Taiwan Today

Tock, tock, tock—the sound of a mallet on hollow wood mingles with clouds of incense engulfing a line of chanting monks. Sutras and sounds keep pace with each other, the combined tone peaceful and meditative, even hypnotic.

The measured staccato sound so fa­miliar to temple crowds resonates from .he belly of a "wooden fish" (mu-yu), an oval wooden drum shaped like a rounded cowrie shell with a wide, slim mouth at one end. Opposite the mouth is the source of the instrument's name: a broad handle intricately carved in the shape of a fish.

A monk steadily beats the top of the instrument's wide body with a rubber mallet, punctuating the verses intoned by his fellow worshippers. The wooden fish is two-feet wide, with a red body and a black handle highlighted with gold paint, a typical design. While the propor­tions of most wooden fish are pretty much the same, they can range in size from small hand-held toys to giant temple instruments many feet in diameter.

The origin of the wooden fish is rooted in legend. A long time ago, the story goes, a Buddhist monk broke his vows and was punished in his next incarnation by being born as a fish with a tree growing from its back. The burden was made even more punishing by the wind, for the tree would sway back and forth, inflicting unbearable pain and bleeding. Stormy weather made the reincarnated monk's life a time of excruciating torture.

One windy day, the monk's former master was walking along the seashore and witnessed his wayward disciple's profound suffering. The old monk took pity on him and decided to recite a set of ritual prayers that would free his former disciple from his painful destiny. The old master succeeded, and when the sorely burdened fish died, the chastened disciple was reincarnated in a happier existence. The old master carved the now- lifeless tree into the shape of a fish, which he hung on the temple wall as an object lesson to other monks who might consider breaking their solemn Buddhist vows.

Another version of the instrument's origin is less picturesque. It says that the fish design was selected for worship services because the fish never closes its eyes and is ever watchful. Buddhists believe that worshippers will be more attentive if the rhythm of a religious service is punctuated by beating a watchful wooden fish.

Eventually the instrument took on secular functions as well. Musicians arranged wooden fish with different pitches in a two-tiered frame and played them like a xylophone. Small wooden fish also became popular as children's toys, household ornaments, and even bobs for key chains. Recently one craftsman in Taiwan has started carving oversized wooden fish for successful temples that wish to display them as an attraction for worshippers and tourists alike.

Chen Ching-chuan is the master carver of these giant wooden fish. His home' and shop is in Tunghsiao, Miaoli County, a town in northern Taiwan well known for its woodcarvers. While Chen was still a teenager, he began helping his carpenter father with woodworking chores. Later, he attended a vocational school in Taichung, central Taiwan, where he spent two years con­centrating on furniture production and design. A few years after his graduation, Chen took charge of the family business and expanded it into a furniture factory. Although well-made wooden furniture is very much in vogue today, 20 years ago it was regarded as old-fashioned and too expensive. Adapting to the market, he took special orders for other sorts of woodcarving, many of them with religious functions.

Traditionally, woodcarvings have been used for Chinese shrines, images of household gods, ancestral tablets, palanquins for carrying the gods, and wooden fish. Miaoli County is known for its large number of Buddhist and Taoist temples, and there has always been a steady demand for statues of the gods and other religious carvings. Before long, Chen saw that he would make a better living by shifting his efforts to the woodcarving trade instead of making furniture.

Chen's specialty of carving wooden fish came about purely by accident. A music company in Japan needed to fill an order for wooden fish, but it could not find craftsmen interested in the job. Finally Chen was asked if he would con­sider taking on the assignment. "I had never carved wooden fish before," Chen says. "So when I first received the offer, I refused. The client then asked me to introduce him to another carver. But none of the woodworkers I knew wanted to take on the job because carving wooden fish takes a lot of time and trouble, and the pay just isn't worth it."

He finally located someone willing to take the Japanese order, but only after making a fateful promise. "I gave my word that I would fill the order myself if for some reason the other carver couldn't finish the work," Chen says. "But this friend of mine gave up halfway through the job. At the time, I wished I could have eaten my words."

Chen kept his promise. The order took a long time to fill, but fortunately each wooden fish was successfully made on the first try. This was no mean feat. "For a green hand like me, the real diffi­culty with carving wooden fish was in scooping out the belly, because that determines the pitch of the instrument," Chen says. The principle is simple: the larger the hollowed area, the deeper the pitch. But a xylophone-style instrument has a number of wooden fish of the same size with five, seven, or eight different pitches. It takes exceptional skill and patience to produce the exact range of tones from components of the same external size. Adding to the difficulty was the fact that Chen did not have any power tools at the time. This meant that the belly of each piece had to be scooped out manually.

After dedicated labor on his first order, Chen expected Japanese custom­ers to come pounding on his door with more orders, but almost four years passed before he was approached again. His living was still based on other wood­carving orders and furniture sales, but he occasionally carved wooden fish for sale locally. After a while, it seemed as though the sideline would never produce much income. But a chance encounter prompted another set of orders.

"I gave many leftover wooden fishes as toys to a friend's little daughter," Chen says. "She strung them together on a rope and pulled them on the floor to make noise. One day, a busi­nessman who handled trade with Japan was visiting the family. He noticed the toy and asked who made it. Before long, I had my second big order."

Although Japan has many experienced carvers of wooden fish, the costs are high. As a result, Japanese traders often place orders for the instruments in neighboring countries with lower prices. The second Japanese client sent a techni­cal expert to Chen's factory, which gave him even more confidence about the prospects for expanding his business. He added workers and invested in more machinery, including a gas-powered drier to prepare the wooden fish for painting. Taiwan is quite humid many months of the year, and if the wooden fish contain too much moisture when they are painted, subsequent expansion and contraction of the wood will make the paint crack within a year or two.

