With its warm weather, Kaohsiung’s Meinong District is well suited to visits during winter. Right at noon, we join the crowds going to its many local rice noodle shops.

Chiu Kuo-yuan, a cultural historian from Meinong, is leading the way. A member of the first generation of returnees from the big cities, he is now in his seventies and has worn many hats in Meinong over the years. Apart from teaching at Chi Mei Vocational High School, he has also thrown himself into ­environmental activism and the study of local cultural history.

Hakka radishes, properly pickled

In winter vegetables grow slowly, but they are at their sweetest. Walking through the streets of this old town, you see the residents drying vegetables in the sun.

It is the ‘White Jade’ radish harvesting season. This variety of miniature daikon radishes was first brought here nearly 100 years ago by the Japanese. Although the radishes are small, they are sweet and crunchy and require no peeling. They can be consumed raw and are a top choice for pickling.

Our group marches off to Shuizun Rice Noodles, where we call on its proprietor, Chung Jen-chen, a researcher and promoter of Hakka pickled radishes.

Spaces around the old house are filled with radishes drying under the sun. The pickling process is not yet complete, but the brown, wrinkled, shrunken radishes are already giving off an enticing aroma. However, Chung insists that this semi-finished product does not compare with the “stinky fermented radish” that his grandmother used to make. “With its sweetness, a single spoonful was enough for a whole bowl of rice porridge.”

Through trial and error, Chung has improved upon the methods passed down in his family. After harvesting, he doesn’t cut off the tops and the whiskery hairs at the tip, but rather takes the whole radishes and gently rubs them with salt, using 125 grams of salt for each kilo­gram of radish. He then places the radishes in buckets pressed down with stones for a week. Next, he takes the radishes out of the buckets and sets them out in the sun for half a month. When the radishes are still soft but are covered in a fine frosting of salt, he places them in sealed jars. At this point, the radishes are not yet “aged radishes,” he explains. “To become aged radishes, they’ve got to sit in storage for at least three years.”

The rich nutritional content of daikon radishes has earned them the nickname “poor man’s ginseng.” Hakkas consider tasty “aged radishes” as an unrivaled preventive medicine. Pork chops and chicken soups made with them taste great. Sun-dried radish tops can also be used to make teas and can be found in herbalist prescriptions to treat coughs and sore throats.

Hakka cuisine includes many foods made from rice flour. Pictured here are classic bantiao rice noodles, which may be served dry or in soup. They are known in Hakka as mienpabàn and in Taiwanese Hokkien as kué-á.

Pig’s gum soup

Peanut tofu

Salt runs in Hakka blood

Hakka cuisine has always tended to be salty and rice centric. For most people, its rich, salty and aromatic foods hit the spot. Chiu emphasizes that these special qualities are connected to the Hakka people’s history of struggling to make ends meet.

Meinong was first settled by the Hakka in 1736, during Emperor Qianlong’s reign in the Qing Dynasty. A tablet beside the town’s first Earth God temple commemorates the settlement’s founding: “The ancestors cleared the land, hacked away the vines, and passed down their virtues, settling on land that others had passed over.” The hardships of the early settlers are clear to see.

Apart from its characteristic saltiness, Hakka cuisine also has a rich tradition of pickles. For the Hakka, with their history of turmoil and migrations, pickling is an important component of their gastronomic DNA. For fear of going short, older generations of Hakkas often went to great lengths to preserve surplus food. And going heavy on salt slows down consumption.

“Salt is like the lifeblood of the Hakka,” Chiu explains. He lists some of the pickles he has seen in Meinong homes: black beans, radish, cabbage, pineapple, bamboo shoots, winter melon, taro, Indian cherry, ginger…. For older generations of Hakka, these pickles provided a sense of food security.

Chung Jen-chen is proud of the Hakka people’s pickling culture.

Given time to mature, pickled ‘White Jade’ radishes will turn into “black gold.”

Chiu Kuo-yuan, the first of the “educated youth” to return to Meinong after working in the big city, is now in his seventies. He has been active as a local historian for 40 years.

All the rage: White water snowflake

Even in the face of challenging material circumstances, Hakkas possess the virtue of tenacity. When they came to Meinong, which sits next to water at the foot of the mountains, it spurred them to make the most of their environment to survive. They discovered how to use many wild plants here in their cooking, including heartshape false pickerelweed (Monochoria vaginalis), wedgewort (Sphenoclea zeylanica), and white water snowflake (Nymphoides hydrophylla), which has recently become popular throughout Taiwan.

