National Museum of Taiwan Literature, a Gate, and a Temple

This afternoon in Tainan, Taiwan, I made a second, and this time successful, attempt to visit the National Museum of Taiwan Literature. I then looked at an old city gate and yet another temple.

But before getting into that, I feel the need to say that this Asian trip is quickly coming to an end. I’m leaving Tainan tomorrow to head back to Taipei. I’ll spend one more night there and then catch a nonstop flight back to Toronto, my hometown, the next day.

I’m scheduled to arrive in Taipei early afternoon via a high-speed train. So I expect to publish a post about my afternoon activities tomorrow. And I won’t leave for the airport until mid-afternoon to catch an early evening flight the next day. So I’ll probably post something about my morning and early afternoon that day (probably posted at the airport or not until I’m back home). So, after this one, I’ll probably only post two more entries on this trip.

This being my last entry from Tainan, I’ll post a summary of my time here below.

National Museum of Taiwan Literature

If you’ve been following along, you know that I tried visiting the National Museum of Taiwan Literature here in Tainan, Taiwan yesterday afternoon. I wasn’t entirely successful. Its permanent exhibition was closed for a few days and not reopening until today.

There were a couple of temporary exhibitions open then. One was about sports literature. The other was about Czech literature. For reasons I explained yesterday, I didn’t—and didn’t want to—spend much time in either.

So I went back today to try my luck at the permanent exhibition. What the heck? Admission is free.

Much to my surprise, they didn’t extend the closure due to the unforeseen presence of Joel.

The use of an English-language audio guide at the Taiwan Literature Museum was included in the price of admission, which as I said, was zero. All I had to do was surrender my driver’s licence until I returned the audioguide.

I didn’t tell the people at the museum that I got rid of my car years ago and rent one only exceptionally rarely. Besides, I can get my licence replaced when I get home.

I thought about forfeiting my licence and keeping the audioguide. But what the heck was I going to do with a Museum of Taiwan Literature audioguide back home? It seemed pointless. So I returned it before I left the museum. Besides, I try not to pilfer things, even if I was going to pay for it with my licence.

The permanent exhibition at the Taiwan Literature Museum is not very large. Its displays are mostly expository text panels, with text in both Chinese and English, some with illustrations. There are also some original notebooks, books, and an old-time Underwood typewriter.

I was a bit taken aback by the typewriter. Its keys had our Roman alphabet. While the expository text panels are in both English and Chinese, the little placards beside each item were solely in Chinese. I used Google Translate to learn that it was, ‘The typewriter used by Yin Xueliang (1918-2008). Yin Xueyao writes mainly novels, essays and reports, and works as a journalist. “Overseas Dreams”, which is based on studying in the United States in the 1960s, is regarded as an early work of “overseas student literature”. This typewriter witnessed Yin Xueman’s study abroad and writing career.’

There were far more text panels than artifacts, so I don’t have a lot of pictures worth posting here.

The audioguide expanded on what was in the text.

I wasn’t thrilled with the audioguide. It wasn’t the material it presented, but rather the cadence of the speaker. He mostly spoke in a sing-song voice that sounded like it was intended for children, but the material wasn’t particularly geared for kids.

And there was one small area with several video screens with authors all reading their works simultaneously over each other. The audioguide selection for that started with, “Wow! What are all those voices?” He then went on to talk about the competing voices we deal with. I could have done without the “Wow!” It again sounded juvenile.

The exhibit started somewhat provocatively, I thought. There was a large panel with the headline, “Warning! You are Surrounded by Literature.” I never thought of being surrounded by literature as something needing a warning, but the associated text and audioguide entry made it clear that they used a more expansive definition of “literature” than I do.

They meant all words, not necessarily just the written word, that are delivered to convey a message or tell a story. They included newspaper articles, advertising, manuals, music, and so on, along with what I would think of as literature—books, short stories, fictional or narrative magazine articles, etc—in that. They argued that those other forms of messaging use the same techniques as traditional literature, so they should be considered alongside it.

I have trouble accepting that. I refuse to call, for example, McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it” or Nike’s “Just do it” literature.

The rest of the exhibition presented the history of Taiwanese literature, from oral histories before the existence of the written word until modern times. It discussed the influence of particular periods, such as colonial times, Chinese occupation, Japanese occupation, the post-civil war authoritarian period of de facto independent Taiwan, and the current democratic period on Taiwan literature.

One section early on in the narrative at the museum talked about missionaries developing Peh-oe-ji, a Romanized, phonetic form of the local Chinese dialect. Ironically, despite it being a phonetic version of the language, the audioguide speaker pronounced Peh-oe-ji as “bay way dee.”

Wait. What? There’s a standard Romanized phonetic version of the local language? Then why do so many of the names of places I’ve come across here have two or more accepted English spellings?

I found the Taiwan Literature Museum quite interesting if a little underwhelming.

Great South Gate

After the National Taiwan Literature Museum, there were only two more sites listed in my guidebook that I wanted to see and were close enough to make them worth seeing. They coincidentally were in a reasonably straight and not particularly long line from the Taiwan Literature Museum.

