Exploring Anping District

My guidebook recommends a few sights in the Anping District of Tainan, Taiwan. I am in Tainan for a few days, so I headed there this morning.

In Anping, I took in a fort, a temple, some streets, and a treehouse. Buckle up.

Fort Anping, or Likely Fort Zealandia

My guidebook calls this sight “Fort Anping.” It doesn’t suggest it might have any other name.

Unlike most of its other entries, it didn’t include a link to Google Maps with the right coordinates. Or any coordinates at all. Or any link, for that matter.

When I searched Google Maps for “Fort Anping,” it was smart enough to say, “Oh, you are looking for a fort in the Anping District. You must want Fort Zealandia. Honestly, you should say what you mean and mean what you say. Otherwise, don’t count on me being able to help you in the future. Seriously. Just don’t.”

Admittedly, Google Maps wasn’t that verbose or curt. It just gave me a list of three sites that I might have meant. Fort Zealandia was at the top of the list. It’s in the Anping district, so it had that going for it. I gave it a shot.

When I got there, there was a small sign saying “Fort Anping,” but most of the signage onsite, including large lettering on a wall in front of the fort, said “Fort Zealandia.”

There is lots of English-language descriptive signage at the fort explaining its history. There’s also a museum that tells the story of the fort. English gets almost equal representation there. And I was able to pick up a small English-only leaflet at the front. (There was also a Chinese-only version. I decided English would be more helpful for me.)

Shamelessly cutting and pasting from Apple Photos’ optical character recognition of the picture I took of the English language sections of one of the signs at the fort, here’s a brief summary of its history:

“The Dutch East India Company arrived in Tayouan in 1624 and built Fort Zeelandia and the city at the northernmost part of the sandbank at the Taijiang lagoon. This was the farthest large military fortress and colonial city from the Netherlands at the time. Fort Zeelandia included upper and lower main forts, and an outer fort, with facilities that included barracks, granaries, prisons, churches, Governor’s House, etc. However, due to tight construction budgets, inadequate tax revenues, and frequent conflicts with the indigenous people and the Chinese, the fort was constantly being repaired and expanded until the end of the Dutch occupation. Zeelandia City was located on the east side of Fort Zeelandia, which had been expanded to sixteen street blocks by the 1640s. Most of the buildings near Fort Zeelandia were public facilities, such as the cemetery, city council, weigh house, etc. According to Dutch literature, it only took twenty minutes to walk around the entire city.”

The vast majority of what’s on the fort site today is recreated. But there is one of the original outer, southern, red brick walls. It’s seen better days, but I hope I look that good when I’m 400 years old.

There is a surveillance tower (recreation) at the Anping/Zealandia Fort. You can, and I did, climb up to its observation level. The tower is not particularly tall, about the equivalent of three storeys, so it doesn’t provide panoramas of the great beyond, so to speak, but it does provide good views of the immediate surrounding area.

Oh, I should mention that, based on my experience today, it seems that Fort Zealandia, or Fort Anping, as the case may be, is very popular with school groups. There were a few of them boisterously invading the place when I was there. (Why, yes. I am indeed a grumpy old man. Why do you ask?)

Aside

Yeah, As If

Take a look at this picture. I don’t think Fort Zealandia caters to people like me. This was a sign on a low wall.

I can handle the not-sitting part. I’m old, but I can still stand for a long time. I may no longer like it, but I can do it.

But, “Do not stress?” They don’t know who they’re dealing with. It goes against my nature to not stress.

Anping Mazu Temple, Maybe

My guidebook recommended the Anping Mazu Temple. At least, that’s what it called the sight in the heading above the paragraphs about the temple. Unfortunately, it again didn’t provide a link with coordinates on Google Maps as it does for many of the other sites.

A search in Google Maps for Anping Mazu Temple came up empty. The guidebook provided an address, 33 Guosheng Rd. Much to my surprise, Google Maps found something at that English-language address, but not the Anping Mazu Temple. Google said that the Anping Kaitai Tianhou Temple 安平開台天后宮 was at that address.

Regardless, I had a clue that this might be the place. Immediately before the street address, my guidebook placed the words “Ānping Tiānhòu Gōng.” It had “Tiānhòu” in it. Close enough.

Just to be sure, I searched Apple Maps for “Anping Mazu Temple.” It spelled it differently, “Anping Matsu Temple,” but Apple Maps was able to find it when I used my guidebook’s spelling. And Apple Maps told me it was at 33 Guosheng Rd. Eureka! I found it!

(I’m finding that Tainan can be a confusing place for a tourist who doesn’t speak the local language and who is using a guidebook that doesn’t sync with the names used in mapping apps and two mapping apps that don’t always match either. To make it even more confusing, in addition to what my guidebook calls the Anping Mazu Temple, it also lists a Grand Mazu Temple elsewhere in Tainan. I’ll visit that this afternoon.)

My guidebook tells me that this temple, whatever it’s called, is one of many that claim to be the oldest in Taiwan. And I think George Washington might have slept there, but that’s only my theory.

The temple building is set back and angled away from the street. But beside and parallel to the street, there’s a large ceremonial gate.

The altar of the main shrine of the temple is very busy, with lots of figures on it and bold colours. Its ceiling, including a domed section, is ornately decorative and deeply carved.

