Tucheng Ammunition Depot: We Want to Decide Our Own Lives
Text / Huang Jen-chih
Every landscape is a sheet of paper, bearing the various memories left behind by the people who once lived on this land. Whether soaked with the sweat and blood shed through diligent cultivation, depicting the cultural customs pioneered through backbreaking toil, or inscribed with the joys and sorrows intertwined in communal life, each page is a precious history of living, and stacked together they become a classic that guides us in how to trace our roots.
The Tucheng Ammunition Depot is a landscape drawing once jointly sketched by the military, farmland, ecology and homes. The footprints falling here are the light leaps of Taipei tree frogs evading snakes on rainy nights; the smear of brown ink spilling there is the scorch mark accidentally left by soldiers inspecting shells. Each stroke planted with greenery is the vegetables the farmers set in daily, hoes on their shoulders; each phrase occasionally annotated is an enduring murmur passed down through generations and gatherings of neighbors. The way the people here treat the drawing is to gently, upon the traces of the day before, quietly sketch their own spark of understanding, letting this drawing pile up the thickness of ink and accumulate the weight of memory.
Yet expropriation and development have never been merely the scraping away and rewriting of a landscape drawing, but rather a forcible tearing apart of sheet after sheet, re-collaging the dream of money at the broken places of memory, stitching at the tears one gleaming yet jarring banknote after another, using a needle of "wealth is the only hard truth" to pierce through the two such different materials of landscape drawing and capital banknote, punching a hole here, sewing a problem there.
And so the farmers began, wearing bamboo hats and carrying rakes, bringing the whole family into the city and onto the streets. They went to the magistrate's door to petition and protest, to the offices that should have prioritized nature conservation to raise their voices, and even to the Presidential Office, which is said to take the people as its body, to sing out "We want to decide our own lives." In the end, the officials whose mouths were full of nothing but "administration according to law" did not one dare step forward to debate the matter, yet more and more people of conscience who could not bear to see the land destroyed, or crowds harboring the dream of a Peach Blossom Spring, poured onto this land.
The bird-watching society and the butterfly society held guided tours and interpretive walks here time and again, and students of the community college spent leisurely afternoons here. Friends from the bar association and environmental groups booked, batch after batch, the summer nights of flickering fireflies here.
Teachers from nearby elementary schools, taking advantage of the rice-planting season, brought students here to experience that "every grain on the plate is hard work"; mothers of the Little Sprouts, who embrace Waldorf philosophy, brought their toddlers in their bouncing-and-jumping phase to build a shared green learning ground here. Approaching from not far off are the promoters of Shumei Natural Agriculture; strolling over there are the practitioners striving to learn kitchen-waste composting. Interwoven on this land, they listen intently to messages long lost in the city.
Students from the Department of Landscape Architecture at Fu Jen Catholic University left the first batch of landscape models here, while Teacher Fang Wei-ta of Chung Hua University began proposing the ecological planning possibility of preserving the status quo. Partners of the ecological work camp unearthed the development potential of the ammunition depot, and students of Chung Yuan Christian University proposed more diverse designs for the roselle fields. Students of National Taipei University took this place as a case study in non-urban land planning, while graduate students of the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at National Taiwan University chose this place as their practicum site for a required course.
David Harvey, having come from afar, left words of encouragement here, and Elizabeth Henderson shared cases of community-supported agriculture. Young friends from Japan's Peace Boat helped till the soil in Brother Hui's vegetable garden, and the following year a Japanese grandmother, likewise practicing organic farming, treated them as her own children. Friends from Hong Kong, China encountered the spring rain here, yet the preparatory meeting of the Asia-Pacific Global Greens had a wonderful time here.
The Tucheng Ammunition Depot park, embracing all of this, still lies quietly at the foot of the Nantianmu mountain range, neighboring the city across the sound of traffic on National Freeway No. 3, just like the tomb of Lady Zheng of the Tongzhi era standing beside Anin Coffee Mountain, silently watching the changes of the world without a word.
The lifting of military restrictions brought the ammunition depot an opportunity for transformation, and also created the crisis of urban development eroding farmland. Green space turning into concrete, housing prices hyped too severely, the core area's population too dense - these are all problems caused by urban speculators, and the solution is absolutely not to forcibly seize farmland. Only by our joint efforts can the tree frogs no longer need to flee for their lives in a hurry, the butterflies no longer sob in the dark, the fireflies reside here for good, and the farmers continue to settle down and make a living here.
Related Information
Guard Tucheng - Love Green Alliance
A group of happy, simple farmers of the Tucheng Ammunition Depot who love their hometown and their land, wanting only farmland for farming, to leave a patch of green space for future generations, formed the "Alliance Against the Improper Relocation of the Tucheng Detention Center," opposing the detention center's "moving Tucheng to Tucheng"; they refuse a Tucheng that will flood badly in the future, and they will strive to protect the Tucheng Ammunition Depot with its flickering fireflies, dancing butterflies, croaking frogs and flying birds.