Yesterday we went first for lunch to perhaps Tainan’s most famous export, the home of slack season noodles, Du Hsiao Yueh. Quite tasty, and they had some very nice fresh bamboo served simply with a bit of mayonnaise.
This is in one of the two historic centres of Tainan, about a 10 minute walk from our flat (though, cravenly, we took a taxi because of the sun). This bit is dominated by a roundabout with spokes radiating off it, with small neighbours, temples and parks tucked into the interstitial spaces. We crossed a spoke and went first to the Museum of Literature where entry was free. Most of it was a library, reading rooms, amphitheatre, etc, but there were a couple of exhibitions up. One was about a Taiwanese author who’d died a few years ago. It was quite interesting to see something like this where I had never heard of her, all the interpretation and labels were in a language I couldn’t read, so things like the set up of her living space, with ikea bowls and tables in a gallery setting, semed peculiarly dislocated. I rather enjoyed it. The one thing I do know about her is that she had her astrological chart done by an astrologer in Covent Garden: the chart was there, in English and with the logo of the shop in Covent Garden which I have often passed,, and there was an obituary, in English, by the astrologer, of another seemingly unrelated astrologer (who was not the author).
Downstairs was a larger exhibition, a very good one and particularly striking in these times. It was on the history of Hong Kong literature, with really excellent texts in English accessible using QR codes, describing how Hong Kong’s history and literature intertwined over the decades. When they put it all up a few months ago perhaps they didn’t imagine that they would be telling a complete history, that future history and literature will be in a different room.
From here, we strolled on to some other sites. The Confucius temple, mostly under scaffolding but set in a wide green space, with two very dressed up women posing inside the only open bit, the Hall of Edification, and the usual cluster of male photographers around them. I admired the semi-circular pool, looked for water celery to put in my hat, and generally enjoyed a rare green space.
After stopping for a coffee at a cafe we’d found in advance, we discovered there were literally dozens more, all small and extremely nice looking, in the clean, quiet alleyways around that roundabout, none of which were on Google Maps, or if they were, the useless algorithm didn’t bring them up.
We arrived at the City God’s temple, dedicated to an exemplary administrator, with an abacus of justice and a sign saying something like ‘you’ll here too’, and cadaverous statues of fishermen and merchants, with long hairy eyebrows that looked like there was hair sprouting from their eye sockets. In front, a Chinese opera troupe was setting up, behind it was a grey concrete Buddhist temple, very sterile, like an American church, and a service inside that, other than the chanting and some monks, could have been a Methodist Sunday service.
In the Wu Garden, a local Hokkien TV channel was setting up projector and screen for a historical drama about freedom. Around the little lake, in one of the pavilions, was a rather nice little art exhibit, of calligraphy embroidered on silk gauze stretched on circular frames, transluscent and shimmering in the late afternoon sunlight.
Our final stop was the Hayashi department store which is now a department store of Taiwanese food and design items. There was some lovely but very expensive clothing, and small knickknacks, of which we bought an indigo-dyed pouch. On the terrace on the top floor was a Shinto shrine from the Japanese era, and signs of shelling from the war. And the ground floor had lots of food items, of which we bought a little bottle of tea oil to make tea noodles for dinner. Which I did, fairly successfully, and also had a good little experiment with the air fryer to do some cubes of aubergine and chunks of garlic, so a very tasty dinner was had, with the addition of tofu, enoki, spring onions and basil.
I warmed a little more to Tainan, though it is still a little too big, a little too grey and a little too smelly for me to really like it.