January 2003. VOL.3 ISSUE 1
HAKKA STRONGHOLD IN THE SOUTH
By Angelica Montgomery
The importance of Hakka heritage to Meinung is obvious if
you glance at a tour map of this famous Kaohsiung County town.
Numerous cultural centers, shops and other attractions celebrate
and exploit the long history of Taiwan's largest ethnic minority.
10 and 15 percent of Taiwan¡¦s people regard themselves as Hakka,
but of Meinung's 50,000 residents, nearly 90 percent are Hakka.
Their ancestors, drawn by the availability of fertile, well-watered
land, began settling in the area during the first year of the reign
of Qianlong, the Qing Dynasty emperor who ruled China from 1736
Their history, from
umbrellas to tobacco, music to ecology, is depicted in the expansive
two-story Meinung Hakka Museum (some English-language pamplets refer
to this place as the Kaohsiung County Meei-noog The Hakkas Museum).
museum provides a library and access to a database system
for Hakka research. It also highlights significant points
in Meinung's history. During the early era of settlement,
conflicts with Minnan Taiwanese and aborigines were common,
and led Meinung citizens to build walls and gates around the
women, who would usually face the water when washing clothes
in a stream, Hakka women did their laundry with their backs
to the river, facing the bank, wary of invaders.
Former President Lee Teng-hui
is a Hakka; so was the late mainland Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.
Hakka people are widely respected for their work ethic and devotion
to education. As part of a traditional regard for scholarship, paper
was considered too valuable to be thrown away. Instead it was ritually
burned, and a disused stove tower for this purpose still stands
in Meinung. In the days of yore, waste paper would be burned in
an annual public ceremony. The ashes were then thrown into the river
that flows through the town.
one point nearly every Meinung home played some role in the
labor-intensive tobacco harvest. The museum depicts the sheds
used to dry the tobacco crop. These clever structures allowed
the temperature to rise from 32¢XC to 73¢XC over eight days; the
shed temperature could never be allowed to rise more than five
degrees per day, or the tobacco would turn black. The people
of Meinung harvested tobacco once a year, around the Lunar New
Year. During this time, smoke would rise from tobacco sheds
near almost every homestead.
Hakka traditional song also
has a connection to farm life. Songs often took the form of lyrical
exchanges between the men and women working the fields. Hakka soceity
was notably conservative, so the words passed between the men and
women expressed emotion through innuendo and double-meanings.
The museum also discusses
the impact of the Japanese occupation of Taiwan on Meinung. Japanese
police built a gate to the settlement, and used it to monitor and
suppress the population. After the Japanese departed at the end
of World War II, villagers tore down the Japanese east gate to erase
this painful history, and built a new one which stands today.
Meinung Hakka Museum is open from 10 am to 4 pm Tuesday to
Friday and 9 am to 5 pm on Saturday and Sunday. It is closed
on Mondays and national holidays. On weekends and important
occasions, musicians perform in the museum courtyard.
one of Meinung¡¦s quite roads, the Lei Cha House Tea shop (see
page 18) serves a Hakka tea that nobility enjoyed 1,000 years
ago. Guests are invited to don traditional blue Hakka frocks
and dine on "yen-yeh fan," tobacco-leaf rice (NT$
In recent years
Meinung has become synonymous with the making of painted umbrellas.
This craft is actually a relatively recent introduction: In
1920 a Hakka businessman from Meinung visited mainland China,
and after seeing the beauty of oil-paper umbrellas made there,
decided to import the skill to Meinung. The Yuan Shiang Yuan
Cultural Village, which contains shops selling hand-made pottery,
works of art, Paiwan glass beads and other gifts, stocks some
of the most celebrated umbrellas in Meinung.
Visitors can see the oil-paper
umbrellas in the process of being handmade. Each umbrella takes
around four-and-a-half hours to make, and sells for between NT$600
and NT$1200, depending on its size. Umbrellas with a hand-painted
image of a woman cost more than those with flowers or birds because
of the extra detail required. According to Lin Hsiu-man, a third-generation
umbrella maker, these works of art can be used for up to eight years,
but require careful looking after.
Visitors with their own transportation should try to spend some
time outside the town, where the fields are still tilled by Hakka
farmers. If anything, Hakka culture and traditional architecture
survives even better there than in downtown Meinung, and provides
outsiders with an additional perspective on this enduring ethnic
Since the opening of Freeway No. 10,
which connects Kaohsiung City and Chishan, driving to Meinung has
become much easier and quicker. If you do arrive from the Chishan
direction, check out the YiMin Temple before heading into the downtown.
Other attractions include Chungcheng Lake, close to the Meinung
Hakka Museum, and the Shuanghsi Forest Area, several kilometers
to the east.