Tainan

2 January 2010

Pingtung

Tainan, by the admittedly low standards of urban design and beauty that prevail on this island, is a pretty city. Before they were all bulldozed, the city woke up to the fact it had a few interesting relics of the past. Chief among those was the 17^th century Dutch fort which was besieged by Koxinga/Zheng Chenggong, a pirate who is frequently mentioned as a national hero of Taiwan. Still standing, the Dutch fort, called Zeelandia, was originally on Anping Island but the tidal inlet between it and the mainland of Formosa eventually silted up so that today it sits several blocks from the sea at the Western end of Tainan city. When Fred Coyett, the Dutch Governor, surrendered the fort to Koxinga in 1662, it brought an end to 38 years of Dutch presence on Taiwan.

By the way, Fred was called ‘Frederik’ but I think, being an American, that the shorter form sounds more accessible …friendlier.

In the center of the city there is a 17^th century Confucian temple and school. It sits in a park. It was the first Chinese institute of higher education on the island. I liked it; the architecture was still Chinese with those curved roofs supporting dragons perched at the ends but inside it was very simple, austere even. Compared to the architectural chaos of the Taoist temples that dot most cities, this place is refreshingly understated.

In front of the temple there is an impressively large Banyan tree which has apparently been sick (I’m not completely surprised, after all, it’s reputed to be several hundred years old) but the good folk of the city have been working to make it well; it’s been a symbol of the temple for a very long time and they rightly would like to keep it so. A dead tree is not nearly as attractive a symbol as a live one – the same thing applies to the oak (or something) that grows in Guernica and is the symbol of the Basque nation. Here in Tainan they’ve put up several plaques to honor themselves and their efforts to revive the tree. I can report that, apart from the encomiums to its saviors memorialized in eternal bronze, the tree lives still, but it looks poorly and I suspect that full recovery is a considerable way off.

There was a food fair in the park and blaring popular Chinese music. The food was good but I couldn’t help wonder what the ghosts of the students who buried themselves in the Analects when the place was an institute of education would have thought about the noise. Unseemly would seem a good guess.

Still, Tainan has sidewalks that are open, broad streets and a number of parks. Rather than build up, they’ve built out, the place is geographically bigger than its population would lead you to guess. It may be, though, that some of the building out is from fear – a lot of the land is reclaimed and the Japanese will tell you, ruefully, that the reclaimed land turns into something like water in any decent earthquake; better to build low and spread the weight than build up.

We drove along National 17 when we left the city; it follows the coast for a while as you head down towards Kaohsiung. The murky air makes the sea the color of dirty bathwater but the authorities have made the best of it and built paths, public areas, parking lots and benches from which you can look out at the water and watch bobbing barriers that mark the line between various commercial fish farms. Wherever there was a tidal inlet, the bridge over it was lined with people fishing. I liked it but, then, I always like coastal areas.