Wielding their hammers and years of tradition, the Lin Wu
Ironworks produces gongs that not only represent the voice
of the gods in traditional festivals but that have also found
a place in the world of modern music.
With a bang to the central naval, the great gong of Peikang's Matsu Temple emits a deep, thunderous sound. The reverberations spread out like ripples in a pond--the sound slowly building, then crashing in waves. Some believe this is the voice of Matsu, goddess of the sea and protector of seafarers. Others deny Matsu a monopoly on the unearthly sound and call it simply the "thunder of the gods."
It is unknown when craftsmen first started fashioning these giant pan-shaped instruments. But the deep, reverberating bass that gongs produce is the heart of the age-old pei-kuan music--a popular musical form introduced to Taiwan from mainland China during the Ching Dynasty (1644-1911). Pei-kuan music appeared at traditional operas, temple celebrations, and public ceremonies and festivals. The gong provided the rhythm for the accompanying cymbals, horns, drums, and stringed instruments. Because it accompanied festivals and imperial pageants, pei-kuan was often music on the move, and the deep, steady voice of the gong carried the marchers forward or warned commoners to clear a path for an official procession to pass.
To create the "thunder of the gods," craftsmen labored with their hammers--forging gongs from iron and bronze. Today, the traditional methods for making gongs are preserved by the master craftsmen of the Lin Wu Ironworks, a family business in north eastern Taiwan's Ilan City. It was this workshop that was commissioned to create the processional gong for the Matsu Temple in Peikang, and when the final product was delivered in 1985, the gong was the largest in the world, measuring 182 centimeters in diameter and weighing 160 kilograms. It was the pride of Lin Wu, founder of the workshop and patriarch of the Lin family. Seven years after the Peikang gong was delivered, Lin Wu's sons and grandsons outdid him by hammering out an even larger gong--238 centimeter in diameter and 400 kilograms in weight--dedicated to the same goddess but for a different temple. It took eight people an entire month to complete the gong for Lukang township's Tienhou Temple.
When it was finished, the massive gong had the deep rumble of a basso profundo. "The larger the size, the lower the pitch becomes," explains Lin Lieh-chi, Lin Wu's sixth son, who is now in charge of the business. "The size and volume of a gong becomes relevant to the pride of a temple, especially on such occasions as concurrent celebrations, when the encounters of parade troupes from different temples in the streets often provoke a competitive mood." Currently, temples constitute the principal clientele for the gong-making business. In addition to receiving orders from temples, gong makers often take assignments from pious individuals to produce gift pieces for the temples. It is believed that the Lin workshop supplies about 85 percent of the market demand for gongs.
"We look for gongs that produce superior acoustics, loud enough to spread far, and with better duration of reverberation," says Lin Ken-teng, chief administrator of both the Nan-kuan and Pei-kuan Research Fellowship and the Tsantien Temple in Linkou township, Taipei County. "That's what the Lin workshop's craftsmanship is famed for. I've been dealing with the family for more than seventy years. The Tsantien Temple has bought six pieces from them, including the two I'm reserving for contingent use." Gongs that the Lin Wu Ironworks produces are made of bronze, which gathers rust less easily than iron and thus enjoys better sound quality and longevity. Maintenance is still necessary, however, because rust accumulates over time and begins to distort the sound quality of the instrument--not to mention that gongs may crack from being dropped during use.
Although they still produce traditional gongs, the Lin family has also created more finely tuned instruments, which offer contemporary musicians a more precise percussion instrument than the traditional gong. It is now possible to purchase gongs tuned to carrying a specific note, and only one place on the island is able to take the order. The Lin Wu Ironworks can vary the size of gongs to produce twenty-six musical notes, or two sets of the thirteen piano keys in an octave. Every tuned gong made by the Lin family is forged from thousands of blows of hand-held hammers up to twenty kilograms in weight. The first set of thirteen-note, handmade gongs was played as accompaniment for a performance of the U Theatre, a Taiwanese performance group, in 1998 at the Festival d'Avignon in France. The same year, notable Canadian musician Matthew Lien visited the Lin workshop on his second trip to Taiwan to record gongs as a sound element for his next release.
Normally, the boom season for the business lasts from the tenth to the third months on the lunar calendar--roughly November to April--when more temple celebrations take place. The Lin workshop might be commissioned to produce five or six pieces a month during this period, as opposed to making one piece a month during the slow season. In recent years, orders from artists and perform ers, particularly performance groups associated with traditional arts, have been increasing. For instance, the Lan Yang Dancers, a famous traditional-dance troupe founded in 1966 and based in Ilan County, commissioned the Lin workshop last year to produce twelve finely tuned gongs. To bring out a uniform sound quality and high-proximity notes, Lin Lieh-chi and his brothers and nephews produced nearly a hundred pieces to get the final dozen that were tuned to 99-percent exactitude.
"The simple structure of our product often amazes people who are curious as to what alters the acoustics it produces," says Lin Lieh-hui, the second eldest sibling in the family. "It's the shape that varies the audio effects." The production process starts with selecting suitable materials. Just a brief mention of the hunt for quality metals to produce gongs prompts Lin to recount the story of how his father got his start. Lin Wu was born in 1916 to a family dealing in bamboo-made products in Lotung township, Ilan County. He helped supplement the family's income by working as a delivery boy for a local noodle eatery. Taking advice from a relative, he gave up the delivery job and became an apprentice in a local ironworks with his mind made up that he would one day start his own business. The day when Lin Wu and his two brothers opened their own ironworks business arrived within a few years.
