Finsatsea: March 30 - April 2

On March 30 we stopped at Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, the third most populous city in the country. The city is significant because it’s the largest port in Taiwan and it has a strategic location on the southwestern coast of the island facing the Taiwan Strait. This was the first of four days we spent in Taiwan and I guess I should write something about the status of this place.

We hear and read often on the news about tensions regarding Taiwan. Here the people refer to their country as the Republic of China with the other mainland country being the Peoples’ Republic of China. The United States’ official policy is a “one China policy” recognizing the PRC as the “sole legal government” of China and “acknowledging” the PRC’s claim to Taiwan, but not “recognizing“ that claim. That sounds like diplomatic gobbledy-gook to me. The upshot is that only a handful of countries in the world recognize the Republic of China (Taiwan) as a country and it doesn’t have a seat in the United Nations. However, the US does through the Taiwan Relations Act passed by Congress have a framework for relations with Taiwan and for protection of US security and commercial interests here. Clear as mud, I know, but from the Taiwanese I’ve spoken to here they all consider the US to be the big brother that will protect them from takeover by Communist China.

Taiwan has been a colony of the Dutch, was occupied by the Qing dynasty of China for a couple of hundred years and was under Japanese rule from 1895 to 1945 (that surprised me because that was long before WWII). The majority of the current population descends from Chinese people who were under the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek, the leader of the Nationalist government of China who evacuated his government and followers to Taiwan in 1949 after Mao Tse-tung and the Communists prevailed in the Chinese civil war after WWII. It’s a very complicated history. Prior to WWII Chiang Kai – Shek had managed to subjugate most of the warlords in China so he was the de facto leader of the country. In 1937, four years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan invaded China and in December 1937 after the Battle of Nanking, the Japanese committed the rape of Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China at the time.. During a six week period the Japanese ransacked the city and massacred the citizens. No one knows the precise number of deaths but the consensus is that at least 200,000 were butchered. It’s estimated that 80,000 women were raped, with most subsequently killed. Chiang tried to rally his Kuomintang forces and formed alliances with the Allied Western Powers, but the Japanese basically controlled the majority of the country.

That’s a very brief and incomplete history of Taiwan, but I’m behind and I need to catch up and write about what I saw in the last four days. Our first stop was Kaohsiung City. For some reason which I can’t remember, I didn’t book a tour that day. Maybe I was just feeling lazy. Anyway, I didn’t do much except take the shuttle to the main shopping district and went into a couple of big department stores. Not very adventurous. My big accomplishment was that I bought a pair of shoes – not that I needed them but they looked nice and felt good. I may be one of the few people in Williamsburg with a pair of Taiwanese shoes. Friends who went on tours came back and said they saw the most wonderful things (which is always the way it works) and I felt bad that I hadn’t gone. C’est la vie.

Sunday, March 31, we docked in Magong, Penghu Islands and this time I did take a tour. These islands are also known as the Pescadores Islands because that was the name given them by the Spanish 350 years ago. The island made its best effort to provide a good tour but it really doesn’t have much to offer. We saw a three hundred-year-old banyan tree that covers 600 sq. meters and a pretty temple dedicated to the god of fishermen. Next we went across a two kilometer sea bridge and saw a couple of statues honoring a big grouper and a fisherman. There was a small but interesting museum with coral sculptures made from the coral around the islands. We visited an old traditional fishing village and saw some basalt columns. That was our day. In retrospect I should have taken the tour in Kaohsiung but hindsight is 20/20.

This is under the banyan tree which is unfortunately supported by an ugly framework of concrete and wood which kind of detracts from it.

The colorful big grouper sculpture

One of the coral sculptures in the little museum

These are pictures of the traditional village

The basalt columns

On Monday, April Fools’ Day, we docked in Keelung the port for the city of Taipei, capital of Taiwan. I disembarked with 17 fellow passengers and we headed out for a two day, overnight tour of Taipei and some other sights. Our guide for the two days was a young man named Andrew who was super-enthusiastic and very friendly. Unfortunately sometimes he got carried away and gave much more information than he needed to and ran over on time.

Anyway, we headed off for our first stop, the National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine in Taipei. The building commemorates the approximately 390,000 people killed in various revolutions and wars. The structure is in the style of the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City in Beijing. People here build things in grandiose proportions and this place is no exception. Our timing was really lucky; we got to the Shrine just before there was a changing of the guard so we were able to watch that ceremony. It was very much like watching the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown in Arlington.

The entrance gate to the Martyrs' Shrine

Martyrs' Shrine

The changing of the guard

After our visit to the Shrine we headed to the National Palace Museum. This museum has a permanent collection of nearly 700,000 Chinese artifacts and artwork spanning 8,000 years of Chinese history. Many of the pieces were originally in the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City in Beijing. How they came to be in Taiwan is kind of interesting. In 1931 after an incident that pre-dated the full-scale invasion of China by the Japanese, Chiang Kai-Shek ordered that preparations be made for evacuation of the artifacts so that they wouldn’t fall into the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army. They were crated up and during the course of the next 14 years they were moved from place to place further westward to avoid them being taken. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, the Civil War broke out and when the fighting worsened in 1948 a decision was made to move the artifacts to Taiwan. Not all the treasures were moved; however many of the finest pieces were moved.

The Museum has a magnificent collection of Chinese works of art. Two of the most prized are a jade cabbage and a carved jasper stone shaped like a piece of pork belly. The carver of the cabbage took advantage of the natural cracks and imperfections in the jade and its changes of color from green to white to incorporate in the sculpture the veins in the stalk and leaves of the cabbage. He even carved two insects inside the cabbage head. The pork belly sculpture used the accumulation of different impurities in the jasper to convey the layers in a piece of pork belly and the sculptor even carved in dimples, wrinkles and pores in the skin of the pork. The two things are remarkably lifelike.

Jade Cabbage

Jasper pork belly sculpture

We saw priceless porcelain pieces and an iron cauldron dating back several thousand years in which the interior is inscribed with some of the earliest Chinese characters. Andrew told me that although there have been some changes over the millennia the script can still be read by modern day Mandarin readers. One of the most remarkable sculptures was a multistoried pagoda carved out of a single ivory tusk (not allowed anymore). The detail on the carving was amazing with figures inside each level of the piece. I can’t even imagine how long, let alone how the sculptor did it.

This was carved from one ivory tusk

Look at the intricate work on this porcelain piece

After a flying visit through the museum we headed to a multi-course Chinese lunch. What we know as Chinese food at home is not really at all like what we were served, and I have to confess I’m not crazy about this food. We had things like pickled jellyfish, intestines of some kind of animal (no idea what), and whole crabs with the shell on that weren’t soft shells but we were supposed to eat the whole things. The only really good things were the fried rice and noodles and the fruit.

Following lunch we went to the Chiang Kai-Shel Memorial Hall. This is another immense building commemorating its namesake. Andrew was pretty carried away and we got an in-depth explanation of the life, exploits and loves of Chiang. We even got to see a true to scale model of his office with the man himself sitting behind his desk. I hate to say it, but I think most of us were more than ready to leave belong before it was time to go.