A brewery vat crushed during the 921 earthquake, which hit Puli hard
“The opium sniffing[1] started at 1897.”
Misused preposition aside, this reads more like a line from a Victorian penny dreadful, than the opening to a history of the Taiwan Monopoly Bureau.
That’s appropriate, as what follows is some interesting history that unfortunately staggers into the realm of fiction in places.
I know bloggers elsewhere rightly take issue with the dishonesty on display at sites of cultural and historic importance in Taiwan; I don’t intend this to be a regular whinge of mine – I have ample pet peeves of other colours to keep me occupied – but I have to say the handling of some of the exhibits at the Puli Shaohsing Brewery (埔里酒廠) is abysmal.
Clay urns at the brewery. Apparently clay from my old stomping grounds of Miaoli is favoured for its "fine texture, strong stickiness, and heat resistance." I'm wondering if the well-known (at least in Miaoli) pottery town of Touwu, which has similar-looking products, might be the place.
In town for the weekend, we were trapped indoors most of the time, primarily because of the pissy weather. In such circumstances, the brewery is easily worth an idle hour or two. It’s just the lame job they do with what they have that rankles.
The setting was particularly appropriate for my friend The Aesthete who, in the wake of an Olympian session the preceding night, had skipped the hair and gone straight for the dog by the time we negotiated the brewery portals around 11 a.m. Though I’ve been firmly on the wagon of late, a couple of free tasters and a perfectly foul coffee laced with Shaohsing wine (紹興酒) were begging to be sampled.
But back to the crapness, starting with the information board on the history of the government monopolies.
Things began promisingly as we chuckled over that classic first line of the opium entry. Each of the subjects – booze, tobacco, opium, camphor, salt, petrol, and weights and measures – has a swiveling panel that can be flipped, revealing the Chinese characters for the item on one side and information about its history on the other.
No problems with the presentation of the exhibit. We actually had puerile fun flipping the panels around. It’s in the text that things start to get dodgy. First, there’s the repeated use of the word “restoration” to describe the onset of KMT rule in Taiwan.
It’s hard to escape “guangfu” (光復) references in Taiwan, with the term usually translated as “retrocession.” That’s bad enough but the semantic slither to “restoration” takes the biscuit. The town magistrate Ma Wen-jun (馬文君) is a blue, so the language isn’t surprising but I don’t think it matters who’s in charge when this dross gets printed half the time.
There seems to be a general indifference surrounding such loaded terms, with the ineffably irritating call not to “think to much” a default position for many Taiwanese – at least I’ve found this so with young people. “Why don’t you want to make the ROC flag your Facebook profile picture on Taiwan’s birthday?” asked one bright young student on 10/10 last year.
“Don’t think too much; it’s nothing to do with politics.”
I suppose we should be thankful they haven’t been quite as brazen about the retrocession issue as they have here.[2]
What a time to be dry ...
So much for the semantics. Further on we have the unsubstantiated and, as far as I can see, preposterous claim that the Dutch sparked opium addiction in Taiwan by getting the aborigines hooked on tobacco laced with the drug.
Never in all my reading on Taiwanese history – which is not inconsiderable – have I come across such a claim. If they’d blamed it on the British, asserting the habits had been imported from China, I could understand the logic, if not the chronology.[3] But why is the finger being pointed at the Dutch, who had left Taiwan some 335 years before “the opium sniffing began”? Honest mistake, or a case of blame big nose?
Happy 921 Earthquake Day! 乾杯!
Worse was to come in another section of the same room. I’m not sure whether or not proceeds of the 921 earthquake commemorative grog see their way to local victims of 1999’s devastating quake but, either way, producing booze as a souvenir seems a rather tacky way to cash in. “Can you imagine a 9-11 memorial beer?” asked The Aesthete, rhetorically.
And this was just the start of the disrespectful way in which the disaster and its aftermath is presented.
Looking at the photos of the damage inflicted on Puli and elsewhere in the county, one is confronted by frightening scenes of destruction. It’s certainly no laughing matter. Why, then, did we find ourselves chortling away?