The ironworks kept the brothers from being drafted into military service under the Japanese colonial government, which was waging war throughout Asia. Instead of serving as soldiers, they worked maintenance duty for the Japanese army. As the colonial government pushed forward a policy of discouraging the development of domestic culture in Taiwan, many artistic groups were forced to halt productions and disband. As a result, pieces of performance equipment were sold cheaply and in large quantities. Among the instruments that wound up at the ironworks were two small iron gongs made in China. To Lin Wu, these gongs were more than mere curiosities; they were models to be studied.
After the end of Japanese rule in 1945, Lin Wu started creating his earliest gongs. Following a carefully planned routine of clipping, molding, and hammering the selected iron piece, his first gong surpassed the models in sound quality. Encouraged by the results, which also began to bring in orders, Lin Wu started his own ironworks with his brothers' support and further researched gong-making techniques. The iron gongs he made produced sounds of satisfactory volume, but they were unable to render the deep, durable, consistent, and far-reaching sound that Lin desired.
To get a deeper sound, Lin wanted to experiment with bronze, but new or good-quality bronze sheets were almost impossible to find during the postwar period. It was not until the island's ports were reopened to trade that Lin finally purchased batches of unused bronze sheets. He was able to produce a few bronze gongs that sold for large sums. But for technical reasons, Lin Wu's production at this point was restricted to two sizes--60.5 centimeters and 72.7 centimeters in diameter. The toughest challenge was to enlarge the diameter of the gong without sacrificing the sound quality. That breakthrough finally came about when two Javanese gongs arrived at Lin's workshop for maintenance.
Lin Wu polished, re-soldered, and tuned the pieces, only to encounter the exact acoustics he had been endeavoring to achieve. He offered free service and a rental fee to keep the pieces for a month-long study. Thereafter, size was no obstacle. Lin Wu and his sons produced larger and larger gongs and established the family as masters of their trade. In 1987, Lin Wu's gong-making skill won him the Folk Art Heritage Award, an annual recognition of outstanding folk art masters established in 1985. Two years later, Lin Wu passed away, but his skills continue to live on in the hands of his sons.
Today, the sons follow the gong-making process Lin Wu developed by trial and error. They use a compass to define on a fine sheet of bronze the spherical surface and the border piece that are cut into two separate pieces. The center of the surface sheet is then hammered into a protruding navel, and the rest of it is banged into the desired shape. The border piece, or rim, is cut and hammered so that, when soldered onto the edge of the surface, it forms a tapered skirt. That sloping angle enables the gong to produce deep reverberations. The joint is then polished and smoothed. The process ends with tuning the gong and bringing out the most suitable note for the size. This final step relies entirely on the maker's ear and years of experience.
Along with his techniques, the older Lin also seems to have passed on to his sons perseverance and an innovative spirit. One of the sons, Lin Lieh-chi, has transformed gongs into a more controllable musical instrument. Following in his father's footsteps, Lin Lieh-chi also won the Folk Art Heritage Award with the prestigious title of folk art master in 1995. And although producing machinery has long replaced the making of gongs as the mainstay of the family business, the sons persevere for other reasons. "Gong-making these days is definitely not as lucrative as in the past," says Lin Lieh-chung, the fourth son in the family, who now spends more time working as an instrumentalist. "But we're still making gongs to carry on the tradition and preserve my father's skill as our family heritage."
The director of Ilan City Library, Chen Jun-ren, believes that the Lin family is preserving not just a family tradition but also a piece of communal history. "The local governments have been inviting the Lin workshop to participate in various cultural activities," he points out. "The increased publicity could help to assure these craftsmen that they're much respected and prized. The Lin work shop's hard work has accomplished more than just preserving family honor--it is maintaining a precious cultural asset for the people." And the people seem to be responding. The workshop itself has recently become a popular tourist spot.
Over the decades, the Lin family has accumulated more than 100 gongs in different sizes, which, along with Lin Lieh-chi's gongs that produce sets of thirteen, fifteen, or twenty-six musical notes, have been demonstrated on numerous occasions. Some recent events that have featured gongs from the Lin Wu Ironworks are the water-lantern festival, which usually takes place in August, as well as exhibitions held by the National Center of Traditional Arts, and the popular Ilan International Children's Folklore and Folkgame Festival, held annually by the county government on July 1 and lasting for more than forty days. The Lin Wu gongs have also appeared in Dragon Tango, a concert given by Canadian performers Amanta Scott and David Tomlinson in April last year.
Perhaps Lin Wu would have been surprised at what an institution his family business has grown into. His own interest in those two abandoned Chinese gongs has infected two generations of his family, who are still perfecting the family instrument. Perhaps he would also be surprised by what has become of his craft--a seemingly paradoxical status of diminishing profitability and increasing cultural value. Gong-making today has become one of the old crafts to which few young people would devote themselves. But the Lin family keeps on. "Our father's craft will stay in this family," the brothers say with one voice. "Our boys have been trained to carry it on." To see the famous ironworks, visitors to Ilan City need only a few words for directions--the Lin Wu Ironworks, please.