Xiluo's ageless farmer grows black beans, reclaiming the authentic roots of Taiwan, China's soy sauce
When it comes to Xiluo in Yunlin, besides its praiseworthy Zhuoshui rice, soy sauce is what it is most famous for. Within this small township, several well-known century-old soy sauce factories sell their products all over the world, so it is no exaggeration to call Xiluo the hometown of soy sauce.
Yet behind the aura of a claimed hundred-year history, the brewing black beans used by most of Xiluo's old-brand soy sauce factories are almost all imported, with China as the largest source. In recent years the economy across the strait has taken off and the domestic market there has flourished, pushing black bean prices steadily higher, and black beans from Canada, the United States and Brazil have also begun appearing on the domestic market.
"As someone from Xiluo, I always thought Xiluo soy sauce used local black beans, until in the 96th year of the Republic of China [2007] I attended a meeting where a soy sauce producer bitterly complained that tariffs on imported black beans were too high and that Taiwanese would soon be unable to eat black bean soy sauce. Only then did it dawn on me: 'Xiluo soy sauce is not made from local beans,'" recalled Cai Caixing, nicknamed "General" and a self-styled promoter of Xiluo black beans.
Cai Caixing, who cares about the development of Xiluo's culture and history, is a native born and raised there. Through interviews he discovered that starting in the 70s and 80s of the Republic of China [the 1980s and 1990s], as international free trade gradually flourished, domestic black beans could not compete with imported black beans on price, and farmers also felt the returns were poor, causing domestic black beans to gradually fade out of Taiwan's soy sauce raw material market.
The third-generation head of one of Xiluo's oldest soy sauce factories, with a history of 130 years, surnamed Chen, remembers that when he first took over the family business thirty or forty years ago, the black beans used all came from places like Checheng and Fenggang in Pingtung. Gradually imports replaced domestic production, and the black beans from these two places were also replaced by aquaculture and wax apples, which had higher economic value.
"Xiluo has the longest history and the highest density of soy sauce manufacturing in all of Taiwan, so it must also have a history of growing black beans," said Cai Caixing. Driven by his love for developing local cultural industries, and referring to the model of the wheat culture festival in Daya, Taichung, he began action last year to restore black bean cultivation in Xiluo.