Because of this (click to enlarge):
And this:
The juxtaposition of text and image in this last one emphasizes the unintentionally tragicomic aspect to the presentation:
The text was so bizarre as to be incomprehensible in places. Luckily, The Aesthete’s Chinese reading is fairly decent, and we had an interesting time trying to figure out what was being said.
In parts it looked like the text had been stuck into Babelfish or a similar online translation tool. Why on earth did the authorities not just pay someone a few thousand NT to do a decent job?
The remains of a hotel near Sun Moon Lake. Not very funny.
On the opposite wall there were equally amusing observations on the supposed health benefits of Shaohsing wine, though the humour factor here was as much from the extravagance of the claims and their “scientific base” as the inanity of the language.
The text included the assertion that the booze could cure all sorts of ailments (colds, excess phlegm, diarrhea and – ahem – depression), that it helped “harmonizing your blood and smooth your breathing,” and allowed the body to “get rid of moisture and darkness.”
It will also apparently “make bodies smooth.” Indeed:
My personal fave is the observation that:
But as silly and unwittingly humorous as these were, they weren’t dealing with a serious subject and demeaning the memory of a tragic event in the process. The earthquake exhibit was reduced to comic absurdity because of these dreadful captions, so much so that we had to check ourselves and think about what we were looking at.
Later in the day, before we bussed and HSR-ed it back to Taipei, we took a brief walk up the hill at the park that marks the centre point of Taiwan. It’s a well-known spot for paragliding.
“You won’t able to do any flying today,” a local warned us as we stopped for some braised minced pork and rice on the way. That was OK. Walking was a task for The Aesthete by this stage.
We didn’t make it to the top but took in some views of the town part of the way up, to give us a nice final impression of Puli. It’s a shame those responsible for the brewery exhibits are failing to do the same.
Parting Shots:
The 100 things you always wanted to know about Shaohsing wine on the back wall was a nice touch. It must have taken some effort to come up with that many. Gouty old git that I am, No. 19 was of interest:
[1] As my pal The Aesthete pointed out – the verb xi (吸), which means inhale but can be used for the taking of drugs in various manners, probably should have been translated as “smoke.”
This 921 display seems a recent addition? I don’t remember seeing it in Feb when I last visited the winery.
“Drinking mild Shaohsing Wine can make people appetizing” – I love it, it explains quite a few things, from headhunting (or worse) to pheromonic attractions.
As to “blame big nose”, not quite: The Dutch did ship opium from Java to Taiwan in 1624, presumably the “sniffing” started soon after. It became quite popular among the Chinese immigrants at that time. Not sure how widespread its use was among the Aborigines. The VOC understood its addictive effects and forbade the Dutch from touching the stuff.
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Yeah, I’m aware they did ship opium but the claim was that they got aborigines hooked on it and I’ve seen scant evidence of that anywhere. It wasn’t even close to being one of their main trade items either, was it? Unlike with the British, who were making a tidy profit off it.
Anyway, are we saying Chinese opium use was sparked by Dutch dealers? It seems like the mixing with tobacco started fairly late (17th century) but Chinese had already been using the drug for hundreds of years by that time.
The bottom line is, the claim that opium usage in Taiwan started with the Dutch encouraging aborigines to mix it with tobacco is rubbish. If they were making money out of it, it was to the Chinese.
Not sure how old the 921 exhibit is. The ‘appetizing’ is genius, eh?
As far as I know, blending opium and tobacco is not simply mixing the two together. Some chemistry is involved. And the final product madak was served in opium dens and required the use of special pipes. I kind of doubt that the Aborigines had access to these houses, therefore “rubbish” is probably right. Medicinal use of opium in China dates back to the 8th Century if not earlier, it was through the oral route until the Dutch started peddling the smoking kind in the 1600s in Taiwan. In a way, they did spark the opium craze.
Question 19 in defense of beer and Shaohsing wine deserves a gold medal, hands down.
Ah, I thought madak was just mixing opium with tobacco in the way one, cough – so i’ve heard – does with hashish.Eating was the preferred method in most places until fairly modern times (de Quincey).
The point is, while a host of other vices are mentioned, there is nothing in most of the literature I have read about opium being a serious problem in avboriginal communities so I just wonder what the reason is for this claim.