There are also four monochrome stone columns with deep relief carvings on them. The carvings on each column have a different theme. One has birds and trees. Another has horses, people, and some sort of mythical creature. A third has a lot of people and imagery I couldn’t understand. I forgot to take a picture of the fourth, and I now completely forget its theme.

Many portions of the column carvings have hollow spaces in them that look to me to be impossible to carve. Then again, I have trouble cutting into low-density meatloaf even with a sharp knife. So it’s not surprising that it would look impossible to me.

I don’t think anyone would use the word “exquisite” to describe the columns, but I found them quite lovely.

The smaller shrines within the temple aren’t quite as ornate or busy, but they’re still quite attractive and interesting.

There is also at least one rectangular, stone relief tablet affixed to a wall.

My guidebook tells me the temple offers, for free, little packets of “safe rice” to keep me and my family safe. I didn’t see them, so I didn’t take one. I guess my family and I better watch our backs.

Anping Old Streets

According to my guidebook, some of the streets in the Anping District near the fort and temple are some of the oldest in Taiwan. It also said to keep an eye out for stone lion masks with swords across their mouths. They used to be used to protect houses against evil, but there are only a few left.

As I walked the narrow old Anping streets, I did indeed keep my eye out for them. I scoured the buildings high and low, above the door frames, high on the low buildings, and everywhere I could possibly look. I didn’t find any at first.

Then I spotted one, but I think it was a reproduction, probably for tourists using the same guidebook I’m using, not one of the originals. It didn’t look like stone. It was brightly coloured. If it was a stone mask, the stone must have been covered with several layers of bright, shiny acrylic paint.

Where did all the masks go? And without them, what’s protecting the houses against evil? No wonder they had a major earthquake here in 2016.

There were only a couple of streets in the Anping District that I saw that looked particularly old or interesting. They were narrow and lined with shops. The shops mostly sold food, toys, and trinkets.

One of those foods was weird. It wasn’t the food that was weird, but how it was made. One vendor who I don’t think spoke English was quite insistent that I try a piece. He held the piece in his plastic-gloved hand and kept thrusting it toward me until I finally took it and tried it (and then walked on).

When complete, rather than just a piece for tasting, it’s shaped like a small, shallow, rough bowl. It otherwise had a form like the puffy crisps that you sometimes get in North American Chinese restaurants before a meal. It had a shrimp taste to it.

Here’s the weird part. It’s made by a machine a little smaller than those old-time toy-grabbing claw machines. It sat out on the street. There is a big, glassed-in collection bin for the finished product. The machine literally fires them out, one at a time, into the bin, making a loud popping sound, like in a shooting arcade at a fair.

There were a few vendors with the machines, and I heard the sound a few times before I saw the source. I honestly thought there was a shooting arcade game there. It was a logical conclusion to make. Some of the vendors on the street sold the sorts of toys that are prizes in those old-time toy-grabbing claw machines, so why not a shooting arcade too?

As I walked around Anping a little more, I came across a parkette with some signs in both Chinese and English. One of them told me that in 1994 there was a bit of a fight about widening the streets in Anping. Residents wanted to widen them, but academics and some people in “cultural circles” wanted to protect the history and scale of the district. In the end, they managed to pretty much preserve two of the streets.

Anping Treehouse

My guidebook didn’t mention the Anping Treehouse. I read about it somewhere else. (I forget where.)

It’s not a treehouse in the sense you’re probably thinking. It’s not a little clubhouse built in the branches of a tree.

It’s an old, long-abandoned brick house built firmly on the ground. It no longer has a roof.

It’s called a treehouse because banyan trees have colonized it inside and out.

The people who run the place have built raised walkways with stairs leading up to them, so in addition to walking through the house, you can also look down on it through the now-non-existent roof. And I did.

There is a small, rectangular pond in the back of the house. When I was there, a bird was on the far side of the pond, where people can’t go. It was sitting there. In its mouth, it had a flat fish lying in its beak, with the head and tail protruding considerably on either side of its beak. The fish was wide enough that one of its sides extended out beyond the front of the bird’s beak.

The fish was too big for the bird to swallow whole. And it didn’t seem to have any way to break up the fish to eat it.

When I arrived, the bird was kind of jostling the fish in its beak to no avail. Occasionally, it thrust its head and the fish down to the ground, without letting go of the now very dead fish. Sometimes after this manoeuvre, it reoriented the fish so just the tail was in its mouth. This went on for a few minutes. I gave up watching while the bird was still repeating the same actions, hoping for a different result. I don’t know if it ever got the result it desired.

On the other side of the pond from where the bird was, a wooden deck jutted out over the water. I went there and looked down into the water. There, I saw a densely packed school of fish huddled near the deck. I couldn’t figure out why they were all congregating there until I saw someone feeding the fish and noticed an unadorned machine that sold packets of fish food for $NT10. (New Taiwanese Dollars. $10NT is a coin that’s worth less than 44 cents Canadian.)

I bought a packet and started feeding the fish. They went into a frenzy with each small handful I threw into the water. A mass of alpha fish crowded close to the deck, but some fish held back and weren’t getting any of the food pellets. I made sure to throw some out to them. Because that’s just the sort of guy I am.

And with that, it was time to leave the Anping district for now (there’s a chance I might come back another day to look at the canal elsewhere in the district) and end my morning.