A Tour of the Xiangtian Lake Tribal Market: Heading Up the Mountain to Visit the Market

Miaoli Tribal Markets

Jointly promoted by the Miaoli County Government and the tribes, the tribal markets opened at three locations starting in February of the 101st year of the Republic of China (2012). These three sites are: the Mabihao Tribe in Tai'an Township, the Simaxian Tribe, and the Xiangtian Lake Tribe in Nanzhuang Township. The main purposes of setting up the tribal markets are:

(1) To empower tribal organizational capacity and put the concept of "local employment" into practice

(2) To combine ecological wisdom and develop sustainable tribal industries

(3) To apply the indigenous spirit of sharing and mutual support to promote joint production and marketing

It is hoped that through the establishment of the "tribal markets," serving as a platform for joint tribal production and marketing, new marketing channels for the tribes will be added, tribal products will be encouraged to move toward branding and the practice of energy saving and carbon reduction; the spirit of mutual aid from the past will be brought into play, the strength of indigenous tribes will be united, collective consensus will be consolidated, and joint production and marketing work will be promoted.

These three tribes went from public tribal project briefing sessions, organizing management committees, spatial hardware planning and construction, market operation training workshops, and tribal vendor recruitment briefings, and in just half a year, step by step through discussion and then compromise, raising each other's questions, sharing experience and knowledge, before finally achieving the establishment of the current Xiangtian Lake Tribal Market, Simaxian Tribal Market, and Mabihao Tribal Market.

In the process of organizing, besides being a renewed self-exploration and repositioning of local industrial characteristics, it was also a process of effort to reorganize the people within the tribes. At the same time, through the promotion of local tribal markets, the conditions for tribal youth to return home were actively created — job opportunities, promotion of local industries, and preservation of the environment and culture, none of which can be missing.

"In the mountains, wandering the market: we look forward to you feeling completely relaxed, embracing the fresh and natural atmosphere of the mountains. The tribal market will move you."

Xiangtian Lake and the Saisiat People

Xiangtian Lake is located in Donghe Village, Nanzhuang Township, Miaoli County, and belongs to a settlement of the Saisiat people. When most people mention the Xiangtian Lake tribe, besides taking the name literally and thinking of a beautiful mountain lake, what is best known is that Xiangtian Lake is the welcome site for the Saisiat Pas-ta'ai (the Short Spirit Festival), held once every two years.

The Saisiat call Xiangtian Lake "rareme:an." This is the name of a kind of tree that grows abundantly around Xiangtian Lake and can be used as a dye for fabrics; the Saisiat ancestors named this place after this native plant. The Saisiat are the smallest of Taiwan's mountain indigenous peoples, with a population of about 5,000; they are divided by place of residence into Southern Saisiat and Northern Saisiat.

The Saisiat living north of the ridge line of Wuzhi Mountain along Egongji Mountain are in Wufeng Township, Hsinchu County, while those to the south mostly live in Nanzhuang Township, Miaoli County; in daily life they mostly interact with the Atayal and Hakka. Therefore, based on geographical differences, the Northern Saisiat mostly understand Atayal, while the Southern Saisiat of Xiangtian Lake are usually familiar with Hakka. The Saisiat Short Spirit Festival (Pas-ta'ai) is held around the full moon of each year's harvest, and the ceremony is mainly divided into two parts, welcoming the spirits and sending off the spirits, and is fixedly hosted by families of different surnames.

The grand spirit-welcoming ceremony is held at the Xiangtian Lake tribe, with the Zhu family serving as the main officiants; the Saisiat families settled in the Xiangtian Lake tribe, besides the Zhu family, also include the Qiong family and the most numerous Feng family. The elders and adults of these three families, besides supporting each other in the traditional Short Spirit Festival rituals, also jointly promote the local tribal market at Xiangtian Lake.

The Saisiat Cultural Museum and the lakeside grounds.

