My home Kungkuan
Although you can say that they've been successful in creating a beautiful locale, as far as Lai Sen-hsien and his ten companions are concerned, they don't want Kungkuan to become nothing more than a place where city people come to ease their pressures-their "backyard" as it were. They emphasize that they have settled down here. It's where they live and work.
Currently restaurants imbued with a natural, relaxed style have shot up like mushrooms after a spring rain. Seeing how some of these restaurants have made enormous balconies and extended them out toward the mountain slopes, with the seats crammed so close together that there's scarcely room to turn around, Lai says: "They fail to live up to Kungkuan's excellent scenery-not to mention any sense of a leisure culture. All I see is the word 'greed.'"
The Ailiao Inn located on Kuanhsiao Road is a place where you can try your hand with pottery and enjoy the lotus blossoms. Its owner Chan Jung-tsai, 46, once worked for gas and security companies. Although elder relatives left him three pieces of land hereabouts, he had previously never considered returning home and settling down in these hills.
But with the recent wave of job losses and unemployment, he returned home. He discovered that all his father's tools were still there, and so he began row by row to clean up his father's garden, working from sunup to sundown for two years. Today, when you open the gate to his garden, you are confronted with the sight of a lotus pool, egrets taking flight, and the sound of frogs. The Ailiao Inn is still a work in progress, and every day after work Chan walks around the garden to take stock of his accomplishments. "I feel as if I've returned to the happiness and purity of childhood," he says.
Li Chin-ming, who took over the Gold Dragon Kiln ceramics factory from his father seven years ago, feels very much the same way. He holds that Taiwanese ceramics factories can't decide what they want to be: They want to do mass production, but also appeal to curio-collecting tourists; they want to hold onto their traditions but also keep up with the latest fashions. Therefore, Li holds, the industry here lacks an established identity and thus faces an uncertain future. "Yet I am actually filled with hope," says Li, who brims with confidence. "My Gold Dragon Kiln is an art village and also a place where my family and I can look after our elders."
Li comes from a family of ceramicists, and his father, two uncles, cousin, two brothers, and sister work there. They concentrate on making handmade water jugs, thus continuing with a product line that brings in certain revenue, and then they take the money they make, and put it into improving their environment: "Last year we built a platform at the side of the forest," says the 33-year-old Li Chin-ming. "Everyone enjoys it there. Come and see." Li points toward a very primitive-looking embankment, lacking cement, upon which sit two or three small brick structures. There's even a white swan on the river!
For hundreds of years, the people of Kungkuan have understood that the value of a farming culture isn't in the price of a pound of grain, but rather in the love of the land.
Persimmon cakes, just put out for sale, sure smell sweet.
With good clay and ample fuel in the form of natural gas, ungkuan Rural Township is one of Taiwan's main towns for manufacturing ceramics and is particularly famous for its large water jugs and alcohol urns.
Bright-colored and delicious-looking strawberries add some color to Kungkuan's spring.
(right) The tastes of herbal teas and cake, decorated with strawberries and herbs from the garden, really linger in the memory.