Native to Meinong Lake, white water snowflake has a crispy mouthfeel and a fresh, clean taste. Not only is it a staple of “mountain produce” stores and restaurants offering Taiwanese cuisine in old streets throughout Taiwan, it can often be found in major supermarkets such as PX Mart and Costco—a demonstration of just how much it has become a standard part of home cooking in Taiwan. It may be hard to imagine these days, but Meinong people used to regard the wild plant as poor people’s food.

The first person to farm the plant was Chung Hua-chen, the “water snowflake granddaddy.” Now in his eighties, the hardships of his former life sound like the stuff of forlorn Hakka folk songs. He vividly recalls picking wild water snowflake in his youth to sup­plement his family’s diet. He’d swim out to the deeper ­areas of the lake with a length of bamboo tied around his neck to help keep him afloat, and dive to cut the plant. Unlike the stringy cultivated water snowflake sold today, which doesn’t grow more than a ­meter long, those wild plants could grow to eight or ten ­meters and were as thick as chopsticks.

Yet when pig farming runoff polluted Meinong Lake, the water snowflake there disappeared. It wasn’t until an adult Chung stumbled across a few shoots on the banks of the lake that he casually transplanted them to his own fields. “Who knew that the plant would turn out to be so easy to grow!” The rest is history. Because the plant is so delicious, its popularity quickly spread beyond Meinong, and many people began to travel to the area just to consume it. Its planting area snowballed, and it soon overtook tobacco as the biggest local crop.

Chung Hua-chen, the “water snowflake granddaddy,” stands by the wet field where he first cultivated the previously wild plant.

White water snowflake has become popular throughout Taiwan, used in salads and all manner of stir-fried dishes. In Meinong it is most commonly used in Hakka bean paste stir fries. It makes for simple, unpretentious food.

Oilpaper umbrellas have come to be the handicraft most representative of Meinong’s traditional culture.

The Shizitou Irrigation System, built during the Japanese era, both nourishes the area’s crops and offers children a place to splash and play during the summer.

Hometown perseverance

With changing times, the image of Meinong has constantly been evolving—from Qing-Dynasty architecture such as the East Gate Tower and the Jingziting (a pagoda-­like incinerator for respectfully disposing of paper bearing written or printed words), to traditional Hakka rice noodles and oilpaper umbrellas, to modern-day cultural ambassadors such as the authors Chung Li-ho and Chung Tie-min and the musicians Sheng-­Xiang & Band.

Meinong is uniquely charming. People say that because Meinong is geographically cut off by the Lao­nong River and mountains (Mt. Chading and Mt. Yueguang), its traditional Hakka culture has been better preserved than in Hakka communities elsewhere. Yet, despite giving the impression of being a conservative Hakka community, for more than a decade the town has been in the news as a pioneer in terms of local activism, environmental conservation, and community building.

Thus it seems that the area’s character is not so much the result of geographic isolation as another expression of the Hakka spirit. No matter how resource strapped, its people have striven their hardest to make ends meet. The current era has brought a transformation, wherein people strongly identify with their hometown and hold a strong desire to hold on to their values.

Before we leave, we enjoy a picnic by Meinong’s Bogonggou Earth God temple. Hosted by Chiu Kuo-yuan, those in attendance include local luminaries such as Huang Sen-sung, founder of Today’s Meinung, and Wen Chung-liang, chair of the local association Rural Meinung Field Learning. Despite generational differences, these natives all made a conscious decision to return to their hometown. As they discuss issues related to Meinong, their enthusiasm for the town is clear to see.

At the picnic, we begin to understand the meaning of Chung Li-ho’s heartfelt cry: “The blood of the natives must return home if it is to stop boiling!” Identification with their hometown is continuing to push successive generations of Meinong natives to forsake urban prosperity and return home to plant their feet firmly in the local soil.

These activist returnees have brought even more allure to the town. As with the “aged radishes” that the Hakka grandmothers hereabout cherish however salty a frosting they may acquire, these Meinongers offer fresh and sweet charms of their own.

The East Gate Tower is Meinong’s best-known landmark.

Located in Meinong’s foothills, the memorial hall to Chung Li-ho displays diaries, manuscripts and other objects that once belonged to the author.

Different generations of Meinong returnees: (from left) Wen Chung-liang, Chiu Kuo-yuan and Huang Sen-sung.

Nestled between mountains and water, Meinong has so many outstanding stories to tell.