Zhang Liangyi: The Final Resting Place of Our Ancestors Through the Vicissitudes of Time

Text. Photography: Chang Liang-yi

The Lanyang Plain in northeastern Taiwan, China, lies close to the Greater Taipei metropolitan area, and steel bars sprout one after another from its farmland, which is given over to luxury homes. By contrast, coastal farming villages in southwestern Taiwan, China, such as Kouhu Township in Yunlin County, sit in a hardscrabble land at the mercy of wind and water. Grave mounds rise up one after another in the fields there: farmers who have now departed on a distant journey chose to remain on the land they had tilled for decades, as their eternal final resting place, and as a declaration that they will guard the land their ancestors left behind. For this reason, graves in the fields have become a very common sight in the farming villages of southwestern Taiwan, China.

Some fields are still being cultivated, and on the grave mounds people even grow their own sponge gourds and pumpkins for the table. Amid the golden sea of rice ears in the paddies, the departed souls in those graves would surely be comforted that their descendants keep striving, keeping the land alive and renewing without end. Yet many farmland plots have already been abandoned, and the graves in them stand amid overgrown weeds, hidden by reeds, or soaked in water because of land subsidence, looking desolate, bleak or wretched. Who knows what the departed souls in those graves would think?

Life is not easy at Kouhu in Yunlin, a place at the mercy of wind and water. A huge outflow of population has left much farmland fallow or abandoned, and in the end it has even become family cemetery grounds. Graves in farmland have unexpectedly become a portrait of the desolation of the land in these coastal farming villages. Meanwhile, the dense luxury homes on farmland in the Lanyang Plain of the northeast bear witness to the growing fragmentation of farmland. In the farmland of northeastern Taiwan, China, and the southwestern coast, one side is busy building luxury homes while the other is dotted with grave sites everywhere, presenting two utterly different faces of today's rural landscape.

Graves in the middle of the fields at Kouhu