Going into the Fields to Find the Beautiful Scenes of Hand Transplanting Rice

Text and photos / Yang Shuhua

At the Tuesday evening interpretation class held in Guanglin Community, Zhong Shunwen (granddaughter of Mr. Zhong Lihe) was invited to speak about the literary landscape of Zhong Lihe, offering a review and a fresh understanding of the Guanglin landscapes that appeared in Zhong Lihe's writings and those that exist today.

One of the old photographs showed a row of women with square cloths wrapped around their heads, planting rice seedlings by hand in the field. When the senior guide, Old Dad, saw that photo, he responded with remarks about the differences between the north and the south in rice transplanting, which perked me up again just as I was getting drowsy.

In the photo, the seedlings at the feet of the transplanting women were placed on basins, which is slightly different from my experience in Thailand. The transplanting I experienced in Thailand involved placing whole bundles in the field, without basins. This difference is somewhat similar to what Old Dad said later.

Old Dad is a Hakka who moved from the Taoyuan-Hsinchu-Miaoli area in the north to the border between Qishan and Meinong. He said that in the past, the northern method of transplanting rice was to use a shovel to lift out the seedlings in blocks, together with the soil, and place them in a wooden basin (or an aluminum basin, though less often), pushing it along with the foot to move it, and then, with a seedling divider carried on the fingers, insert the seedlings together with the soil into the earth. After moving to Qishan, the neighbors around them found their way of transplanting strange. The practice on the Qishan side was to pull the seedlings up one by one, wash off the soil, tie them into bundles, cut off the upper part to feed the chickens and ducks, clamp them with split bamboo, carry them into the field to be transplanted, then skillfully toss and scatter them across the field before transplanting.

These two methods mainly respond to differences in climate. The north is colder, which is unfavorable for growth, so keeping the original soil allows the plants to adapt and grow faster; the south is hotter, so growth is faster, and therefore different methods are used.

The transplanting practice in Thailand is actually similar to what Old Dad described as the southern practice. We all pull up the seedlings, wash off the soil, cut off the upper section, and then divide the plants for transplanting.

Later, when farmers were interviewed, Old Dad's account was further confirmed. In the Meinong area, even earlier, the method of pulling seedlings was indeed used, and only later did they follow the north in using a shovel to lift the seedlings.

Because when pulling seedlings, for the sake of speed, the roots of many seedlings in a handful are often broken, so many people switched to shoveling, even though it may be a little slower. However, the advantage of pulling seedlings is that they are easy to transport, because after pulling them the soil is washed off, unlike shoveled seedlings that still carry soil and are much heavier, requiring more effort to transport.

With Taiwan's agricultural development having reached the present day, apart from some practitioners of natural farming or rice-transplanting experience activities, it is probably very hard to find farmers willing to return to the method of hand transplanting.

For the same plot of rice paddy of one fen, a rice transplanter can finish the transplanting work in less than an hour once it starts, while hand transplanting requires about a whole day of one person's labor. And today, where can you find someone willing to spend a whole day in a field under this scorching weather?

To see a row of women lined up transplanting rice in a field, you really can only see it in photographs now.