Taipei

We've just finished four days in Taipei, a huge, sprawling city that, depending on how you look at it, is just part of an enormous megalopolis that connects all of the urban centers of western Taiwan.  We did our best to look around in the time we had.

The view from our apartment of Tower 101, the tallest building in Taiwan.

There are still plenty of neighborhoods with an old-World feel, though this one, Dihua Street, is gentrifying fast.

Squeezed between outdoor food stalls and old shops workmen were furiously remodeling the old stone and brick buildings.

Boxes of ginger.

Bags of garlic cloves.

We saw many shopkeepers ritually folding pieces of paper and burning them, a Buddhist tradition for good luck and prosperity.

A famous 150-year old shrine at the end of Dihua Street is famous for single people to pray to find a partner.

Near our apartment the raucous street scene.

Intensified at the outdoor market nearby.

The ACC's Taipei office arranged for me to give a talk at a venue in Taipei, a restored Japanese home.

They also arranged for us to visit the Taipei Puppet Theatre Museum, which has a workshop with a puppet carver.

We saw an amazing performance in the museum's theatre.

And we toured both the exhibits and museum storage.  Well worth a visit if you come to Taipei.

Taiwan's East Coast

We left Lanyu Island by very a few days ago, back to Taitung where we opted to rent a car and drive back to Taipei along Taiwan's east coast, rather than fly.  In Lanyu's ferry harbor I took one last photo of some brightly painted fishing skiffs.

Our ferry stopped in Green Island on the way, where the harbor had the typical large wooden fishing boats I had also seen in Taitung.  I tried to find out where they were built (probably Taitung) but not luck.

We set off through what is called the Eastern Rift Valley, squeezed between the central and the coastal mountains.  The rice was just verdant.

We spent the night high in the mountains, about 20 km up a major river gorge in the central mountains, near this aboriginal village.

The next day found us back out on the coast, leaving the sunshine of the Rift Valley for intermittent rain.  We found a harbor full of those pontoon boats and decided to stop and take a closer look.

I noticed the boat in the foreground was powered by a not-too-large outboard mounted in a well on deck.

Two helpful Taiwanese Coast Guardswomen tried to answer my question of where the boats were built.  They radioed a colleague who spoke English and the consensus was these boats are built in Taitung.

Since we had long since left Taitung behind we kept heading north, and in the next large port found even larger pontoon fishing boats.

As well as one under construction!  I paced off the length and this is about an 80-footer.

Curved beams were freshly cut and painted, waiting to form the bow of a boat.

There was a large pile of these timbers, a dense, rock-heavy tropical hardwood.

Note the white grain running through the brown sapwood.  The heartwood is a brown-orange color.  I wonder if any readers have theories on what species this might be?  Given the overall nature of these boats I suspect its a relatively cheap timber.  Wish I could bring home a few hundred board feet.

One of the massive pontoons (these are over a foot in diameter) was cut off and I noticed it was full of white styrofoam.

Once again, these are sea boats and held together with just plastic strapping.

A look at the framework.  The cross timbers are all heavily covered in creosote and bolted to the painted longitudinals.

The curve at the bow is made of two compass timbers bolted together.

A smaller pontoon boat came in while I was there.

Off to one side of the yard were four frameworks, perhaps awaiting new pontoons.

I spied one nicely-shaped wooden boat across the harbor.  It had a different hull shape than the others I have seen.

Last Night on Lanyu Island

I am writing this from deep in a mountain gorge on Taiwan, nearly as far from the sea as one can get in Taiwan.  We took the ferry off Lanyu this morning for Taitung, rented a car and drove into what is called the Eastern Rift Valley, between the coastal mountains and central highlands of Taiwan.

The morning of our last full day on the island, however, I found yet another tatala, this one hidden behind a seawall in the harbor.  Its about twelve feet long and looks very new.  It was full of rainwater from the previous day's storm.

But Syaman Lamuran, our host, found me during the day and said he would introduce me to a boatbuilder that evening.  It was the stepfather of a friend of his.  We went to his house and found him working on a scale model of a tatala.  He's building it at the request of the local elementary school as a teaching tool for the students.  He is putting it together in a completely traditional style, and it was a great opportunity for me to ask lots of questions.  One thing I noticed was how all the tatala had plank scarfs so close together, something considered poor practice in Western boatbuilding.  All the planks in these boats are edge-fastened with pegs, and you can see in this photo how the center section of the sheer plank covers the two upper scarfs, which are in turn covered by the center plank section of the middle strake.  This is intentional, and explains why the scarfs are arranged the way they are.

He had a jar of a red clay mixture.  He paints the surfaces to be joined, and the red clay marks the high spots for him to trim with his axe.

Here he is pushing the forward part of the sheer plank in place for marking...

...then carefully trimming.  This seems to be a painstaking process throughout, but it explains the amazing fits I've seen on these boats.

Syaman, on the right, looks on.  He and the boatbuilder's stepdaughter helped with interpreting.

I asked about measuring, drawing, any recording whatsoever, and the boatbuilder explained he measured everything with his fingers and his span.  He said pegs in boats are placed two fingers apart, but with modern adhesives (which some people use) you can space them three fingers.  He said he used a string and put knots along its length to indicate locations for various parts of the boat.

The boatbuilder's stepdaughter looking on.  The stem is in the foreground and the roughed out sheer end behind it.  These are cut from the trunk/root connection of the tree so the grain sweeps with the plank.  She mentioned that she had to help her husband dig this material for his first boat, which was odd to hear because of all the taboos surrounding women and tatala.  She went on to say her husband incorporated some untraditional techniques building his boat and her stepfather refused to speak to him for a year!

A look at the sheer plank and the inwale, carved right into it.  I asked specifically if ANY of the planks in a tatala were bent to shape and I was told that EVERY part of the boat is carved.  The boatbuilder told me the best craftsmen can rough shape the materials in the forest close to the final shape, but less experienced builders have to leave the material much thicker.  Planks are taken on and off the boat many times when fitting, and the interior is carved to final shape before assembly, but the outside is left heavy and is shaped after final assembly.

Discussing measuring, the boatbuilder got a string and showed me how he could determine the amount of curve to cut in a plank section by stretching a string over its length and inserting fingers in the gap.

He said he did the same thing to determine the inner and outer edge of the stem.

The question of the high prows of these boats came up again.  Earlier I had been told it was to keep them steady in a wind, though I could imagine with their low freeboard they could be blown over in a cross wind.  This boatbuilder said, emphatically, the prows were all about beauty and the skill of the builder.  Interesting answer, since he seems to be pointing to a non-functional purpose.  But every single person I asked how long it took to build these boats began by saying, "Well, first you have to grow taro..." The launchings can be community celebrations, their size in direct proportion to the amount of decoration on the boats.  Boatbuilders begin thinking about this before they cut down the first tree, amassing the necessary number of pigs, taro, goats, etc. that will be needed for an appropriate launch.

He said he had built or helped build ten boats in his lifetime, which is very impressive, since the boats are generally built by their owners.  On the one hand this means the craft is spread out through the community rather than concentrated among a handful of professional boatbuilders, but the consensus is young people are simply not learning this craft, and most of the current boatbuilders with any experience (by some guesses as many as twenty) are older.  This man is in his 60s and other boatbuilders I met were in their 70s.  Needless to say they leave no written record of any kind.  He confirmed the boats only last about ten years, twenty at the most.