The Matsu islands offer both an escape from the push-and-shove of mainland Taiwan and a reminder of political realities.
The guesthouse had a port-hole-sized, creaky window made of wooden slats that pulled inwards, making it possible to peer out over the bay, with its small island, and decide whether the weather conditions merited venturing any further. They did. It was one of those limpid summer mornings, the heat of the day still in retreat, in which the sky seems to languish like an invalid on a viscous sea. The terracotta roofs of a picture-postcard Hokkien fishing village fell away to the sea's edge, and if you leaned forward, as I did, you could see the downstairs verandah, complete with two soldiers in combat ready fatigues, their M16s pointed at the distant shores of mainland China.
After a day on Matsu, one of Taiwan's far-flung outposts, little more than a stone's throw from Chinese shores, you learn to take the soldiers, as other surprises, in your stride. On the drive from the airport the previous day, the three giggling college graduates I shared a minivan with exclaimed with glee, as we turned a corner, "Look! Tanks!" with much the same enthusiasm they might have had had we been on safari in deepest Africa and had stumbled upon a herd of rhinos or a pride of lions.
For Taiwanese tourists--the Matsu chain has been promoting itself as a tourist destination since the late 1990s--the military presence on the tiny archipelago nestled in the Min River estuary, is something of an exotic treat. For foreign visitors, it is more likely to remind them that China has never relinquished military force as a last resort to assert its claims on Taiwan and its outer islands. Either way, you remember that, while it is easy to forget tensions between China and Taiwan, not that long ago--in 1954 and 1958--Matsu was being pounded regularly with shells from China, though not as heavily as Kinmen to the south, where it is still possible to find the deserted shells of bombed-out villages.
Reminders of conflict are never far away. Close to the airport on Nankan, the island chain's administrative--and, it is sometimes said, cultural--hub, Chinese characters on a cliff face overlooking the sea, proclaim "Sleep with a Gun under Your Pillow." The locals laugh this off as a slogan from another era, but on the island of Beikan--the more touristically attractive of the two main islands--as I pause to snap pictures of an antique fishing village, a soldier appears at my side and coughs apologetically. "A lot of people photograph that village, but today we're having military exercises, so perhaps ," he trails off.
I start to protest, but then I see the pained expression on his face and realize that he would rather let me be, that he is just a man doing his job. And, like that, I also realize that while Matsu is an island that is effectively a military boot camp, part of its charm is in the fact that the soldiers here are just men doing their jobs, praying that they never have to do the ultimate job that they are here for.
There are 19 Matsu islands, but for the average visitor there are three: Nankan, home to the county government, rustic Beikan, which is renowned for its picturesque fishing villages, and Dongyin, a remote, windswept island with a century-old, British-built lighthouse and some impressive underground fortifications. While development of the islands has mostly taken place since the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan in 1949, the three main islands--the rest are mostly uninhabited--have probably been home to fisherfolk for centuries. Indeed, the islands' name comes from the goddess of the same name, who legend has it was a young woman of great virtue and filial piety and who died while trying to save her shipwrecked father during the Sung Dynasty. Her remains are said to have been buried on Nankan, and her reputation grew such that she became the patron goddess of those who put to sea and by extension of all Taiwan, which celebrates her birthday on the 23rd day of the third lunar month every year.
Oddly though, Matsu has none of the trappings of a pilgrimage destination. The temples scattered around the islands are modest affairs maintained by the small communities that worship in them. For Taiwanese, who live on one of the most densely populated islands in the world, the attraction is Matsu's isolation, its open spaces, and on a clear day the sight of the hazy green hills of China marching away into the distance.
