"Where is your workshop?"
"Just tell the taxi driver, 'Hou-kang' (literally Rear Harbor), and he will know where to go."
"I can't believe such a coincidence—a man living in a 'harbor' making boats. Are you sure?" "Quite sure," he said.
I decided to check further to see if he was putting me on, because though I have spent two decades in Taipei, I had never before heard of such a place. I summoned a taxi, and told him: "Huo-kang, Shihlin, please," expecting to be cornered when he asked, "Where?" But the cabbie nodded his head, and in 20 minutes, took us to the terminal for Tanan bus service.
There, a huge plastic shed had been erected in a corner of the parking lot, and within, two middle aged, near naked men were tinkering at two huge boats. Nearby, pieces of lumber were scattered in disorder, lying on the muddy earth.
Liu Ching-cheng was squatting at the foot of a mounted dragon boat, dexterously pinching off tung-oil mortar to calk seams between adjoining planks and, also, the small holes left by screws. He is 42, and has spent more than two decades making dragon boats.
"Our family has been in this line ever since the days of my great grandfather. I learned the craft from my father when I was a kid," he said.
The trouble with a father-to-son career is that those involved don't know the scientific basis for each step of their work, though they perform skillfully. For instance, when I asked him how he calculated the slope of the hull, Liu thought real hard and replied: "I calculate with my own eyes and experience."
I decided to leave him at peace. Liu told us that the boats, each 18 meters long and 1.5 meters across, are each equipped with 16 pairs of oars. In other words, a boat is crewed by 32 oarsmen, two of them serving as helmsman and cockswain.
But the boats are not going to participate in any races this year. They are special. "The Chu Yuan Temple, about 15 minutes walking distance from here, ordered them. The temple once stored a pair of dragon boats in a special enclave known as the 'Home of the Dragon Boat.' When in town, fishermen would burn incense to these boats on the 1st and 15th of each month to satiate the spirits until the next dragon boat race. The boats were built during the Ching Dynasty. I was told that a court official of the Ching Dynasty even came to Tamsui and dabbed the paint on the eyes in the boats' dragon heads. These boats did not seriously deteriorate until after they were 80 years old, sometime around V-J Day. This year, the patrons of the temple decided to chip in what money they could to build two new boats in their place," Liu related.
I asked if the new boats could also survive for such a long time. Liu replied honestly: "Impossible. The old boats were made of camphorwood, while these two are made of Chinese juniper. The reason for this is that local camphorwood timbers are too short. Also, most of the trees are reserved to obtain the camphor oil."
Liu said that the cost of the pair of boats was about NT$600,000 (US$4,000). "This year, we have taken four orders for dragon boats-two of them have already been filled. They are now used for crew practice on the Tamsui River. These two boats here are to be delivered on June 12, three days before the Dragon Boat Festival, so we are working from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. It will take us only 20 days to finish constructing these two boats, putting in such long hours.
"I could use helping hands, however, to help carve the dragon head and tail and to paint or help carve the hulls, to speed up the operation," Liu said.
His brother, Liu Ching-yi, is a coach for dragon boat racers. He grabbed a huge oar, jumped aboard one boat, and started to demonstrate to us what a helmsman should do to help steer the way. Kneeling down on his right knee, he raised the oar a bit and started to row in the air, chanting: Ho tsai? Ho tsai? which means "Where? Where?" and refers to Chu Yuan, the Royal Court poet-advisor whom the races reputedly commemorate.
Dragon boat races reputedly began some 2,000 years ago in memory of Chu Yuan, a loyal minister of King Huai (328-299 B.C.), who was slandered by jealous rivals at court. Exiled, he spent the rest of his life wandering in the wilderness, warning the King of his government's imminent downfall, and pouring out his sentiments in verse.
Encountering Sorrow, a poem of nearly 200 couplets, sings of his frustration at his undeserved fate. Finally, Chu Yuan could bear his bitterness no longer; he leapt into the Milo River and drowned on the fifth day of the Fifth Moon.
Nearby fishermen paddled furiously out to save him, but were too late; they could only drop offerings of rice in the river to calm his hungry soul. Later, some say, his spirit appeared to these fishermen to complain that the river dragon was snatching all the rice before he could get it. He asked that the villagers stuff the rice in bamboo tubes to keep it out of the dragon's reach. So, it is said, did the boat races begin.
In Taiwan, simple races were held during the Ching Dynasty. Later the tradition was promoted by the Japanese and became more elaborate. Today, races are held in Kaohsiung, Ilan, Keelung, Tainan, and Taipei.
(A burst of laughter brought me back to the Lius' workshop. One of our staff members was awkwardly trying to recreate the elder Liu's gestures as a steersman.)
