Mind and body
People who live in the city have a hard time imagining rebellious teens spending hours cleaning up chicken waste without any complaints. But these kids are comfortable working with their hands and their heads, and take on tasks in the kitchen, the gardens, the woodshop and even the webpages.
"We don't just build our own houses. We also repair roads and maintain our own flood control systems," says Li Ming-wei, a 30-year resident who has in recent years been responsible for guiding visitors around. He points out that Mt. Zion is bounded on the east by the Nantzuhsien River, and on the north and west by mountains. Given this and the deep valley that lies to the south, the community has an excellent geomantic location. But because it is also situated on top of a fault line, the construction team has had to do a great deal of soil and water conservation work. Then Typhoon Herb came through in 1996 and destroyed the majority of their earth retaining walls. They spent six months rebuilding them with everyone in the community pitching in. The work called to mind the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem by Nehemiah in Babylonian times. Their new retaining wall is a tiered structure 60 meters tall and 120 meters wide. Viewed from the vantage of Highway 21, it makes quite a sight.
Caring for the Earth
Though the community's 100 hectares is a lot of land, most of it is slopeland. Consequently, their cash crops are largely provided by fruit trees, including more than 10,000 tea-oil camellia (Camellia oleifera) and more than 1,000 plum trees. The community also manufactures a range of well regarded organic products on site, including bottled tea oil, tea-oil toothpaste, tea-oil facial lotion, and tea-oil dish soap.
Mt. Zion also produces organic fertilizers, including a spray made from fermented kitchen waste and another fertilizer made from worm castings. They produce the latter by suspending their rabbit cages above mounds of earthworm-rich soil. When the rabbits' feces falls to the ground, it becomes a feast for the worms. "Worm castings are nine times more potent than ordinary organic fertilizer," says Li Ming-wei. But, he adds, they cost too much to make in the world outside Mt. Zion's boundaries.
The Mt. Zion community is doing well these days. Its gardens are tidy and its animals are flourishing. Such a picture of prosperity was hard to envision 40 years ago.
In 1963, God led the community's founder, Elijah Hong (born Hong San-chi and later known to his followers as "Grandfather"), to Mt. Zion, which was then nothing but a precipitous, uninhabited wilderness. Certain that God had led him to this holy mountain for some purpose, Hong sold off his family's property and moved here with two other men who were, like him, dissatisfied with traditional churches. They built grass huts, grew ginger, and raised sheep, living a hard life while they waited for God to raise up a new spiritual leader.
Unable to make ends meet on the mountain, Hong went back to Tainan to run a pharmacy in 1965, using the proceeds to keep the homestead project afloat. While there, he chanced to meet the founder of the New Testament Church, Kong Duen-yee. Already very ill, Kong had come to Taiwan to spread her version of the gospel. She spoke persuasively on Christ's blood, water, and spirit, and believed that she had been chosen by God to revive the churches of the world. Hong became her follower and took on the mission of spreading the church's teaching in Taiwan. When Kong passed away shortly thereafter, Hong took on the roles of apostle and prophet as well.
Grueling work
While Hong was spreading the gospel and building his church, three families moved up onto Mt. Zion to begin bringing it under cultivation. Li Ming-wei, who became one of Grandfather's followers as a young man, says that when he first went up the mountain in 1972, there was hardly anything there-just a few grass huts, a vegetable garden, and no electricity. A shopping trip meant hiking for eight hours along winding mountain paths and stony riverbeds to Chiahsien. After spending the night in town, they'd have to shoulder their loads of rice and other goods, and lug them back up the mountain.
Hong described the difficult early years in One Man, One Mountain. Running cabling for a cable car in 1976 was particularly tough. How were they to get two kilometers of cable weighing more than 400 kilograms up the mountain? "God instructed us to have 12 young men carry it on their shoulders, each wrapping dozens of turns of cable around their necks. They spaced themselves out evenly, and marched at the same pace," recalls Hong in the book. In spite of the difficulty of walking in this kind of line, he writes that with God's guidance and the church members' faith they were able to complete their incredible task.
Leaving tragedy behind
"Leading this kind of self-sufficient life, God is revealed to us in the environment," says Li. He explains that customs and civilization don't determine or interfere with life in the mountains. Instead, they live in accordance with God's laws, which allows the bounty of God's country to be revealed to the people of the world. Li says that the passage of time is making this ever more apparent. Many members held onto this belief even when the Nationalist government barred them from the mountain in 1980-86. Unable to live on Mt. Zion, they went abroad looking for another "Holy Land" far from the distractions of civilization.
But why did the New Testament Church run afoul of the government? Most people attribute the church's troubles to its founder Kong's leftist leanings and the "people's commune" look of the group's homestead. They believe these unsettled the government, which feared Mt. Zion might be providing cover for a subversive Communist group. The authorities therefore moved to disband the homestead. The church took to the streets, protesting the government's actions for seven years and winning sympathy from abroad.
Church members finally returned to Mt. Zion to rebuild their homestead in 1986. With the end of martial law in 1987, the homestead began welcoming visitors to the mountain, slowly turning into a tourist destination and shedding its veil of secrecy.
Strolling in Mt. Zion's tranquil gardens, you often run across posters proclaiming: "The crimes of the Nationalist Party's imperial Chiang family will never be forgiven," and "Floods and earthquakes are coming!" But when you see the elderly residents talking to young people beside the gardens, watch barelegged children playing in the road, and hear snippets of song wafting out of the buildings, you can't help but feel you've stumbled onto a little utopia.
Following their own path
Picking a few young people out at random, I asked about their reasons for being here. Their answers gushed out whether they'd moved here with their parents or on their own. They spoke about how they had come to work and study for God, or about what they'd learned opening up new farmland at "holy sites" in places such as Africa, Australia, and Sarawak. Twenty years into the rebuilding of Mt. Zion, some church members have left after finding themselves unable to adapt to the hard labor or restrictive lifestyle on the mountain. Even so, they continue to believe that one honors God by "giving up one's autonomy to work for the group."
As Hsu Tsun-jo, the 26-year-old mother of a four-month-old, puts it, she had grown up in the church but had never felt God. Ten years ago, she ignored her parents' protests and moved to Mt. Zion. Her two older sisters soon followed. Now she is happily married and lives a spiritually fulfilling, worry-free life. Unlike her old classmates out in the world, with their debts and marital problems, she is satisfied with life and grateful.
According to those on the mountain, life really can be very simple. The bright smiles and measured pace of Mt. Zion's residents are food for thought for those of us out in the hustle-bustle of the world.