The first was the Great South Gate.

Immediately before I got to the gate, I passed a market with a big banner standing beside it with some very large Chinese words and in smaller letters the English words, “The great south gate weekend tourism flower market.”

I didn’t know there were special tourist flowers. You learn something new every day.

The market was covered and had probably a couple dozen stalls that sold flowers, plants, pots, and potting soil. There was also a stall that sold a variety of tchotchkes not related to flowers or plants in any way that I could see. Another had an aquarium with many tiny tropical fish that I assume were for sale.

But, on to the gate … and more.

At one time, Taiwan had a defensive wall with fourteen gates. Almost all of the wall is gone, and only four of the gates still stand. One of them is the Great South Gate, and it’s the only one with some of the original wall still flanking it.

The gate is interesting, but what makes it special is it’s set in a beautiful little park. The park has a variety of trees, two of which have signs beside them, with English translations, saying what type of tree it was: a Chinese Banyan and a Comphor Tree. The banyan tree was quite large.

Several other trees weren’t labelled, including one that I particularly liked. It had beautiful variegated leaves. Apple Photos thinks it is a garden croton, a flowering plant native to Australia and Oceania.

Back to the gate. You can walk through the gate to a little plot of land and a small closed building behind it. You can also climb up some stairs to the top of the wall and walk along the small bit of it that’s still standing. Up top, there are two old canons and views of the park. The latter allowed me to look at the big, old banyan tree from about halfway up its height.

A lone tree is giving a bear hug to one section of the wall, kind of like the many trees at the Anping Treehouse. Apple Photos thinks this one is a sacred fig tree.

I greatly appreciated that stop.

Wufei Temple

My guidebook calls this Wufei Temple. It’s on Wufei Street. I don’t know if the street was named after the temple or the temple after the street. The temple is old enough that it could have been the former.

A sign outside the temple calls it, not the Wufei Temple, but the “Five Concubines Temple.” This jives with what my guidebook (Lonely Planet) says about it. “Wufei Temple was built in honour of the concubines of the Prince of Ningjing, Zhu Shugui, the last contender for the Ming throne. When Koxinga’s grandson surrendered to the Manchus in 1683, all hope of restoring the Ming ended. The prince committed suicide and his concubines hanged themselves on a beam in the bedroom of his palace.”

A sign inside the temple gave an alias to the Five Concubine Temple as the Wufei Temple.

The sign outside the temple had a more detailed description than my guidebook. “It was established in 1683 (the 37th year of the reign of Yungli Emperor of Ming Dynasty). The Five-Concubine Temple was originated from the Five-Concubine Grave burying charming concubines, née Yuna, nee wang, and maid concubines—Hsiu Ku, Mei sister, Ho sister who committed suicide to show their fidelity to Chu Shu-Kuei, the Prince Ning-Ching in the late Ming Dynasty. It has more than 300 years of history. Next to the grave, there is a small shrine. It is the grave of Yi-Ling-Chun, the two waiting eunuchs who hanged themselves to die to show their allegiance to their master.”

(The grammatical errors were the signs, not mine.)

They all committed suicide. How did that help their master?

The temple itself is tiny and simple, with not much more ornamentation inside than five statues to represent the five concubines. The shrine close to it for the eunuchs is even smaller and with few decorative elements.

But there’s more. Like the Great South Gate, the Wufei Shrine is set in a lovely park. This one had topiary and other trees, including several banyans, along with some colourful bushes planted to form a pattern.

In a city with so many interesting temples, it seemed fitting to end my sightseeing in Tainan with another one. So, when done with the Wufei Temple, I headed back to my hotel, satisfied.

Tainan Summary

As an overall impression of Tainan City, I found it on the humdrum side. Apart from the temples, most of the architecture is, in my opinion, bland and often grimy. And much of it looks like it’s seen better days but without the advantage of appearing historic.

(By the way, Tainan City is its official English name, but pretty well all of the sources I looked at call it simply Tainan.)

But then there are the temples. There are a lot of them. And most are a joy to visit and explore. And, of course, there was the Anpling treehouse. I quite enjoyed that.

I felt a little misled by the guidebook I’m using. Normally, it groups sights geographically as best it can.

Here in Tainan, there were some recommended sights in a nearby town or on the outskirts of town mixed in with the central sights. In the case of two collocated sites, the transit options to the nearby town where they are located were awful and it would have been a long taxi ride, yet they were listed in the book in the middle of the sights in central Tainan.

The book doesn’t shy away from listing more distant sights, but it normally puts them after the main listings with a heading to indicate that they are away from town.

In this case, they didn’t seem worth the effort to get there so I didn’t go. The point is, because they were lumped in the middle of the central listings, I assumed they’d be easy to get to and I used that as part of my decision on how long to spend in Tainan when planning this trip.

That being said, I had more than enough rewarding things to do to enjoyably fill my three and a half days here. That was probably the right amount of time to spend in Tainan. I’m glad I came.