It turned out not to be the best time to expand his business. "Things often don't happen the way you expect them to," he says. Tunghsiao Town in Miaoli County was the center of Taiwan's wood­carving industry, and his father's shop was one of the oldest firms. But soon after Chen took over the business, the competition intensified. A large number of woodcarving apprentices completed their training right about then, and many of them opened new shops in Sanyi, another township in Miaoli County. Before long, they were winning orders away from Chen's firm, and eventually Sanyi became the woodcarv­ing center of Taiwan [see FCR, Novem­ber 1988].

Chen had the choice of directly con­fronting the competition and trying to outbid them, or just following the "will of heaven" and being more relaxed about his work. He chose the latter, deciding not to worry about what the fates would send his way. Yet he cannot help feeling sentimental at times as he watches the sunset of the woodworking business in Tunghsiao.

"In the most prosperous times, my workshop had to hire 40 to 50 people," he says. "Some of them came all the way from the southern tip of Taiwan to learn the craft. A nearby food stand would use more than 60 pounds of noodles per day just to feed the employees in the neigh­borhood. Now I only have about 10 workers, and many of the other work­shops here have closed. These days the food stand is lucky to use 10 pounds of noodles a day."

Business is neither expanding nor contracting now, just running even. Chen's work is well known, so he does not have to advertise. New customers are introduced by old ones, which is a tribute to his ability and creativity. He has also maintained a balanced distribu­tion of his products, with 70 percent exported to Japan, West Germany, and the United States, and 30 percent destined for domestic sale.

The Western market for wooden fish is focused exclusively on pieces used in secular music. "I won the first West German order from a German music professor who was teaching at Taipei's Chinese Culture University," Chen says. "The professor drew basic designs showing how he wanted the wooden fish shaped and explained the pitches he needed. It was a complicated order. He ordered several sets of wooden fish of the same size but with different pitches, and other sets of different sizes but with the same pitch." Chen gained a reputation for being able to produce satisfactory results, no matter how demanding the requirements.

His Japanese customers fall into two categories: musical instrument companies, and temples. The former, such as Yamaha, usually order the standard sizes, and they prefer that the wooden fish remain unpainted. But the orders from Japanese temples are far from ordi­nary. On one occasion, a temple souvenir shop ordered mini-sized wooden fish to sell as key chains. The buyer only cared about whether the item would be attractive to tourists and was not concerned about their tone. Chen made some one- inch samples but decided to refuse the order because it would be too much trouble.

More intriguing was an order at the other extreme of size. Eleven years ago, a Japanese trader visited Chen's workshop and placed an order for a huge wooden fish, roughly five feet wide and six feet high. After he finished the task, experts in Taiwan's Buddhist circles said that it was biggest wooden fish ever made. In 1987, another Buddhist temple in Japan entered the race for owning the largest wooden fish. A century-old Tokyo temple sent representatives to Chen's workshop with an order for a wooden fish with dimensions slightly larger than the earlier record. It took Chen and two assistants about three months to finish the job.

In January 1988, administrators at Chinsan Cemetery in Taipei County decided that the record wooden fish should be in Taiwan. They ordered a six- foot by seven-foot instrument. Chen has worked on it for more than five months on the ground floor of his three-story workshop. The monstrous size of the wooden fish requires varied procedures, and Chen's workshop is cluttered with all sorts of specially-designed frames to hold the instrument in place during its construction. "Such a big wooden fish can't be made from a single tree trunk," Chen says. "It has to be made from several camphor logs."

Despite these adaptations, the steps for constructing giant instruments are essentially the same as for the standard two-foot diameter wooden fish. "First I decide on the exact size, and I sketch a design," Chen explains. "Next, the logs are glued together, then cut into rough shape—and this is done by hand because the machines can't handle such large dimensions."

Next, the belly is hollowed out by two workmen working under difficult conditions in cramped spaces. First, the whole piece is stood on end, with the handle portion upwards. A section is cut from the side opposite the belly in order to make room for a workman to drill saw, chop, and carve out the inside: Eventually the hollowed out space is big enough for two men to work side by side. After this tedious and exacting job is completed, the opening on the back of the instrument is covered and the whole wooden fish is sanded smooth.

The last stages focus on ornamenta­tion. For giant wooden fish, Chen says the dragonfish is the only appropriate design that should be carved on the handle. The instrument is painted and sanded several times, the body red and the handle black, before various portions of the fish are decorated with a layer of gold leaf-real gold, that is. The final product is magnificently impressive for both its size and beauty.

But is it profitable? It takes a large in­ vestment to pay for three woodcarvers who spend more than five months work­ing on an instrument that weighs almost 130 pounds. "People think that I must make a fortune out of this, but to be frank with you, what I earn only pays for the labor," Chen says. The buyer will pay over NT$2 million (about US$77,000) for the wooden fish set, but this includes the instrument, two wood­en holders, a large mallet, and a ching (a Chinese musical instrument made from a hollowed-out stone, also used as an accompaniment for religious chanting), Chen makes the wooden fish and the mallet himself, but he has to order the remaining items from other workshops.

Despite the lack of big profits, Chen is content with his work. "Of course making money is important, but I feel happier when people like my work," he says. Unfortunately, his children have no interest in continuing in the profes­sion. "I can feel the craft loosing its vigor," Chen adds, with a sound of frus­tration and helplessness in his voice. He thinks the skills will survive only if the government or private enterprises in­vest in preserving this traditional handicraft by cultivating a new generation of woodcarvers.

For the present, Chen is satisfied knowing that his giant wooden fish are being preserved in various temples and that his craftsmanship is admired in several countries, "Greatness? Not real­ly," he says. "But there is definitely a little bit of my heart given to the gods in each piece."