Q.19 was indeed a hoot. I’ve often heard the claim that fortified wines are ‘better’ because of fewer purines and from my basic research that seems to be true. Beer, on the other hand …
Not sure why the claim of the aboriginal opium abuse. It is possible that a page from the Javanese history has been pilfered to illustrate how the Dutch controlled the natives.
Incidentally, big nose = Red Russians. “Tall nose” is the correct usage, pronounced do’t-pi-a in Taiwanese. Non-derogatory, a simple matter of contrast with the local varieties (some actually have theirs enhanced via self-funded cosmetic surgery).
A German physician by the name of Engelbert Kaempfer, a VOC employee, was probably the one who perfected the manufacturing of madak. If any tall nose is to blame, Dr Kaempfer should be the one.
Try as I might, I cannot see how “retrocession” is the wrong name for what happened. The Qing Empire signed Taiwan away after their defeat, the Qing’s successor’s then received it back. Unless you want to go down the (moronic, in my view) road of claiming that international law requires that Taiwan is in reality US territory,I can’t see a problem with this term. I mean, what would you rather call it?
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What would I call it? I wouldnt call it anything. I’d say something like ‘when the KMT took power’ and even that is a misleading simplification.
I’s suggest that you aren’t ‘trying’ that hard if you think this is mere pedantry or me trying to makes some political point (I do notice that that’s pretty much your standard response to anyone who has a problem with the blue-skewed presentation of history; sometimes I agree with you but other times you seem to be being contrary for the sake of it).
I’m surprised you think there is nothing untoward with here.There are so many reasons this term is dodgy to me.
Firstly, Taiwan was only fully incorporated into the Qing Empire in 1885. The island was, thus, a Dutch colony more than three times as long as it was officially a Chinese province. OK, it has been a prefecture of Fujian for a couple of hundred years but if we’re talking official status here …
More importantly though, you’ve highlighted the issue of it being signed away (true), then it being “received back”. Why do you use the more formal and legitimate-sounding description in the first case then the very vague and open-to-interpretation in the second?
I agree that the argument that Taiwan’ is officially a US protectorate is silly. But I’m afraid it’s a strawman argument that you trot out all the time against people (at least myself) who are making no such claim. What I am claiming, and what I hold to be indisputable, is that Taiwan’s status was never settled in anything approaching the way it was by Shimonoseki.
I’m sure you’ve read/know about San Francisco. That some people are using it to make silly arguments does not mean there is not a genuine point here. Thr Treaty of Taipei, similarly, did not make any provisions for a transfer of sovereignty – only nationality.
The point is, ‘retrocession’ pretty clearly implies some official transfer and back to an uninterrupted power (regardless of what you say about successor governments – anyway, by that logic, isn’t the PRC claim legit?). It’s also very clear with the old waishengren that there is some return to a glorious past implicit here, which many (and not just independence types) don’t really like.
Anyway, my main beef was actually with ‘restoration’, which – with its imperial imagery – is even more along the lines of that last point.
Did you read that gio page I linked? Are you seriously trying to tell me that isn’t the most blatant attempt to misrepresent history?
I have to say G, you are in danger of being the flipside of the Taiwan independence revisionists (for want of a better expression) you are always deriding.
I think I’m fairly balanced, yet you’re clearly trying to lump me in with the irrational promulgators of ‘moronic’ views.
May I suggest annexation – as in the Soviet annexation of Kresy.
At least that was given a veneer of legitimacy by Potsdam and Yalta.
JB, the difference is that I am not the one going around saying that some terms are “wrong” when, given the facts, it’s not at all clear that they are. I wouldn’t mind “return”, “KMT took power”, “annexed” or any other such term (“liberate” would certainly be going too far though). What I do mind is an attempt to enforce a particular view of Taiwanese history (Taiwan should be independent, Taiwan’s connexions with the mainland should be minimised) through ‘correct’ language, even if I sympathise with their politics.