The spirit-welcoming site is no larger than an elementary school playground, usually covered with lush green grass and surrounded by quiet mountains; it is hard to imagine that during the festival, as many as 40,000 people have poured in here. Imagine, after nightfall, in the valley thick with fir trees, the scene of the Saisiat people singing and dancing around the bonfire all night; no wonder the Short Spirit Festival is often given a mysterious color.

The Xiangtian Lake tribal market is located next to the festival grounds and the Saisiat Cultural Museum by the lake. Inside the Saisiat Cultural Museum are displays with Chinese and English explanations, and traditional Saisiat implements and clothing that local tribal people and county government units worked hard to preserve. In the past, the Saisiat Short Spirit Festival did not allow outsiders to participate, and even the ritual songs sung by the people during the festival could only be learned orally from tribal elders one month before the festival. In the museum, you can see precious documentary footage filmed in the early period.

Although in response to the usual flow of tourists to Xiangtian Lake, some vendors have long been scattered around Xiangtian Lake. Some of these vendors are tribal people, but quite a few are outsiders who come here to do business. The Xiangtian Lake tribal market, through the internal organization of the tribe's people, applied to the county government for funding and formally settled beside the cultural museum. The plan starts first from taking care of industrial sales for Xiangtian Lake tribal residents, and then integrates these existing vendors, hoping to achieve the shared prosperity and development of local industry and people.

This Mr. Zhu is actually the speaker of the Saisiat Ethnic Council! He brought old ginger and Wusong seedlings grown by his own family to support the tribal market.

 
(Left) Saisiat craft artist Feng Shun'en led the older women of the tribe in making beaded cellphone charms in the style of Saisiat hip bells. The beadwork uses traditional materials, Job's tears.
(Right) Alcoholic products made from local agricultural ingredients. These ingredients are: mountain taro, black glutinous rice, green plum, and millet. The tribal people carefully sawed bamboo into bamboo cup wine glasses; they offer a small cup for tasting, and buying the wine comes with a large bamboo cup. It really drinks with a particularly fresh fragrance!

 

At the tribal market, some vegetables produced in the Xiangtian Lake mountain area are sold. There are fresh log-grown shiitake mushrooms, cabbage, mountain celery, and old ginger; there are also home-dried daylily, wood ear, and goat's head, as well as items made under the influence of local Hakka flavors, such as dried preserved mustard, dried cowpea, dried shredded radish, dried old radish, and kumquat sauce. At the same time, the tribal market also offers handmade DIY ethnic-flavored accessories; women of the Feng family teach visitors to make Saisiat hip-bell keychains, which is also a distinctive Saisiat local feature of this market.

Xiangtian Lake's Local Agricultural Specialties Over the Years

These fresh and lovely fruits and vegetables grow in the fields of the Saisiat homes that ring Xiangtian Lake. Xiangtian Lake now has nearly 40 households of residents, most engaged in livelihood and economic activities related to the mountain forest and land environment. However, Xiangtian Lake's local industry did not start out by growing these leafy vegetables; it took decades of industrial change to reach today's appearance.

Xiangtian Lake was originally a lake in the mountain area, which the Hakka called Yangtian Lake. During the Japanese colonial period, because of its water resources, the low-lying areas were developed into paddy fields, while the mountain areas unsuitable for rice cultivation were widely planted with tea. The elderly in the tribe even remember harvesting upland rice by hand around the 1960s. In the past, because of imperial colonial rule, the Saisiat living in the mountains began to change the content of their food, gradually shifting from millet and taro to rice.

After entering the era of the Nationalist Government, although the Saisiat of the inner mountains of Nanzhuang continued to grow tea as a cash crop, they seemed limited by technology and plant growth constraints and were unable to compete with the tea industry run by outsiders and businesspeople. In the 1980s, the government renovated the originally dried-up natural lake and built an embankment to create today's artificial Xiangtian Lake; around this time, the tea plants at Xiangtian Lake were removed. The area of paddy fields also shrank year by year. At that time, the main industry of Xiangtian Lake residents was responding to the farmers' association policy by widely growing snow-white mushrooms, and even today more than twenty dilapidated mushroom sheds can still be seen among the vegetation.

