The warmth of the flues
The flavors of the local Hakka cuisine recall the history of the eastern Hakka's movements and development of new lands. The tobacco barns that litter the township, on the other hand, are visceral reminders of how early Fenglin residents made their livings and of the "immigrant" industries of the Japanese occupation.
Soon after Taiwan was ceded to Japan at the end of the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895, the eastern part of the island became the target of Japanese immigration and development. This immigration came in three waves. The first was driven by private-sector organizations such as Kata Kinzaburo's "Kata Group." The second, from 1906 to 1917, was government sponsored and involved large numbers of immigrants from the main islands of Japan, which were suffering population pressure and rice shortages. For the third, which got under way in 1921, the colonial government brought in Taiwanese farmers to develop tobacco, tea and sugarcane industries.
The Taiwanese who migrated from western Taiwan to the east coast between 1906 and 1930 (called "double immigrants," as their ancestors had previously migrated to Taiwan from the Chinese mainland) were largely from the prefectures of Taihoku (modern Taipei City and County, Keelung, and Ilan County) and Shinchiku (Hsinchu, Miaoli, and Taoyuan Counties), with Hakka from Shinchiku making up the majority. The area's diverse ethnic terrain also included Japanese, Minnanese, and Aborigines.
The colonial economy was organized principally to meet the needs of the colonizers. Taiwan, which didn't produce tobacco and where few people smoked, became a tobacco exporter to meet Japanese demand for the leaf. According to Hsu Ying-fu, a former employee of the Taiwan Tobacco and Wine Monopoly Bureau, the Japanese began planting a gold leaf variety of American tobacco into the Hualien-Taitung region in 1913. Fenglin became involved with the tobacco industry in 1917, when cultivation of the plant spread to the "immigrant" villages of Fengtien and Lintien.
"In the old days, you could tell how poor or wealthy a family was by the number of tobacco barns on their property," says Hsu. Fenglin was once an important Eastern Rift Valley tobacco grower, and at its height had about 80 tobacco barns for curing its crop. Tobacco, all of which was exported, was the area's economic lifeblood.
In those days, Fenglin's industrious farmers used the period before the rice harvest to sprout their tobacco seedlings. These were transplanted to the fields once they brought their rice in. Generally speaking, when the tobacco reached about head high, its leaves were large enough to harvest and cure.
Once they had picked the green leaves, the farmers strung them in bunches, hung them from bamboo poles, then placed them into their barns. There they were flue-cured, a process which would, over the course of a week, turn the leaves a golden brown. Curing was grueling work. To keep barn temperatures constant throughout the process-necessary if the grower was to produce high-quality tobacco-the grower and his family had to take turns night and day making sure the fire was always lit, but never too hot.
"Some people say the heat from the flues affected the Hakka's quality of life," says Tai Kuo-chen, "and that was really the case." Tai, a second-generation Fenglin resident who was once the principal of Taipei's Nanhu High School, says that while curing tobacco was a sweaty business in the summer, the curing barns kept away the winter cold. Clearly, the business offered upsides and downsides to the Hakkas who came east.
Seen from the recently opened highway bypass, Fenglin's barns look like little houses set atop roof ridges. Now that the tobacco industry has largely relocated, few of the barns are still in use. Here in Fenglin, only Yang Chun-hsiung and Hsu Ying-fu remain in the curing business, and they, like their counterparts in other locales, have replaced their barns with computer-controlled curing rooms. These have cut curing times, eliminated the need for family members to take turns keeping watch, and spelled the end for the tendrils of white smoke that used to hang about the flues. Standing in front of his family's barn, the 70-something Hsu describes Fenglin's former prosperity with a certain detachment, but his eyes can't mask his feelings about the decline of the local industry.
In recent years, the cultivation of China Baby watermelons along the banks of the Hualien River has arisen as a new driver of the Fenglin economy.