Over his long career, Lin Chih-mu has built more than
half of the suspension bridges in Taiwan. In his hands,
steel wires seemed to become as soft as yarn. After
braiding "steel rainbows" for work, he would spend his
leisure hours weaving steel wires into household utensils.
In mountainous Taiwan, light-weight suspension bridges were commonly used to span the valleys and provide connections to upland villages. Whenever the subject of the construction of those bridges arises, the name of Lin Chih-mu is sure to be mentioned. Over the fifty years that Lin devoted to his profession, he designed and supervised the building of some 200 suspension bridges that arch like rainbows over rivers and across gorges and ravines. It never occurred to Lin to engrave his name on even a few of his works. But without any self-promotion, Lin nevertheless left his mark, earning the appellation of "Master of Taiwan's Suspension Bridges." Until bedridden by a stroke in April 1999, he had also left his footprints all around the island, wherever a low-budget bridge was needed. It is estimated that more than half of Taiwan's suspension bridges are his creation.
Lin was born in 1930 into a poor rural family in Nantou County in central Taiwan. His mother died when he was only three years old, and although his daily life was loaded with heavy chores on the farm, Lin managed to do well in school. He even stood out enough among his classmates to pass the entrance exam for the Osaka Senior High School in Japan. But he had to forsake this opportunity for financial reasons as well as the inauspicious timing--Japan, the colonial power then occupying Taiwan, was nearing defeat in the Second World War. The teenager then turned his attention to acquiring skills in the construction business that would enable him to earn a livelihood, and in 1948 he apprenticed himself to Huang Shih-ying and Lin Wan-ke, master contractors of suspension bridges. From that point on, Lin began to live like a gypsy, moving continually from one construction spot to the next. He fulfilled the apprenticeship in two years and then established his own business as a contractor. His clients ranged from government agencies and enterprises, such as the Taiwan Forestry Bureau and the Taiwan Power Co., to private landowners and mountain villages.
Each project typically started with a thorough investigation of the geological formation of the chosen location. Out in the wild, without the modern transportation equipment and technical instruments that engineers today take for granted, conducting this kind of on-the-spot survey was invariably arduous, dangerous, and time-consuming. The ideal sites for erecting the main bases of the bridge were the two points that formed the shortest span but also provided solid-enough ground to sustain the tension imposed by the taut wires and the load the bridge was expected to carry. Once the proper locations were determined, Lin Chih-mu would prepare the blueprint for the bridge according to the required specifications and the amount of budget. The detailed design involved calculating the length and breadth of the bridge, the thickness of the wire, the size and type of the steel structures, the number and dimensions of the supporting piers, and the potential impact on the river flow if it became necessary to add extra abutments in the riverbed.
Without academic training in engineering, Lin relied on his practical experience to handle the planning and design work. "I have no idea how he managed it with his limited background in mathematics," says Lin Chin-tien, Lin Chih-mu's eldest son and vice director of the Historical Research Commission of Taiwan Province. "All I know is that my father's experience taught him just about everything. For instance, the vertical wires that form the flank should be so aligned that the intervals along the main curves appear to be even and therefore pleasing to the eye. He did the calculation without the help of any modern device." Out of great admiration for his father's devotion to his work and his contribution to Taiwan's development, about a decade ago Lin Chin-tien launched a momentous research project--recording the history of his father's career.
The son began by interviewing his father and by following the work crew as it moved about the island. The experience was like reliving his childhood, since in the early years when the elder Lin was just starting out in business, he took his wife and children along from project to project. "We spent our childhood drifting from one temporary shack to another," Lin Chin-tien recalls. "Sometimes we stayed at a nearby bomb shelter to save the money and labor needed to build a shack. Often the construction site was so remote that we'd have to draw drinking water from the river and use alum to purify the water when it looked murky. We kids helped to pick wild edible greens for food. Life was rough, but we were happy. The first time I learned to write my name and Arabic numerals wasn't on a piece of paper in a classroom. My father taught me with a stick on sandy ground. Even writing that way, his handwriting was excellent."
Lin Chin-tien reported to school for first grade a year late--after his father had finally put an end to the children's nomadic existence to secure their education. The youngsters were left in Nantou in the care of their grandmother while their parents went on with their life of roaming. "When we were kids, our parents came home to us between jobs and without fail during the Chinese New Year holidays," Lin Chin-tien recalls. "The situation reversed when we became adults. We would spend the New Year at their construction site, however far away it might be. It remained a family tradition until my father fell ill."
As he gained a close-up view of his father's work through a grownup's eyes by means of his field study, Lin Chin-tien came to appreciate the hardship that the bridge-building crews endured. He now regrets that as a young man his dislike for gambling had caused him to be too harsh in judging the crew members for killing time playing mahjong. "Their job demanded a high degree of concentration even for the most skillful workers," he explains. "After a long day of risking their lives on the wire ropes rain or shine, and with no TV or other recreational opportunities available, what could be more relaxing than playing mahjong?" But Lin Chih-mu had his own favorite leisure pastime--using leftover number-eight steel wires to weave household objects such as baskets, clotheshorses, and basin stands for his family to use. He often said that he had spent so much time working with wire on the job that it became "tame and supple" in his hands. In his old age, he had accepted his son's suggestion to make miniature suspension bridges as a hobby, but the stroke intervened before he could get started.