An abandoned mushroom shed

Former paddy fields, now covered with wildflowers: the tropical ageratum (Ageratum houstonianum)

In response to external agricultural industry policies, prices were initially good, but after market purchasing prices fell, the Saisiat felt that growing mushrooms had become too labor-consuming and could not be sustained. "When harvesting mushrooms, you can't sleep all night. We also have to go out to work, and there aren't enough people." In addition, the mushroom growing medium required large amounts of rice straw for fermentation, and the inner mountains of Nanzhuang did not have enough rice straw; even the nearby Dananpu, known as the granary of the Zhonggang River valley, could not gather enough, so the Saisiat also had to spend extra money to buy it from Toufen and Houlong. This is also a reason for the decline of the mushroom industry.

At Xiangtian Lake today, the most popular local agricultural product is log-grown shiitake mushrooms. Log-grown shiitake mushrooms are grown by cutting trees that have grown to the size of a bowl, trimming them to a length of about 1.3 m, drilling holes in them, and manually inserting shiitake mushroom mycelium to cultivate the mushrooms. Unlike the common mass-produced space-bag shiitake mushrooms, log-grown shiitake mushrooms need a cool and humid growing environment to slowly nurture their growth. Xiangtian Lake has large day-night temperature differences and is often shrouded in white mountain mist, making it very suitable. There are currently seven households specializing in growing log-grown shiitake mushrooms, and the logs for cultivating the mushrooms are placed under the beautiful, deep fir forest.

Mushrooms that grow up breathing in phytoncides every day like this taste thick-fleshed and richly aromatic, the finest among shiitake mushrooms.

On the right is a tribal gathering garden. Although at first glance it looks like a patch of weeds, the two local Mr. Fengs are familiar with identifying edible crops — mountain celery, tree tomato, prickly ash, bitter greens... Green vegetables to be taken to the tribal market for sale also grow here. With so many companion weeds, it is naturally non-toxic and pesticide-free!

At the center top of the photo is the rareme:an tree. The Saisiat named Xiangtian Lake after it.

The Saisiat, who live off the mountains, also deeply revere the mountain forests. Walking once around the Xiangtian Lake trail, you can see that the Saisiat do not cut down trees at will, preserve the appearance of the mountain forest as much as possible, and continue to use the ancient wisdom of the Saisiat ancestral spirits. For example, if they hear a barking deer call the night before, they know the weather will change the next day; it is just as effective as the Han Chinese saying "when the foundation stone is damp, it will rain." The Saisiat also understand that plants are full of emotion; they describe mountain pepper as like a "chaste and virtuous woman" that is difficult to transplant elsewhere, and as soon as it is moved it will not grow and will not bear fruit. The Saisiat themselves set fines to punish those within the community who hunt outside the hunting season — because that ignores the balance of natural ecological growth and decline.

Likewise, the Xiangtian Lake tribal market is exactly a product of the Saisiat's concept of respecting the natural environment and making a living from the mountain forest economy, spontaneously initiated by the residents here. It lets local friendly specialty agricultural products be produced and sold locally. Next time you visit Nanzhuang, why not come and take a walk!

Thanks

Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Development Center Foundation http://taiwan.atipc.org/
Xiangtian Lake Tribe, Nanzhuang, Miaoli

※Further reading

• In the mountains, wandering the market: visiting the Mabihao Tribe
• [Going Up the Mountain, Wandering the Market series reports]
      Simaxian chapter: Simaxian Tribal Market opens, adding vigor to a Shei-Pa trip 
      Xiangtian Lake chapter: Saisiat flavor embodied in original taste, right at the Xiangtian Lake Tribal Market 
      Mabihao chapter: Not afraid of change, only afraid of having no customers: Mabihao Tribal Market morale is high