Acouple of months ago the central hall at the Hanmin Temple in Pali Township, Taipei County, rose three feet off the ground, rotated 45 degrees south, and then "walked" 100 yards before finally settling down again. Walking is not, in fact, limited to small buildings like the Hanmin Temple hall. A seven-storey pagoda in Ilan once went for a stroll, too. Both "housewalks" were the accomplishments of Taiwan's house-moving contractors.

"Moving a house" and "moving house" are two very different things. For most people, the latter is headache enough. Taking the whole house along too might seem like an impossible project. But actually the principles of house moving have been known since time immemorial. The whole process involves just three steps: raising, moving, and steering.

"Raising" means getting the house, together with the foundation, out of the ground. The method is fairly straight-forward: knock out the floor, find the centers of gravity, drill out the foundations, and slip in the jacks--rapidly. Once the jacks are in, the next step is the actual raising, six inches at a time, filling in with bricks as one goes. Pressure must be applied evenly to prevent wobbling and distortion. Not until the structure is a yard up off the ground is it time to start talking about moving it.

Lifting a house this way does not require great science, but it does take a lot of labor. Raising the Hanmin Temple hall used 38 jacks. At one workman a jack, that makes 38 workmen. And with so many hands involved, coordination is a must. No house raising in Taiwan takes place without the rhythmic "beep-beep" of the foreman's whistle. Mixed in with shouts, grunts, and the noise of bystanders, it makes for quite a racket.

Raising requires coordination; moving and steering take more thought. The principle here is to replace the jacks with iron rollers and then lay down boards lengthwise, above and below. The house is dragged along by a power winch over the boards and rollers, which are placed back in front again as soon as they come out from behind. The house can be moved this way four or five feet an hour. If it meets an obstacle on the way or the direction must be adjusted, then it is time to "steer."

Wang Chin-liang, a house mover with over 10 years of experience, says that controlling the movement of the rollers is the real trick. If it is done incorrectly, the house may crack and split. The real test of a master is in just this point.

When the house reaches its new location, the rollers are replaced by jacks and the house is lowered onto the foundations and reinforcers, placed in exactly the same positions as they were at the old site. Beams, pipes, and flooring are handled by other contractors.

House moving in Taiwan seems to have originated in Putzu Village, Chiayi County, but the exact date and reason are not known. Some people point out that 50 or 60 years ago, when as many as five generations might live together under one roof, additions to existing residences were often needed. If the geomancy, or fengshui, for an addition was unpropitious and the family could not bear parting with the ancestral abode, they had to think of a way of taking it along. Other people maintain, however, that farmers, who are used to thinking up ways to save strength moving heavy loads, simply extended the same techniques to moving houses.

"It's rare these days to move a house just because of the fengshui," Wang says. Most clients now move their homes to avoid road building, get away from a lowlying lot with poor drainage, or escape demolition for having built without a permit.

The move at Hanmin Temple was for a different reason. "The central hall was basically for the worship of Kuan Ti but contained a statue of Liao T'ien-ting as well. Two gods in the same shrine was not right," the temple "deacon" explains. "At first we planned to add a second storey so they could be worshipped separately, but the foundations were too weak and couldn't support the weight." They finally decided to build on the site a three-storey hall dedicated solely to Kuan Ti. Since the old hall was still worth preserving, they had it moved to Liao T'ien-ting Park.

Taiwan, at present, has 50 some house-moving contractors, over two-thirds of whom come from Putzu Village. Two Putzu families, the Wangs and the Ch'ens, have been in the business for over 40 years.

While house moving is profitable (60 percent of quotation), business is irregular--although it picks up suddenly sometimes after Ghost Month. And business varies from place to place. Land use in Taipei has reached the saturation point; maybe only one building in a thousand has room to go anywhere. Wang's average of three jobs a week is quite good. So most contractors work at another job as a regular occupation.

What surprises many is not so much that a house can be moved as that it can do so and stay in the same condition it was in before. Some owners and their families remain inside the house while it goes along. "Even the vase on the second floor came through without a scratch," one admiring client says.

And in all the years of moving houses, contractors claim, "not one has ever collapsed." Most contractors have just elementary or junior high school educations with no expertise in construction, but they are uniformly full of confidence. "There's no blueprint. It all depends on experience. All the procedures are right here in my head," Wang boasts. And up to now, at any rate, homeowners have shown contractors the same confidence.

So it looks like houses will be taking "walks" yet for some time to come.

[Picture Caption]

After the central hall at Hanmin Temple "fled to freedom" in Liao T'ien-ting Park, the statue of Liao T'ien-ting no longer stood in Kuan Ti's shadow.

Slight deviations in angle can hardly escape detection by the eye of a master, aided by a brick and a tube of water.

Pulled by a winch, this hexagonal pavilion glides smoothly over a track of iron rollers.

"Steering" is the test of the expert.

Slight deviations in angle can hardly escape detection by the eye of a master, aided by a brick and a tube of water.

Pulled by a winch, this hexagonal pavilion glides smoothly over a track of iron rollers.

"Steering" is the test of the expert.