The boats are long, low, sleek shells with a dragon's fiery face rising up at the prow, and the beast's tail curling up at the stern. We seem to visualize a giant dragon head bobbing slowly over the river, swinging from side to side, swaying to the music of a drum, gong, and sona trio.
According to the elder Liu, when he receives an order, he travels to Lotung, Chiayi, and Taitung to hunt suitable logs. "Most of the big timber in western Taiwan has been used up. The majority of lumber firms are now located along the eastern coast of the island," Liu said.
The timbers must then be cured, otherwise changes in temperature will result in fissures.
For the Lius, asking for heavenly indication of an auspicious day to start the work is a very important matter. A sacred but simple ceremony must be staged to ask for the gods' protection for the boats, and for a smooth work process. The workers then proceed to cut planks to suitable shapes and thicknesses, putting the boat together from the bottom up.
In fact, constructing" dragon boat is a combination art requiring the coordination of carpentry work, wood carving, oil painting, and marine architecture theory.
Carving the head and tail of the dragon boat is a challenging work. A pair of huge bulging eyes echo the effects of two jumbo nostrils and yawning jaws; tongues stick out and dragon "hairs" fly in the air. The impression of a dragon head is "strong, sharp." The curled up tails are minutely carved to show the scales of the dragon.
We visited the Lius again two days later to see the painters apply the colors to the two boats. One painter was busy carving out the characters for "Chu Yuan Temple loves the village," and "Chu Yuan Temple loves the country," on both sides of the hull, and on the bow spit. Another was busy applying white paint to the hull, the prow, and the dragon tail. Still another was dexterously sketching the dragon's coiling and twisting body riding the tidal waves, along the hull.
With a tacit understanding, two painters picked up huge brushes to paint the bottom of the boats, entirely yellow. The pair of dragon boats are, though, dominated by green and blue hues. The painting of the dragon heads is especially fascinating. The painter boldly applies red, blue, green, and yellow hues on the heads, representative of Chinese traditional temple color motifs. Under the brushes, the dragon was quickly instilled with life and vitality. Their hands were so quick that the painters finished their "drawings" on the boats in a day. Their work will survive for another 25 years, according to the elder Liu.
He further pointed out that some buyers prefer to have the hulls of their boats carved before applying paint, which of course means more time, craft, and expense.
When asked how to best preserve a dragon boat, Liu gave this instruction: "Store them inside a boathouse once you have finished with them following the Dragon Boat Festival, to protect them from wind, rain, and pestering insects. Whenever a small fissure appears, fill it up right away with bark from juniper trees and then put tung-oil mortar on to prevent it from cracking further. And it is best to let the dragon have a new coat of paint every few years. In the past, we used bamboo and wood nails instead of the screws we use today, so they didn't get rusty then. Today on Orchid Island, the aborigines still use wood nails to build their boats, but it takes at least a year, with several families working together, to construct such a boat. It's impossible for us to do so, because the customers always give us such short notice."
We were interested in knowing how a boat with a total weight of about a ton was going to be delivered. Liu smiled and pointed out that in the case of the two new boats, the Chu Yuan Temple would send two "dragon prancing teams" to usher the boats back to the temple. To facilitate this operation, a wheeled chassis will be used to transport the boats.
We decided to pay a third visit to the Lius on the first day of the Fifth Moon to watch the boats being delivered. As the dragon boats rocked through the town, the gaily painted heads were advertising the dragon boat races four days later. It was as if creatures from Chinese mythology had really come to life. Two "people" dragons, ahead of the boats, were prancing and dancing amid exploding firecrackers and onlookers, showing how happy they were to greet their two new nautical companions.
The dragon boats were finally led back to the temple, where a sponsor for the temple officially dabbed paint on the dragons' eyes, completing the ceremony. They are now set on a special altar, displaying the waves painted on their sides. There they will rest, well tended and honored until the following year, when they will again be paraded through the city.
According to the elder Liu, to this point he has built 36 dragon boats, the most impressive being two sent to the Chinese community in Chicago. Liu recalled that when former President C.K. Yen was still Vice President, he paid a visit to the U.S. In recognition of the overseas Chinese devotion to their mother country, he decided to send them two dragon boats as gifts.
Last year, the Chinese community in the Ryukyus sent a team to join in the Taiwan dragon boat races and carried two of the boats back to their homes after the competition, finding them much easier to maneuver than their local boats.
If you ask the elder Liu what is so special about his boats, he will likely only smile abashedly and reply with a show of humbleness: "I don't know. But some people say that my boats are more beautiful and that they run faster." No wonder. With more than 20 years of devoted gardening, the Lius have reaped their due harvest in one of the most venerable of the Chinese folk arts.