Holding On to the Old in Bangka

The various interpretations and associations made with respect to Wanhua-Bangka as it was known in its glory days-are as complex as the changes that this district has been through. The forthcoming film Monga (an alternative transliteration for "Bangka"), the first "purebred Taiwanese" film in past 15 years to open in the coveted Chinese New Year vacation slot, just may provide even more possibilities for the imagination.

"Herb Alley" on Xichang Street (above), the clothing district on Dali Street (left), the religious statuary and implements shops on Xiyuan Street (facing page).... These unique byways are defining elements in the character of Wanhua, and testify to the vicissitudes of traditional industries in the contemporary city.

Wanhua resident Huang Shih-shung, an expert on local history and culture who volunteers as a guide at Bopiliao-writing under his pen name UPUP-last November put an essay entitled "Why I am Opposed to the Film Monga" up on his blog. In it he listed various "crimes" associated with the film, including: damage caused to historic sites used as sets; an emphasis on the criminal underworld, strengthening the negative impression of Wanhua widely held by the public; and an NT$4 million subsidy provided by the city government in expectation that the movie would promote the city, yet without any careful review of the actual content.

The day after the essay went online, it appeared as a front-page story in the United Daily News, television news programs rushed to cover it that night, and the controversy was off and running! Taipei deputy mayor Lee Yong-ping, speaking to the TV cameras, emphasized that as Taiwan is a democratic society with freedom of speech, the city administration, despite its hope that the film would help effectively market the city, "could not under any circumstances engage in review of content, which is something unlike China that Taiwan can be proud of!"

Director Niu Cheng-tse, meanwhile, responded that the film is not a documentary, and the public should respect the creative freedom of film workers to express their ideas through their own concept of what their project should be. Producer Li Lie, adopting a low key, simply said, "First see the movie, then see what you think."

Since Monga has not yet opened, it is impossible to know what the truth is about the film. But in less than one month that blog essay has attracted over 10,000 visits, and more than 200 people have left impassioned comments.

Those supporting the essay's theme were by no means in the minority, with many arguing that Monga is no better than "throwing a stone onto someone in a well"-in short, further marring the district's already dubious reputation. But other netizens said that even though the film does focus on gangsters and the sex trade, such people and events have certainly been part of Wanhua's history, and such characters constitute one segment of the various links in the chain of the district's current residents, so wouldn't denying such facts simply be distortion in a different form? And still others, citing the Godfather films of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese's Gangs of New York, and Hong Kong films about triads, stressed that anyway what matters in a film isn't the locale or the social milieu, but the story line.

Well, as they say, everybody's a critic. Looking on the bright side, Huang Shih-shung, having gone through this cyber-controversy, concludes: "No matter what, the fact that as a result of this incident more people are paying attention to Wanhua is a good thing."

Longshan Temple, which celebrated its 270th year in 2009, is a center of faith for all of northern Taiwan, but for Wanhua in particular. The photo shows a parade held to celebrate the temple's anniversary.

Exploring further, what is the "genuine face of Wanhua" at present? Is it really, as many people who compare it to the prosperous, fashionable, and modernized eastern district of the city think, just a decrepit old area swept into the dustbin of the city's memories?

Tai Po-fen, a professor in the Sociology Department at Catholic Fu Jen University, who was born and raised in Wanhua and has participated in citizen efforts to revitalize the community there, offers the following analysis of the reasons for Wanhua's slide from prosperity to decay:

In the language of the Plains Aborigines, Bangka meant "canoe" or "wooden raft." In days of old, large merchant ships could sail up the Danshui River to Bangka, and it became a flourishing commercial center, home to countless enterprises built on trade with the coastal ports of mainland China. In particular, it was the transshipment and distribution point for the "Big Three" products of the Taipei Basin in those days: lumber, tea, and clothing.

However, with siltation of the Danshui River along with frequent feuds among the three main groups of people who settled the area earliest, their collective prejudice against later arrivals, and their unwillingness to allow foreign firms to set up there, commercial activity gradually migrated to the newly rising district of Dadaocheng (the area that is today around Dihua Street in the Datong District of the municipality).

After the Japanese takeover in 1895, the colonial authorities designated this as an "entertainment and recreation corridor." With this new focus, the district retained for quite some time its old appearance of prosperity and vitality.

After Taiwan's retrocession to the ROC in 1945, traditional printing and wholesale ready-made clothing became the two main industries in Wanhua. The development of the printing industry was closely connected to the establishment of the headquarters of the China Times on Dali Street. In that era of hand-set printing, there was enormous demand for outsourced typesetting and printing work, and numerous small-scale print shops appeared in the area.

