A rural community, beset with pollution and
a declining population, decided it was time
to turn things around. The method? A revival
of the ancient art of clog-making, coupled
with more than a dash of artistic inventiveness.
Ti-ti-ta, ta-ta-ti
Give me a small pair of clogs
Childhood beckons summers forsaken
To play a game long forgotten
From one lane to the other
Ti-li-ta-la ta-la-ti-li
-from Wooden Clogs Ensemble: Ti-ti-ta,
(1982), by Yu Kwang-chung
Childhood was the inspiration for this poem, but near the town of Suao in Ilan County, on the northeast coast of Taiwan, it is not so much a remote memory as a vivid description of daily life. Baimi ("white rice") is sandwiched between the Central Range and the Pacific, bisected by a stream. Its official name is Yungchun ("Eternal Spring") Village, about five square kilo-meters in extent and home to approximately a thousand residents. For them, time seems to have stopped half a century ago. Regardless of the latest modish outfits, or even the common conveniences of modern life, they continue to wear wooden clogs, footwear that today's urban youngsters have scarcely heard of. But these clogs are more than an outmoded necessity: they have become canvases on which Baimians can give expression to their creativity.
The thirty or so inhabitants who manufacture clogs part-time bring so much imagination to the painting of their brightly colored footwear that they have managed to completely overturn stereotypical perceptions of clogs as being dull, heavy, and un wieldy. Styles are both concrete and abstract. Subjects range from indigenous flora and fauna, rustic vistas, portraits, and the latest additions to the repertoire of cartoon characters on children's television.
How did all this come about? The area has an interesting history. According to local legend, the first settlers came during the Ching dynasty--the evidence suggests this was probably in about 1820. They worked long and hard, but harvests were meager. Just as they were verging on starvation, a deity took pity on the populace and placed an earthen grain urn at the foot of the nearby mountain. From then on, clean, wholesome grain gushed out of the urn every day, in quantities that were just enough to sustain the village. This continued for some time, until one night greed prompted a villager to try to hoard the grain. He broke the urn, only to find it empty. That was the last the villagers saw of their "free lunch," and thereafter only the name Baimi survived to remind them of nature's bountiful generosity.
Things are very different now. A popular saying in Baimi--"Overflowing grain in days of yore, white sand flying now"--highlights the community's plight. The village is situated in the heart of the nation's largest lime production region, which annually extracts two million tons of a product rich in calcium carbonate that is used in products as disparate as toothpaste and rubber shoes. Here, at one of the largest quarries in East Asia, Taiwan Cement Corp. and some fifteen other companies are responsible for 85 percent of Taiwan's line quarrying industry. This creates a lot of dust, or baisha ("white sand"), which shrouds Baimi in a fog, permeating the air and clouding the water.
In many ways it is a depressing place. Quarrying activities are everywhere, often separated from residential homes by only the width of a narrow road. Monster trucks barrel their way down the only thoroughfare, roiling lime and dust, two hundred times a day. And the white powder coats everything, everyone, sapping their health and spirits. New environmental regulations mandate gradual reductions in particulate output, but as yet there are no signs of improvement in Baimi, scourged by this particularly unpleasant form of industrial pollution.
Lin Jui-mu, head of the Baimi Development Committee, points to the flakes coating the leaves and branches of the trees alongside the road and says that Baimi has the highest rate of dust pollution on the island. Residents, faced with the twin prospects of deteriorating quality of life and a population hemorrhage, decided that something must be done. First they needed a voice, so in 1994 they formed the Baimi Development Committee. The members began by cleaning up their homes and the immediate vicinity, including the foliage of the neighborhood's trees and the ground itself. Nothing daunted, they continually swept the streets and unblocked the drains, trying to shame the quarry owners into taking action.
Then somebody had a brain wave. Community self-determination was all very well, but it needed a symbol of some kind. The traditional wooden clog, sturdy and hard-wearing, was the ideal solution. During the Japanese occupation and for at least a decade after that, clogs were necessities of life. Only the inexorable march of modernization, coupled with dwindling raw materials, put an end to the area's once thriving clog industry. Might it not be revived as part of the artistic, cultural, and historical heritage of Baimi?
At the 1996 Ilan County Fair, a delegation of Baimi residents set up a stall where they encouraged people to express their creative ideas by painting wooden clogs. The packaging of these clogs in novelty gift boxes attracted the attention of the county government, which ordered a few pairs to give to its distinguished foreign visitors. Buoyed by their success, the committee ran another stall at the 1997 Ilan Community Exhibition, where they won kudos for the best product manufactured by a community -based industry.
Suddenly clogs were "in." Some of the local lime companies let the villagers use their empty buildings rent-free, as a kind of compensation for making so much mess. Baimi at once put them to good use: 1998 saw the completion of a classroom where the younger generation could learn how to make clogs, an exhibition center, the Wooden Clog Quarterly (a community magazine), a management learning center, and the Community Cooperative Association.