For Chen Hsueh-sheng, the head of the Lienchiang County Government, the isolation, empty spaces, and China, how ever, number among a host of problems facing the frontline islands he administers. The military is coy about providing exact numbers of troops on the islands, but it is thought that they have been halved since a high of around 40,000 in the 1970s, which has hurt the local economy and led to a corresponding drop in the residential population of the islands--down from around 17,000 in the 1970s to around 9,000 today. Meanwhile, being little more than "wading distance from China," as Chen jokingly puts it, is a problem in itself--bestowing Chen's administration with illegal trading and fishing in Matsu waters by Chinese fishermen and a massive garbage problem courtesy of the Min River and China's economic miracle. The fishing--some of it using dynamite--has emptied the Matsu's waters, which once teemed with fish, say locals, while the garbage from China is growing increasingly difficult to manage. According to recent reports, much of it is biodegradable and harmless, but as much as 30 percent of it is less savory--dead animals, discarded medical equipment, clothes, plastics, and worse--forcing some villages to string up nets outside their beaches and docking areas.
Another complaint is the so-called mini-three links, which were inaugurated in January 2001, and which promised to bring prosperity to Kinmen and Matsu by allowing direct trade, mail, and shipping links with China. The links, not to put too fine a point on it, have been disappointing. China, says Chen, has been uncooperative, and requests for meetings with mainland officials have been ignored.
"We want China to allow tourists to come over here, but China won't allow it," says Chen.
At Nankan's port area, on a typical Tuesday afternoon a dozen or so passengers sit and wait to check in for a ferry service to Mawei, a port close to Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province. A young woman who gives only her surname, Hsu, says she is from Fujian and has been living in Taiwan for three years since she married a Taiwanese man. The other passengers are Taiwanese, but their number is dismally low considering that as many as a million, or perhaps more, Taiwanese regularly travel to China on business or live there.
As for the Chinese visitors that Chen says his islands are waiting for, the only ones are those in a detention center on the island of Nankan. The detention center houses illegal mainland Chinese immigrants divided into camps for women and for men, and all of them have been transferred from similar camps in northern Taiwan's Hsinchu and in Ilan, in northeastern Taiwan. In normal times, the Nankan detention center is used for cases that are due to be shipped back to China, but these are not normal times, the guards say, and China has put its repatriation program on hold since the March 20 presidential elections. There are 204 of them in all, and nobody knows when they will be able to go home.
I was fortunate to be escorted around the islands of Matsu, which gave me the opportunity to visit the detention camp, clamber aboard the mainland China ferry, and visit the popular Matsu Winery on Nankan where the island's famous kaoliang liquor is distilled from sorghum. But the highlight of the trip was a journey in a military transport across choppy seas to the most distant of Matsu's islands, Dongyin. Like Kinmen and some of the other Matsu islands, it is a warren of underground fortifications--dank tunnels in which every sound ricochets off the walls, and which make you long, as soon as you have descended into them, to head back into the sunlight above ground.
Above ground Dongyin is probably the most stunning of Taiwan's outlying islands. Both Penghu--formerly the Pescadores--and Kinmnen to the south, are flat and relatively featureless, but Dongyin has rolling hills and dramatic cliffs that tumble into craggy bays. The itinerary I had joined was taking us to a lighthouse designed by British engineers and which was, by way of rather dubious calculations, celebrating its centennial birthday that very day. The winding path up to the summit of the hill where the lighthouse had its home was packed with a shuffling procession of Matsu inhabitants, all speaking their indecipherable "ping" dialect, which is related to the dialect spoken in neighboring Fuzhou. It was a surreal occasion- -centennial lighthouse birthdays being something of a rarity--and made more so by the imaginative translations of Chinese poems carved into rocks along the way: "Voice of the wind, billow, and tides tingle at the tip of ears," was one of the more memorable.
And then, at the crest of a steep stretch of hill and around a bend in the path was a saxophonist playing KennyG-like arpeggios. None of us had expected him, to be sure, but we had a lighthouse birthday to celebrate and this was a far-flung corner of Matsu, which somehow makes the unexpected acceptable. There was a cake, which somebody duly sliced up, and others passed around the crowd. The saxophonist broke into "Happy Birthday" and we all sang along in Chinese. At about this time, cake in my mouth, singing "Happy Birthday," I noticed there was a plaque commemorating the founding of the lighthouse in 1902, which meant we had it wrong by two years. I pointed this out to the people standing around me, and they nodded and smiled and went on singing. I joined them.