As for the ready-made clothing business, because of the poverty in Taiwan in those days, many people took cast-off cloth from made-for-export clothing manufacturers and assembled it into clothing of all kinds which they then sold in markets. These cottage enterprises eventually grew into full-scale clothing makers in their own right.

Back about 1955, the whole stretch from Shantou Street and Xiyuan Road to Dali Street was packed with ready-made clothing retailers, attracted by the low prices, who bought their products wholesale in Wanhua. Peripheral firms that further processed and fine-tuned the ready-made clothing also appeared in large numbers in the area. With the convenience of the nearby Wanhua Train Station added into the mix, by the peak period in the 1980s there were over 1000 firms there connected to the ready-made clothing sector.

However, with the decline of traditional Taiwanese labor-intensive manufacturing industries in the 1980s, the heady days of Wanhua's ready-made clothing industry disappeared. On top of that, with the computerization of the printing process, the China Times had far less subcontracting work than in the past.

Professor Tai also mentions that even as the clothing and printing industries were departing, traditional providers of goods and services that centered on Longshan Temple, the most important in northern Taiwan, also fell into decline. As these providers-including whole streets or lanes of traditional jewelers, wedding shops, and herbal pharmacies, as well as makers of items for use in worship and religious statuary-became increasingly disconnected from mass life in the modern age, the flow of customers slowed to a trickle.

With dramatic changes underway in lifestyles and economic structure, there was a dramatic rise in demand for services, and economic development migrated to eastern Taipei. This district was in a sense virgin territory, with none of the burdens bequeathed by Wanhua's history, and much more open space that could be developed in accordance with a comprehensive plan. From the Sogo Department Store on Zhongxiao East Road to the Xinyi District Project Area, eastern Taipei has grown increasingly prosperous, while the Wanhua and Datong districts have faded away to be outside the main circles of activity of most residents of northern Taiwan.

Map of Wanhua District, Taipei City

When were the seeds planted for Wanhua's unhappy associations with underworld activity and the sex trade?

Ke Te-lung, an antiquarian and second-generation owner of the Grandma A Cai sweet soup shop on Huaxi Street, relates that the complexity of social life in Bangka, with more than its share of low-status, criminal, and otherwise socially marginal people, can be traced back to the Qing Dynasty. In those days there were many sailors and laborers around the docks, and many drinking establishments and brothels opened up on the nearby northern section of Huaxi Street, turning into the earliest red light district in northern Taiwan.

The tradition carried over into the Japanese occupation era, when this area was designated an "entertainment zone." After retrocession to ROC control, the name was changed to Baodou District (a Mandarinization of the Taiwanese nickname "Taodouzai," referring to the concave curve of a human stomach, evoked by the narrow and winding alleys which were designed in accord with the demands of fengshui and defense), and Baodou remained (in)famous far and wide for its concentration of licensed and unlicensed prostitution. Naturally, the sex trade has never been able to escape being tied up with local gangs, and everything from control over brothels to soliciting customers to profits from sales of tobacco, alcohol, and narcotics has been inextricably tied up with the contest for power among rival mafias in the streets and neighborhoods.

Old and new buildings, traditional and modern looks. Taipei's Wanhua District-formerly known as Bangka-is at yet another transition period in its history. The yellow space surrounded by corridors on three sides is Bangka Park, which is directly across the street from Longshan Temple.

In an effort to turn around this situation, in 1998 then-Taipei mayor (and current president) Ma Ying-jeou, who spent his childhood in Wanhua, came up with a budget of NT$150 billion for an urban redevelopment plan for Datong and Wanhua.

Thus far the fruits of this program include completed work on Bangka Park, the Red House and Ximen shopping zone, the Wanhua district administration center, the Dali Street clothing corridor, and the Bopiliao neighborhood, whose exhibitions have just recently opened to the public, as well as ongoing work on Wanhua Plaza No. 406 and Youth Park. You could say that the physical environment of the whole Wanhua District has been or is being renovated, and that it is catching up to the eastern district in terms of transportation, lighting, scenery, and greenification. But there remains a huge difference from the eastern district in the realm of "people," the most unique and alluring aspect of Wanhua.

"Herb Alley" on Xichang Street (above), the clothing district on Dali Street (left), the religious statuary and implements shops on Xiyuan Street (facing page).... These unique byways are defining elements in the character of Wanhua, and testify to the vicissitudes of traditional industries in the contemporary city.

However, is the revival of this old district purely a question of hardware? What about the intangibles? Should they be preserved, or do they need to be reformed? How can the physical environment and the intangibles be accommodated to each other? The fact is, when implementing urban development in a district with as a long a pedigree as Wanhua's, there will inevitably be more pitfalls and complexities, and those in charge must comprehensively weigh the factors of overall physical appearance, human aspect, and history.