As for the GIO link, the obvious thing that is wrong with it is not so much the words it uses, but what it misses out – that obviously, whilst many did welcome the Nationalists, many of those who did had reasons to regret it later, and whilst there was economic growth, there was also firm repression. “Retrocession day” is not worth celebrating as, despite being a liberation for many from one kind of tyranny, it was followed by the imposition of another kind of tyranny. However, the mere fact that they use the word “retrocession” there as well as at the Puli Shaoxing Brewery does not mean that there is something wrong about the mere use of the word “retrocession” to describe what happened on the 14th of August, 1945.
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Ooops, wrong date, the 25th of October, 1945, obviously.
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They didn’t use “retrocession”. I thought I made that pretty clear.
What happened on 14 August 1945? Did Taiwan retrocede to ‘China’. Could you provide some official document/statement/anything backing that up?
The problem with the GIO pages is about more than just what they omit:
‘and the people’s standard of living, compared with that during the colonial period, changed enormously for the better. This remarkable transformation testifies to the benefit Taiwan enjoyed by casting off Japanese rule.’
A higher standard of living did not follow for a long time – in fact the opposite was the case as the KMT goons plundered wholesale inestimably compounding the damage done to infrastructure by US bombing. Claiming it was a result of casting off Japanese rule is also clearly rubbish.
That last comment of mine wasn’t correcting your date btw, just querying whether you hold the arrival of troops to welcome parties at keelung who were almost immediately horrified at what disembarked (many already had a fair idea) constitutes ‘retrocession’?
Let’s be clear again: the claim that ‘retrocession’ lead to improvements is a ridiculous lie. Taiwan was light years ahead of anywhere in China. Just as I heard someone today arguing about the efficacy of homeopathic remedies through a post hoc argument, the leaps and bounds in Taiwan’s development generally happened in spite of the administration (the land reform, the money pumped in was all US).
I really suggest you read Shackleton if you want a good idea of the great changes for the better in the people’s standards of living: http://homepage.usask.ca/~llr130/taiwanlibrary/formosacalling/formosa-calling.pdf
Also, I would ask you, changes for the better for whom? Probably not those whose property was confiscated with no chance of redress even to this day.
JB – Well, fairly simply, Taiwan is now ruled by the Republic of China. that’s the “retro” part, and the “cession” part is Japan giving up all title to it in 1950. If you prefer just to say it came under the KMT, then this is fine to – since this is what happened.
What do you want to call it? Can you think of a term which you would be happy to read in a museum?
As for the rest, since I am not trying to defend the KMT’s record, I wonder why you bring it up.
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Third time: they don’t use ‘retrocession’ at the museum. Dear me, old boy … It’s the first bloody sentence of the comment before last.
The record was brought up in response to your comment that the GIO site was guilty only by omission and that the standard of living had indeed improved. I say it twice, so I’m not sure what is confusing you.
I seem to be going round in circles here but, again, this is a ridiculous claim because: 1) It’s simply untrue for the first decade or so (and in the cases of the dispossessed, untrue full stop); 2) short of Marcos-level pilfering, this would have been achieved by anyway. (Isn’t it rather remarkable how an admin that had set a benchmark in corruption, crookedness and ineptitude suddenly became efficient in Taiwan?) and 3) It had nothing to do with Taiwan casting of the yoke of Japanese colonials as is claimed.
That is NOT simply leaving out some facts.
Oh, and as for this: ‘Taiwan is now ruled by the Republic of China. that’s the “retro” part’ …
Er, no. it isn’t.
Who is it ruled by, if not the ROC?
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Clearly I wasn’t saying that. In fact, that’s the one thing I am saying.
The ‘no it isn’t’ refers to ‘that’s the retro part’. I am understand your previous succesor government argument but still think ‘retrocession’ is misleading (imagine you came into this a tabula rasa. what would you to it to mean?). And you’ve aptly highlighted the reason, by saying the ‘retro’ (i.e. ‘back’ – and not in the sense of retroactive/backdating btw; if that’s what you’re getting at, that is not what is meant by the word) means back to the rule of the Republic of China.
Do I need to point out the problem here? to be honest, I think you’ve made my point much more clearly than I had or could have!
That should have read: *what would you take to it to mean?*
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Yeah? I won’t be recommending your shit company which I’ve just de-linked.