Tainan Community University Taijiang Branch learning chronicle: Building a river-basin school that coexists with rivers and seas
Taijiang was once an inland sea, and after four hundred years of sediment slowly carried and deposited by the Zengwen River and the Yanshui River, it became today's Annan District. Only upon reaching Taijiang do you understand what "seas turn into mulberry fields" means. This is a record of the efforts of Tainan Community University Taijiang Branch to treat the Taijiang river basin as a school and to cultivate Taijiang culture deeply.
Seas turn into mulberry fields - Taijiang reflections
Taiwan's community university movement has passed through 16 years, moving from facing cities toward rural areas, taking root in rural soil, and opening up more deeply cultivated cultural movements with local characteristics. In order to grasp and continue the local living characteristics that ancestors developed in adapting to their environment, community university movement participants began a "local studies" movement aimed at preserving local ecological knowledge and documenting the characteristics of local cultural life.
In Annan District of Tainan City, this is the place Zheng Chenggong called "Dayuan" when he led his troops in landing in Taiwan, the important historical area where the Ming-Zheng dynasty defeated the Dutch and then ruled all of Taiwan, allowing Taiwan to step onto the stage of Chinese history for the first time. It was also the former Taijiang inland sea, and here lies the origin of Taiwan's four hundred years of history.
If history is the memory of a people, then the history of Taiwanese people should begin with Taijiang. And this history inevitably faces the Age of Discovery during the Ming-Zheng period, and Taijiang must surely have been the stage center of this historical drama.
In Taijiang one can read the history of nature and humanity; Taiwan's history is also the history of rivers and seas. Standing on the levee, you can still see nearly a hundred years of living history still slowly moving forward. That is the Jianan Irrigation System dug by Yoichi Hatta, which today still connects to the sea at Taijiang, flows toward the Black Ditch, and rushes back to Hatta's hometown.
When asking for directions on how to take the bus to Taijiang, I learned that people call Taijiang "Haiwei," perhaps meaning the end of the sea, the edge of the city. Today's Taijiang may give many people the impression of a fishing village area on the edge of Tainan's core urban district. But for the teachers and students of Taijiang Branch, Taijiang is the starting point of all stories. The fish ponds represent aquaculture and riverside tidal flats, and are the memory of every Taijiang person, as well as the root of the identity that sustains Taijiang people.
From "education thriving at the great temple" to "river-basin school"