Mii Fu-kuo, a professor of architecture at Tamkang University, points to the example of the USA in the 1960s. At that time the downtown areas of large cities like New York and Los Angeles were in decline, crime was rampant and economic activity stagnant, and the middle class was heading for the suburbs in panic-since christened "white flight." The US government decided to deal with the problem by improving old and run-down residential districts, so they replaced huge tracts of old structures with new high-rise housing complexes and adopted a formulaic model of beautification that was applied everywhere.

This "slum clearance" approach offered at first glance some impressive short-term results, creating the impression of overnight urban renaissance. But the consequence of the transformation of the inner cities was to force the people who originally lived there, unable to deal with rising housing prices and costs of living, to the margins of the city.

The gutting of the old districts, nonetheless, could not completely change people's stereotypes about them, nor solve all their problems at one stroke, so new industries and residents were slow to move in, and the boom went bust in short order. In this way, not only did the same problems repeatedly reoccur, whatever unique character and vitality these communities had once had was completely eradicated, never to reappear.

This model of urban renewal eventually was subject to withering criticism. For example, Jane Jacobs' classic work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was an analysis of this phenomenon.

Old and new buildings, traditional and modern looks. Taipei's Wanhua District-formerly known as Bangka-is at yet another transition period in its history. The yellow space surrounded by corridors on three sides is Bangka Park, which is directly across the street from Longshan Temple.

Tai Po-fen adds: "We should first and foremost have a clear idea in our heads about what the goal of urban renewal should be." When they hear the term "urban renewal," many people's eyes light up as they think only of clearing away neighborhoods that are seen as standing in the way of "development," making maximum economic use of space regardless of the impact on the skyline or atmosphere, speculative booms in property and real estate, and the like. But are these what the residents really want?

Tai points to the case of Kyoto in Japan. Kyoto, like Wanhua, has lots of small winding neighborhoods and "obstacles" to modern, open-spaced urban development left behind from its history, but when they undertook urban renewal they preserved as much as they could of the existing character, elegance, and cultural ambience of its small lanes and streets. What's more, given the strong sense of identification local residents feel with their cultural past and physical surroundings, redevelopment efforts have spared not only millennia-old historic sites like Kiyomizu Temple, but also many structures built only within the last century or so (such as the Kyoto Art Center, a former primary school, and the Waraku-an Guest House) and traditional shops (such as the Kagizen Yoshifusa and Shichijo-Kanshundo restaurants, specializing in Japanese-style sweets).

Besides cultural identity, Tai notes that there is also a psychological angle as well. "The two times in my life when I was most reluctant to say that I am from Wanhua were when I was in Taipei First Girls' High School in the 1980s and during the SARS crisis in 2003." Such things-a youth spent in an elite high school and the SARS-related incidents in Wanhua that created such panic-can indeed shed light on the subtle psychological state that almost all Wanhua natives feel to some extent.

"Why can't Wanhua residents have their own positive feelings of association with the district? Why can't they stand up proudly and say 'I am from Wanhua'?" Tai asks. Noting that Wanhua is rich in deep-rooted traditional appeal, it's people are sociable and informal, and it is at the heart of the Taipei City communications network, she wonders: Why is it that so many people, when deciding where to sink their money in real estate, still prefer to cough up big bucks and go to expensive and far-flung districts like Dazhi and Nangang?

Besides city planning and construction of public infrastructure, Tai thus calls for a mental transformation as well: "If we can take the residents as our starting point and step by step build up a romantic image of Wanhua in the imaginations of people living in northern Taiwan, or even build up a collective consciousness and collective memory of, and some attachment for, this old hometown that all Taipei residents share in common, maybe that will be the opportunity for Wanhua to really come back to life from the roots on up!"

There are two sides to every story. The secret code to Wanhua's charm is embedded in the pious worshippers praying earnestly at the Longshan Temple, and in the homeless milling in the streets outside the temple; in Ximen's fashionable and brightly lit movie theater zone, and in the mysterious precincts of Red House just one block away. Now's the time to visit this district as it goes through its metamorphosis from old to new!

Population structure of the Wanhua District, Taipei City

"Herb Alley" on Xichang Street (above), the clothing district on Dali Street (left), the religious statuary and implements shops on Xiyuan Street (facing page).... These unique byways are defining elements in the character of Wanhua, and testify to the vicissitudes of traditional industries in the contemporary city.

Longshan Temple, which celebrated its 270th year in 2009, is a center of faith for all of northern Taiwan, but for Wanhua in particular. The photo shows a parade held to celebrate the temple's anniversary.