The community's only thoroughfare is now a monument to the industry, with virtually every house displaying colorful decorations. Through the concerted efforts of understanding government officials, artisans, and ordinary inhabitants, Baimi has become the epitome of an artisans' community, one that specializes in wooden footwear. The cottage industry brings in about NT$200,000 (US$6,250) a year, all earned from sales to tourists.
A well-organized financial network supports these endeavors. Government subsidies, although covering a significant part of the cost, are not the whole story. Any Baimi resident is free to invest in the Community Cooperative Association, with voting rights reserved to those who purchase thirty or more shares. The association has a proper constitution, with an elected chairperson and a manager. The intention is to foster a sense of identity with the clog industry in the populace at large, thus forging the community into a close-knit financial entity.
The association also organizes voluntary service teams to help the elderly and sick, and look after children while their parents are at work. The women have devised a clog dance, which they perform at the community activity center on holidays. Parents are encouraged to bring their children to learn how to make clogs and paint them. Even some of the paths around the community are paved with tiles designed and made by the villagers, each design representing the creative effort of a single household.
In one sense, Baimi is well situated to benefit from Taiwan's developing domestic tourist industry, with ready access to major highways and proximity to the northern east-west railroad. The area, surrounded on three sides by rugged mountainous terrain, is rich in natural and cultural resources, including a defensive underground tunnel and cannon platform constructed by Ching-dynasty soldiers toward the end of the nineteenth century, and a military burial ground. Unfortunately, however, the area's serious pollution problems have prevented the residents from capitalizing on their natural assets.
Everybody knows that it will be impossible to recapture the prosperity of the old days--the co-called "golden era" of clog -making. During the Japanese occupation, Baimi was already producing clogs in sufficient quantities to export to Taipei and other areas of Taiwan. It was able to sustain this output because the soil in the area was just right for the Jiangmo tree, Scheffera octophylla, which produces an extremely hard wood, eminently suitable for manufacturing clogs.
Five decades ago, it was the Jiangmo tree that lured two craftsmen, Chen Hsin-hsiung, 63, and Li Chien-chi, 70, to Baimi. They came as apprentices to learn the trade of making wooden clogs, and have remained lifelong friends and professional partners ever since. "A clog is easy to make, but it's not so simple to make a good one," Chen says. Although a single sharp tool is sufficient to do most of the work, it is an unwieldy implement and it takes a lot of hard work and practice to learn how to use it properly. Their apprenticeship took three years and four months to complete. After that, they knew "the basics."
Now it takes each man just fifteen minutes to make a pair of clogs. The entire process can be completed in a single, uninterrupted series of actions--splitting a piece of wood in half, shaving the edges into perfectly symmetrical curves, replacing the ax on the work table, sweeping up the polisher, and finally nailing in the strap. Only a high-speed camera could hope to capture every detail of the work. "All that hard work I did as an apprentice paid off in the end," Chen Hsin-hsiung says. "In the golden era, I was making a hundred pairs of clogs a day, and the orders still kept flooding in. We were known far and wide as 'the clog twins.'"
Chen has made more clogs than he could possibly count. He has fond memories of the old days, when wooden shoes were a necessity and a good pair of clogs would cost an average family several days' wages. People would only reluctantly part with them after they wore out. New pairs were considered so precious that many residents preferred to go barefoot or wear grass sandals while working, saving their best clogs for Lunar New Year festivities or going into town.
While the Japanese occupied Taiwan, clogs were the most common kind of footwear in rural communities, and almost every one wore clogs at some time or another, whether they lived in the country or the city. Clogs were an important part of a woman's dowry. It was considered common courtesy to wear clogs when visiting neighbors, because the "ti-ti-ta" sound they made told you that someone was coming to the front door. The rhythmic noise was as distinctive as the person wearing the clogs. When the newly arrived Nationalists banned the wearing of clogs in public facilities, because they were too pointed a reminder of the Japanese heritage, they were still worn at home.
The end came with the rise of the petroleum industry and the consequent availability of cheap plastic shoes, which tolled the death knell for the wooden clog industry. Although Baimi's master craftsmen defended the use of Jiangmo wood as the most suitable material for footwear--its dryness, lack of toxicity, resistance to damage, and even medicinal ability to inhibit foot fungus--low-cost petroleum-based plastic proved too much for them. Chen Hsin-hsiung took to making wooden chopping blocks, and Li Chien-chi got a job in the local lime industry. Baimi's former wooden-clog heyday survives only in the minds of the older villagers.
Some of them think that the recent revival of the old traditions will do nothing to counter the deteriorating environment, pointing out that dust falls on clogs and leather shoes indiscriminately. Lin Jui-mu, however, thinks otherwise. "Restoring the tradition has united the people here, giving them a common identity and a shared lifestyle," he says. "It's helped us stand back from our problems and see them more clearly." The golden era will not return, but as long as Baimi's newfound community spirit continues to thrive, there is hope for the village.
Anita Huang and Kant Chang are freelance writers based in Taipei.
Copyright (c) 2001 by Anita Huang and Kant Chang.