From the Temple Gates to the Scholar's Desk

Most of those peddlers who used to be everywhere selling ketzai booklets have passed away, and now 39-year-old Lin Chin-hsien is the youngest seller of these songs.

Unlike the ketzai peddlers of yesteryear who frequented temple fairs, he unfolds his stand mainly at political rallies, academic conferences or other venues where folk culture is in the spotlight, He explains that one Taiwanese opera booklet costs only NT$6, but sales come hard and people still complain that they're too expensive. And so he has culled 280 ketzai from those published by Chulin or those he collected in Ilan and compiled them in one set. "Now those who will buy one or two for their own enjoyment are few.Most customers are scholars or students of Chinese or history who buy them to do research."

Lin Chin-hsien understands the marketplace because he himself is an amateur researcher of Taiwanese culture. Originally a hawker of clothes in night markets, when he turned to writing ad copy in Taiwanese he came to feel deeply the difficulty of writing literary Taiwanese and so began researching the writing of Taiwanese. Finally, he went so far as to drive around the island as a wholesaler of Taiwanese language books and tapes.

Old ketzai booklets are a major resource for those studying the music of traditional theater, folk beliefs and the writing of Taiwanese dialect. （from the collection of chen-ming）

An encyclopedia of life and culture:

"Ketzai booklets are the essence of language," Lin asserts. Their peddlers have gone to many places and read many of them. They themselves are living dictionaries. And from the rhymes used in different editions, one can see the different accents in Ilan and Hengchun, in northern and southern Taiwan.

What's more, ketzai booklets were originally intended for ordinary people. The vocabulary is common and colloquial, and Mandarin characters phonetically similar to the Taiwanese word are often used in place of the correct written characters.

Upon first reading these lyrics, people are often at a loss. Yet after reading a volume or two, the words slip fluently from the lips. "At first this kind of writing always seems disordered and confusing, but then it becomes lively and easy. If you use Romanization, you only get a record of the sounds, but the Ketzai booklets record also the meaning in the sounds. Tsang Ting-sheng, an associate professor of Chinese at Changhua National Normal University, says he has learned a lot from studying how Taiwanese is written. Because the vitality of language comes from language itself, the ketzai booklets, written to be spoken or sung, are truly language at its essence.

Besides linguistic scholars, ketzai booklets are also alluring to those with an interest in Taiwanese customs and culture. They serve as kind of cultural encyclopedia of Taiwan from the Ching Dynasty, through the era of the Japanese occupation, to the Republic of China period. Among the ketzai are "old Taiwanese songs," "songs for teaching Japanese," and songs recording the customs of weddings and funerals. These unpolished booklets are gems in the eyes of scholars. Kristofer Schipper, a sinologist who teaches at the University of Paris, did field work here in the early sixties, amassing a large ketzai collection and publishing an index of 500 old songs.

Ilan's Chen Chien-ming is in the midst of organizing his 800 ketzai booklets, the largest collection among R.O.C. researchers. "The mainland's Taiwan Arts Research Office has been in touch with me many times because they can't find any Taiwanese ketzai booklets on the mainland. Even including ketzai booklets printed in Amoy, they can't find the variety over there that is in my collection. " From the busy academic activity and the ever dimmer sounds of music, you can tell that ketzai has moved from the realm of the living to the desks of the scholars.

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Old ketzai booklets are a major resource for those studying the music of traditional theater, folk beliefs and the writing of Taiwanese dialect. (from the collection of Chen Chien-ming)

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Chen Chien-ming, a researcher of ketzai theater, has the largest collection of ketzai booklets on both sides of the strait.