Hulled Rice and Pouchong Tea: Reviving the Rural Vitality of Dananpu

Mention Miaoli's Nanzhuang and most people immediately think of the old street famous for its "Osmanthus Lane," but many may not know that within its borders lies a village called Nanfu, known locally as Dananpu.

Strictly speaking, it sits at the junction of Sanwan Township and Nanzhuang Township. This is a farming village of roughly 1,500 people, most of them Hakka. Without digging deeper, it is hard to imagine that this small farming village, barely noted even on the tourism map of the Nanzhuang Township Office, was once a bustling commercial and transport hub. That meant neighboring villages had to pass through Dananpu to reach one another, so in the past great numbers of people gathered in Dananpu to do business. Industries as varied as coal mining and tea production once flourished in Dananpu; it was even the great granary of the whole of Nanzhuang Township. But after the Miao 124 road connecting Sanwan and Nanzhuang opened, this prosperity gradually faded away, the crowds no longer came and went, and calling it a declining farming village is truly no exaggeration.

Because of social change, agriculture long ago ceased to be the nation's main development industry. For the sake of job opportunities, most of Dananpu's young people choose to work elsewhere, and Dananpu's workforce is generally aging. Yet farm work demands tremendous physical strength, and the elderly farmers, however willing, find it hard to bear such labor. For all these reasons, most of the younger generation is unwilling to return home to take over the farming, and in the end the fields can only be left fallow. Looking at his own three-fen field, already fallow and overgrown with weeds, farmer Zhang Mingcai said quietly: "There's no way. My legs are bad, and I'm old. I'm already eighty years old!"

Unwilling to Stand By as the Village Dies, a Young Man Returns Home to Promote Community Building

Qiu Xingwei, a student at the Institute of Anthropology at Tsing Hua University, is a son of Dananpu. Moved by the structural difficulties his hometown faces, and convinced that the crisis of the vanishing farming village can no longer be ignored, he decided to return to Dananpu to promote community building and to relearn how to be a true local. To this end he also established the Dananpu Rural Office, hoping that through the action of young people entering the village, it could uncover Dananpu's rural value and cultural character, and find the possibility of developing farming anew.

Qiu Xingwei believes the villagers must come to understand that the land still has value beyond its price, and that this must be realized step by step, starting with revitalizing the land. "Revitalization doesn't mean building houses on it, but returning the land to cultivation." Of course, some residents still find their actions puzzling, and Qiu Xingwei simply explains to them: "Now all the industries have moved away; only the land can't move. The most basic industry of the land is agriculture, and agriculture is the foundation of Dananpu," so that the land can be preserved for future generations.

At present they have been conducting interviews and surveys in Dananpu for nearly four or five years, with the main aim of visiting farmers and uncovering their stories, so as to add value to agricultural products. "Once we know what crops the village produces and the production conditions behind them, how can we maintain those production conditions?" Qiu Xingwei notes that by clarifying farmers' production conditions and marketing channels, they can develop agricultural products and help farmers fill in what is lacking. "In fact, our job is to be the interpreters between farmers and the public."

He adds that a recent survey turned up a household in Dananpu that raises sheep, more than two hundred head, with no idea what to do with the leftover goat milk. It happened that a friend in Nanzhuang knows how to make ice cream. "If we combine the two, maybe we can sell a local goat-milk ice cream."

No Longer Merely an Exhibit: The Future of the Tu-long Is to Keep Milling Rice

In fact, arriving in Dananpu, one can discover the local industrial and cultural character. There is Lin Yuxiang, the last inheritor of the craft of making the tu-long, a traditional rice-hulling mortar, who set up a "tu-long room" at his own home displaying the tu-long he has collected. Before the invention of the rice mill, everyone used the tu-long as a tool to grind away the husk, and afterward fewer and fewer people continued to use it. There is also the old miner Zhang Rongfu, who built a "Mining Museum" opposite Nanpu Elementary School, housing the tools once used in the mines along with the rosters and documents he has collected.

Right: tu-long master Lin Yuxiang
Left: Lai Yonghua, full-time staff member of the Dananpu Rural Office, currently actively learning tu-long techniques from Lin Yuxiang

Pictured is a tu-long from Lin Yuxiang's collection; he has also set up a tu-long room in Dananpu for visitors to see

In this regard, the Dananpu Rural Office hopes to write out the story of the tu-long for more people to see, and has arranged for full-time staff member Lai Yonghua to learn tu-long techniques from Lin Yuxiang as a way of passing on the craft. "If you only learn the tu-long but don't use it to mill rice, then it's just an antique, a fossil in a museum," Qiu Xingwei believes. Rice is the soul of the tu-long, so it must keep milling rice to keep operating. "Reinvesting the preserved tu-long artifact with meaning is what we need to do."

"We keep thinking about how to promote the tu-long to the wider world?" says Fu Weizhe, a member of the Dananpu Rural Office. "It happened that there's a Bend Down Market in Taipei, and we felt rice and the tu-long could be linked together," specifically selling rice milled with the tu-long. "At the time we were also wondering whether there was a variety better suited to making brown rice?" In the end they went online