Open your senses and savor the beauty of Taiwan's countryside in fine detail

Lead image / Guo Zhirong

What is the countryside? Is it the rural land beyond the city, but ultimately a kind of preparatory ground to be turned into city? That is why it is called "non-urban land."

Or is it a historical existence that has now bid farewell to the past, yet is at a loss as to where its future lies?

Or perhaps it was originally another kind of existence relative to the city, with a value of its own, requiring a perspective different from the city's in order to be treated properly?

The countryside of history is easy to understand, but today's countryside is mixed with the impact of industrialization, making it instead hard to grasp. More and more people are born and grow up in cities, so the countryside is naturally unfamiliar to them, and they have no way to begin to understand it; a minority, though raised in the countryside, have stayed so long that excessive familiarity leaves them unable to articulate the countryside's characteristics. So "What is the countryside?" has become an increasingly difficult question to answer.

Through the keen perception of a literary writer, perhaps some clues can be recovered:

The countryside gave farming families blue skies and green fields, with home inside it, and the workplace inside it too, so that at all times one can stretch the heart and mind and delight the eyes. Bright sunlight, soft night, work and rest, all manner of comfort. Birds sing, butterflies dance, and along roadsides and beyond courtyards there are always flower colors and flower scents; how could the spirit not be roused? Trees rise upward, solemn and serene yet expansive, and grasses and plants cover the ground, growing everywhere; how could vitality not be inspired? Fresh air, sweet cold springs, produce of complete nourishment and lingering flavor; how could blood, vessels, sinews and bones not be in harmony? Add to this the farmers' few desires and guarded simplicity, their plain and unadorned nature; who could fail to envy them as people of the age of Emperor Yao? (Chen Guanxue, 1994:19)

This is an excerpt from the essay "Pastoral Then and Now" by the pastoral writer Mr. Chen Guanxue.

Mr. Chen has long been regarded as the "modern Tao Yuanming," living in seclusion in the Pingtung countryside for decades, farming, reading and writing. Sadly, he passed away this July. Through his many writings, we can receive a picture of life in the countryside of southern Taiwan, past and present, and further confirm that opening the senses, eyes and ears alike, truly allows a deep and fine appreciation of all aspects of Taiwan's land. His eyes, penetrating deep into Taiwan's countryside, help us discover a pastoral beauty both unfamiliar and familiar.

Taking the passage above as an example, some will inevitably think that Teacher Chen's writing is full of nostalgia, pointing to a "premodern landscape" and "the flavor of life in the agricultural age" that vanished once and for all after industrialization, and therefore regard it as writing detached from reality.

In land that has not undergone farmland readjustment, the diversity of the landscape can still be faintly seen

In fact, look carefully: the elements in it are all still obtainable in today's countryside: home and work combined, sunlight and night, crowing birds and dancing butterflies and flowers, trees and grasses. The difference is that people are no longer sensitive to their existence, so much so that they cannot use them to stretch the heart and mind and delight the eyes; nor are they any longer of few desires and guarded simplicity, but instead envy the city's prosperity and profit. Having lost a heart at ease, not only can they not perceive the beauty at hand, they even upside-down do things that harm themselves, such as spraying pesticides that destroy the fresh air; although there are cold springs and clear streams, these are often abandoned and reduced to sewage ditches. Thus, some have eyes but do not see, and not a few blindfold themselves and wreak destruction. How could the rural environment not make one worried and disappointed?

"Pastoral Then and Now" was written in 1983, but as early as the 1970s, when Teacher Chen left the city to return to live in the countryside, he already had such feelings, and often grieved endlessly over the disappearance of the old pastoral life. He said:

"In the autumn of 1952, in order to seek a little knowledge, I parted from the old pastoral life. Who would have thought that this parting would last twenty years, and when I returned in the spring of 1972, the old pastoral life had long since passed. Looking everywhere, smelling everywhere, listening everywhere, for the lost old pastoral life, I kept wanting to wail aloud." What a "looking everywhere, smelling everywhere, listening everywhere" - one can see how deep Teacher Chen's care for the pastoral life was, and how keen his cherishing. He recalled the even earlier pastoral scene:

What was most memorable about the pastoral life of former days was that wasteland was endlessly interspersed among the cultivated fields. The wasteland was left to weeds growing in profusion, shrubs gathering thinly, birds and rats, snakes and rabbits, moths and butterflies and bees and scorpions taking it as home and as a means of feeding and multiplying, cowherds taking it as a place to let out sheep and cattle and a place to play and chase, village men and women taking it as a place to gather firewood and a garden to collect medicinal herbs; gazing there, one could let the eyes roam; listening there, one could let the ears be at ease; taking from it, there was use; leaving it be, there was room. Ample and unconstrained, there was an endless sense of broadness and leisure. It is exactly what Laozi meant by "being gives benefit, non-being gives use." How memorable the pastoral life of former days was! (Chen Guanxue, 1994:12)

Judging by time, the former scenery Teacher Chen recalled should be the scenes he saw and felt in the Pingtung countryside in his youth, before the 1960s. Take the "wasteland" he described as an example: before the 1960s, the pace of industrialization and urbanization had not yet swept across all of Taiwan, and because human and animal plowing power was limited, quite a lot of "wasteland" still coexisted with cultivated fields.

But in the 10 years from 1962 to 1971, the government promoted the "First Ten-Year Farmland Readjustment," using readjustment in each county and city to make farmland more regular and orderly so as to facilitate the entry and exit of farming machinery. This paved the way for the agricultural mechanization that immediately followed, and was at the same time the beginning of Taiwan's countryside bidding farewell to its traditional landscape. When Teacher Chen returned home in 1972, the pastoral land of Pingtung had naturally already changed, and little did he know that another even larger wave of change had already begun.

In 1972, the government began promoting the so-called "Nine Major Measures to Accelerate Rural Construction." Besides software measures such as loosening the conditions for agricultural loans and reforming the agricultural produce marketing system, the "construction" means were even more influential: advocating the establishment of specialized agricultural production zones, encouraging the establishment of factories in rural areas, and strengthening rural public investment, among others.

Left image: The countryside gave farming families blue skies and green fields, with home inside it, and the workplace inside it too. Right image: Farmland readjustment paved the way for agricultural mechanization, and was also the beginning of bidding farewell to the traditional landscape

Even today, Taiwan's agricultural policy still does not depart from the thinking and practices established at that time - viewing agriculture only from the economic side, giving the countryside only hardware construction. Thus, over more than thirty years, compared with the ever faster-growing industry and high-tech sectors, agriculture has never been able to shed the social image of "low output value" and "outdated"; and as for scattered hardware construction, how much effect it has actually had on raising output value remains disputed, but there is no doubt that it has irreparably sacrificed pastoral beauty.

Facing a greatly changed countryside, we have no right to despair; instead, we should all the more actively open our sensory perception and finely appreciate the pastoral beauty that remains. At the same time, we must act and do all we can to stop any construction that destroys pastoral beauty, and stand up again on the land.

Out of consideration for a sustainable environment, we welcome wasteland - not wasteland produced by helpless abandonment or fallowing, but wasteland given the task of caring for the environment, consciously managed on the basis of science and local wisdom. Of course, besides wasteland, the countryside has many more issues of space; this piece is only a beginning, and in the future I will carefully unfold them one by one...

Reference:
Chen Guanxue, 1994, Visiting Grasses, Volume One, Taipei: Sanmin.