In the process of conducting his research, Lin Chin-tien became well-versed in the bridge-building process. He notes that the process of mounting the two main wire ropes was the riskiest part of the job. A strong swimmer would have to pull the cables across the river, and then a windlass would be used to help hoist them for hooking to the top of the piers. If the wire ropes slipped off and hit the workers during this procedure, it could cause serious--even fatal--injuries to the victims. (Lin lost three of his favorite apprentices in such accidents.) Once the main cables were set in place, skilled workers would team up in twos, balance themselves in a seated position on a plank set across the main wire ropes, and then--in a high-wire act without an audience--push themselves along the cables to attach the vertical wires one by one.
To pray for the job to go smoothly and safely, before groundbreaking and again before the main ropes were mounted, Lin Chih-mu and his crew would burn incense and present offerings of meat, fish, and fruit to worship the gods that govern the mountains, the water, and the earth. The same ritual was repeated when the project was completed. If the commission had come collectively from a village, on the day of completion the villagers would hold a similar ritual, after which the two oldest people in the community would lead the villagers in walking across the new bridge--as a symbol of the bridge's expected longevity. There were also certain taboos that workers had to bear in mind during the construction period. These included whistling on the unfinished bridge, treading on it with slippers or clogs, and allowing pregnant women onto it.
With his construction skills, Lin Chih-mu helped to change the way of life in many isolated mountain areas, making it easier for villagers to transport their crops to market, receive medical attention, and engage in regular contact with the outside world. His persistent hard work also provided job opportunities for his crew members, enabling them to support their families. Out of a feeling of responsibility for his team and their families, Lin never considered retiring from bridge-building. "He had chances to make more money from housing construction, but he refused to put his workers, trained in bridge-making techniques, out of a job," Lin Chin-tien says. The crew for years included nearly forty people, most of whom would hire themselves out as farm workers while they waited for the next assignment. But in later years, as concrete bridges gradually replaced suspension bridges in popularity, the size of the crew was reduced to less than twenty.
During the first year that Lin Chih-mu was hospitalized after his stroke, he was conscious and ready to offer his assistance and advice to anyone wanting to build a suspension bridge. Later, after suffering two additional seizures, he gradually lost the ability to communicate, but by then his son had put down his words for him. Lin Chin-tien's intention to act as his father's biographer eventually grew into the documentation of Taiwan's suspension-bridge construction as a whole. The book, entitled Taiwan's Suspension Bridges, was first published in 1993 and it remains the only study of the subject. Historical records cited in the book show that when the Japanese occupiers left Taiwan in 1945, about nineteen steel-wired suspension bridges were in place. The decade of the 1950s brought a building boom that increased the number on record to ninety, though many bridges hidden deep in the mountains were not documented.
In the past few decades, however, numerous suspension bridges have been torn down to make way for wider and sturdier structures that could carry heavier motor vehicles. Artist Lee Ku-mo was among those who opposed what they regarded as that misplaced notion of "progress." In vain, he organized demonstrations in 1984 to protest the Nantou County Government's plan to replace the Shihcho suspension bridge with a concrete version. Lee still talks passionately about a subject that is close to his heart, describing how "the curves of a suspension bridge blend so beautifully with the cascading green mountains and meandering white streams."
But just as modernization made the old suspension bridges obsolete as fixtures of the economic infrastructure, economic development also brought a new set of social values--one that stressed protecting natural beauty and improving the quality of life through more attention to leisure, recreation, and tourism. In time, a new market emerged for suspension bridges--as features of mountain resorts and other scenic areas. One of Lin Chih-mu's crew members who stayed in the bridge-building business, at first surviving mainly from commissions for maintenance work on old structures, gradually also began receiving orders for new bridges to be used as tourist attractions.
A 1991 survey lists a total of 295 suspension bridges in twenty counties and cities, including those built for sightseeing purposes. Mountainous Nantou County, where the Lin family hailed from, scores first in number with its fifty-eight "manmade rainbows." Lin Chin-tien hopes that his book will lead Taiwan's county governments to appreciate the bridges and refrain from replacing them with lifeless concrete. The 360-meter-long Double Tenth Bridge in Nantou County, for instance, is an old one built by Lin Chih-mu in 1949 and reconstructed around 1967, but it regularly attracts a stream of domestic tourists. "My father's profession has become one of those sunset businesses," Lin Chin-tien says with a sigh. "Few young men these days would be willing to enter such a risky field. Had I not written the history of my father's career, his skills would be completely unknown by now."
Lin Chin-tien likes to refer to his father's kindness and perseverance as the "intangible legacy" that the elder Lin has handed down. This braider of rainbows may no longer be active in his chosen profession, but the bridges he built stand as a testament to his mastery of the craft. They are a tangible legacy shared by all people on Taiwan.