipingshan Forest Railway is the one that the Parisanan Association have been fighting for the hardest over the past four years.

"Since Taiwan's entry to the WTO, the value of rural villages has to depend on tourism," notes Huang Jui-chiang, who is amongst the people pushing for the restoration of the railway. When combined with the growing leisure farming industry, this restoration takes on even more importance. All along the 9.6-kilometer Niutou-Sanhsing section of the Taipingshan railroad, a variety of beautiful natural vistas greet the eye-soaring mountains, creeks and valleys, fields, villages, and small towns. All this has great tourism potential, and aside from spurring the growth of peripheral industries such as accommodation and food service, it also has a great historical importance.

Taipingshan's "fals cypress" forests were discovered by the Japanese early in their occupation of Taiwan. They soon began to fell them, and cypress became an important mainstay of occupied Taiwan's economy. Ilan's second largest city, Luotung, also rose to prominence as the collection and distribution center for Taipingshan timber, and used to enjoy the same sort of prosperity as the cities on the western plains. During the middle period of the occupation, the railway, originally dedicated to lumber transport, was opened to passengers after pressure from residents along the line. In the 1970s, with tourism to Taipingshan on the rise, an express train was commissioned and was virtually always full of passengers. But, thanks to fresh competition from public road access, and after being damaged by a typhoon, the railroad was finally closed down in 1979.

"The total production volume of Taipingshan's forest area outstripped that of Alishan," says Huang Jui-chiang, "but thanks to Alishan being opened up comparatively early and its railway being still complete and protected, Alishan has a much stronger reputation. Everyone's forgotten that Taipingshan is actually the old man of the forestry industry!"

Although the foundations of the forest railway are still there, the track itself has been dismantled, meaning that to rebuild it is reckoned to cost hundreds of millions of NT dollars-no small matter. Over the past four years, the Parisanan Association has undertaken many activities to promote this matter. They have successively mobilized 10,000 people to sign a petition, held talks with local elders to get their agreement, paid formal visits to senior officials to seek their backing, scouted out the track foundations, and made written proposals. After a long, uphill battle, they have finally got the attention of the county government, who then evaluated their plan. Last year, with the short-term goal of "historical protection," the county government allocated funds to the renovation of the former Tiensungpei railway station, letting the once-dilapidated station stand renewed in the community, captivating people and bringing to mind thoughts of a bygone era.

In spite of entry to the WTO bringing stiff competition to bear on the Sanhsing Shangjiang Pear market, the farmers still take on the higher production costs that come from producing high-quality goods.

Like that of the never-say-die efforts of the Parisanan community builders, the story of Chuang Han-chung and Lu Mei-li's Sanhsing museum is also well received.

"Why set up an art gallery in such a remote village?" "So my wife can carry on her creative work," replies Chuang. "If you're not looking for a way to make a living, how can you live off only a handful of carvings a year? More importantly, how can you bear to sell these works into which you've put so much of yourself?" "It's like a chicken digging for bugs to eat-if there are no bugs in this spot, he'll head off somewhere else." Because they didn't want to be sponsored, and thus be constrained by businesspeople, they decided to set up for themselves. They found Sanhsing, where the land was cheap and the area secluded and conducive to creativity, and built a small, beautiful museum, starting along the path to self-sufficient artistry.

When she was young, Lu Mei-li did some work as a graphic designer for a few years, but she grew tired of always doing her design work for someone else, so she started along a different path. "Ceramics, carving, I studied every art form I could," she says. Later, since she loved the scent of wood, she decided to focus on carving and after years of pouring her heart and soul into studying it, she found her Shangri-La.

The main materials used by Lu Mei-li for her carving are tulip-poplar wood and gold, and she takes as her inspiration the bugs and orchids of the natural world, and Buddha images. "If you look here, you can see freshly-hatched chicks," says Chuang, leading a group of visitors on a tour of the exhibits-lifelike locusts ready to take flight, fluttering butterflies resting in flowers, layer upon layer of elegant lifelike orchids. Aside from the skillfully crafted characters for "Fine Carving" carved in small writing on them, one can really feel the love the artist has for the natural surroundings of the village.

"My works can be enjoyed by young and old alike," says Lu, calm and composed, and a lady of few words. "Art should be part of life, not just sit in frames." Thus, in addition to the art of fine carving, her creative repertoire also includes glass ornaments, Chinese macrame, and gifts. One of her self-designed hanging wooden ornaments, "Full of Successful Plans" (which, in Chinese, is a play on "full of onions, plenty of leeks"), was amongst the top entrants in the Council of Agriculture's "Agritourism in Every Township" souvenir creativity contest. All through the exhibit sales center, one gets a sense of the feminine delicacy and creativity put into the artworks. At the same time, this "art should be part of life" mantra is also certainly their link to Sanhsing's industries, promoting the basic ideal of the "country spirit" bicycle tours.

Standing in the Jade Orchid Tea Garden near Atayal Bridge in the dusk of Sanhsing, a feeling of calm slowly comes over me. As I look out across Lanyang Plain, I think back to those who came here hundreds and thousands of years before: the Kavalan and Atayal tribes, and the Han Chinese from the other side of the lofty mountains. They fought with tooth and nail to make this place what it is, and this spirit has been passed down to today. Whether it's the farmers who are "taking up the WTO challenge," the "never-say-die community builders," or an artist carving her own path-it still flows through the veins of the people living here today.

Wood-carver Lu Mei-li and her husband Chuang Han-chung chose to set their business up in the peaceful, natural environment of Tiensungpei in Sanhsing. As well as dedicated creative work, they also work hard to make the most of the area's natural and cultural resources, offering "rural spirit" tours to visitors. (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)

Children playing around the sprawling onion fields; a sight of true gentle beauty. The picturesqueness of Sanhsing, both its people and their surroundings, is a wonderful reflection of the cultural landscape of the Lanyang Plain.

Stones piled up into the shape of a haystack, drawing the gazes of many a tourist as they stop and stare, along with stone-crafted flowerpots and other local icons. This "stonework culture" is the result of the efforts of the Parisanan Association.