A 148-year journey through history stuns scholars at home and abroad: You Yongfu, owner of a small bookshop in the deep mountains, spent 18 years "Searching for Thomson"

In 1871, John Thomson, a member of the Royal Geographical Society, traveled to the Far East and photographed his way to Xiamen, where he met a fellow Scot, Dr. James Laidlaw Maxwell, who was practicing medicine and preaching in southern Taiwan, China. Maxwell half-coaxed and half-tricked Thomson into coming to Formosa. From Takao Harbor and the prefectural city to the deep mountains of the interior, crossing badlands terrain, he photographed along the way the Pingpu life of Zuozhen, Neimen, Jiaxian and Liugui, leaving behind precious 19th-century images of Taiwan's interior.

148 years later, the new book "Searching for Thomson: The Great Discovery of Taiwan's Cultural Heritage in 1871" has been published. The author spent 18 years on field research, retracing the routes John Thomson walked in Taiwan, contacting historical and art scholars, collectors and museums in the UK, the US and France to help provide documentary clues, and imagining what Thomson felt when he first saw Taiwan, laying a new milestone for local research on the "Thomson images."

The book has been recommended in writing by many scholars and writers at home and abroad, and what stunned the scholars was that this pen pal who exchanged letters with them had no titles, no academic background familiar to them, but humbly called himself "the owner of a small bookshop in the deep mountains of southern Taiwan" -- You Yongfu.

A small bookshop in the deep mountains, producing international research

At four o'clock, before dawn, You Yongfu is already up. After morning exercises, he chants sutras and recites mantras, then eats breakfast -- usually a papaya and a handful of mixed nuts. At 6:30 he raises the bookshop's metal roller door, greeting the small mountain town's day and its first customers -- students commuting to school.

The small bookshop is called "Pumen" and sits beside the Jiaxian public market. Although Jiaxian's population keeps hitting new lows, the number of new elementary school students has dropped sharply, and there are fewer and fewer pedestrians on the street, with only an occasional electric mobility scooter weaving through the alleys, the small bookshop opens day after day.

In recent years he has been so busy that he has no time even to read sutras and open the shop; most of his time has been devoted to field investigation of the "Thomson route" and the collection of documents. He publishes research findings irregularly in various journals and has also set up a blog, "Sunshine on Jiaxianpu," to publish his latest research discoveries.

Frederick Coyett? No -- Frederic Wakeman? No -- the compiler and translator of "Le Gendre's Taiwan Expedition" and American historian Douglas L. Fix wrote in the "Recommended Preface": "The roads he walked, the time he spent, the photographs he observed and the historical documents he analyzed were more than Thomson's, and more arduous"; writer Liu Kexiang believes that through the historical background of the 19th century and Thomson's travel route, the author, with his locally skilled field research, gradually developed "a grand style utterly different from that of other annotators and translators," "opening a new dimension for early travel accounts of Taiwan."

Destined to spend a lifetime in the company of books, yet it also left him covered in wounds

From high school onward, You Yongfu was crazy about books. Taking the bus from Jiaxian to Fengshan for high school, he had to ask his father to help carry two shoulder poles' worth of books. He loved writing poetry, and had a bleak youth. After failing the university entrance exam by one point, he went to work at a bookstore in Kaohsiung. At that time industrial pollution was severe, and unable to adapt to the environment, he went to Taipei to rely on his second sister.

In 1974, when You Yongfu was 22, he first went to Laoosong Bookstore in Wanhua, then to Jianhong Bookstore on Chongqing South Road. You Yongfu, who loved the company of books, loved Buddhist sutras most for their "beautiful wording," and their "sense of déjà vu" seemed to have planted a Buddhist affinity long ago. At 24, he vowed to devote himself to studying Buddhism, and has been vegetarian for 43 years since then. At that time the economy was taking off, and the book market was excellent. Seeing that Tamsui had many schools, You Yongfu opened his first "Pumen Bookstore" on Yingzhuan Road in front of the station in 1978. Through Buddhist affinity he also met his wife, and settled down in Tamsui, married and had children.

Ten years later, real estate prices soared, and the bookshop's meager profits could not keep up with soaring rents. First he moved, and then he could no longer hold on and closed the business. At that time his wife entered a temple to practice, leaving him alone to keep the bookshop going, from 6:30 in the morning to 11 at night. Both body and mind began to show problems, so he could only return to Jiaxian first and make plans later.

The family scattered, his wife entered the Buddhist order, and his old father refused to acknowledge him out of spite

Like many postwar immigrants to the island, You Yongfu's father came from Meishan in Chiayi to Jiaxian to clear land and farm, and through diligent cultivation became a middleman dealing in dried bamboo shoots. Seeing that his youngest son, whom he had devoted himself to cultivating, went north to struggle for more than ten years, only to return home broke with a truckload of books, the old father could hardly hide his disappointment and rage before a house full of unsold stock, and from then on they were like strangers. Father and son lived on the same street all day long, yet the old father looked right through him and would not speak to him.

Fortunately, his eldest brother set aside a spare room for his down-and-out youngest brother to reopen the business, still called "Pumen Bookstore." Before long, his wife resolved to enter monastic life and asked for a divorce, leaving him to depend on each other with his only son in elementary school.

Later, a fire broke out behind the old family house. You Yongfu ran back to the old house, picked up his bedridden mother and fled. Seeing that his father still wore a cold, stern look, he could not help kneeling and begging his father's forgiveness, and with relatives as witnesses father and son recognized each other again. Later, when his father was critically ill in a Kaohsiung hospital, You Yongfu supported him all the way back to Jiaxian. He said, "Fortunately, father and son achieved a perfect reconciliation."

"To establish himself in Jiaxian, my father toiled all his life and valued economic success. He could not accept my failure." Looking back on that period of midlife separation, You Yongfu still smiles, with no ripple at the corners of his eyes.

Cultivating Jiaxian's local history, unexpectedly crossing 148 years of history

Returning to the land of his hometown, he finally found stability. Also running a bookshop and writing poetry, he befriended Jiang Mingshu and others in Qishan's literary circles. The 1990s were an era of great excavation of local history and culture. You Yongfu successively published the poetry collection "Scalloped Scissors" (2006) and "Jiaxian Historical Records" (2006), filling gaps in Jiaxian's local culture.

While collecting Pingpu historical materials, he discovered that Jiaxianpu, which had very few records in the Qing dynasty, "in 1871 actually had a world-class explorer, Thomson, stay overnight, and the residents even held a lively evening party to welcome the guest!" He excitedly plunged into Thomson research for a full 18 years.

Zero government subsidy funding, making it even harder to untangle historical clues

You Yongfu also thought about applying for subsidies. He submitted plans to the Council of Indigenous Peoples, the Ministry of Culture and the Cultural Affairs Bureau, but what he actually received was zero. Besides the time-consuming process of official document circulation, what puzzled him even more was why personnel expenses could not be subsidized. Only after others pointed it out did he understand that applying for subsidies requires accounting techniques to make savings from the surplus. He sighed: "I would rather rely on myself than falsify."

Business at the small bookshop is poor. For several years in a row, his savings wavered between five digits and four digits, and he could not help worrying that one day a check he wrote to a supplier would bounce. Scarce resources were not the obstacle; deciphering one by one the visual and textual clues Thomson left behind, that was the difficulty.