Jan.4 to Jan.10
Writer Sanmao (三毛) didn’t spend much time in the mountain village of Chingchuan (清泉) in Wufeng Township (五峰), Hsinchu County, something about the place seemed to deeply impact her heart.
“When I think of Chingchuan, it’s as if there’s a kind of pain,” she wrote to Father Barry Martinson, the Jesuit priest in Chingchuan who invited her to visit. “It’s not tortuous, yet it hurts so much. Whenever something too wonderful enters my life, I always feel pain and loneliness. Of course, there’s joy mixed in as well, but not much.”
Photo: CNA
That was after her third trip there in February 1984, six years after her life in the Sahara Desert and the Canary Islands came to a close with the accidental death of her husband Jose Maria Quero y Ruiz . The late writer, who committed suicide in Taipei on Jan. 4, 1991 (some dispute the cause of death) gained widespread fame for her writings on her adventures abroad, but Chingchuan is one place in Taiwan that she’s still closely associated with.
“After I started living alone, I realized that my loneliness grew by day. The friends from Chingchuan visit me in my dreams almost every night, and these people’s faces make my heart ache,” she continued in the letter.
The red-brick residence Sanmao stayed at in Chingchuan has been converted into a museum-cafe-shrine, and is one of the main draws to the mostly-Atayal village where Martinson still resides as the local priest.
Photo: Tsai Meng-shang, Taipei Times
“Chingchuan is beautiful. Chingchuan is real... Please beg for God to take away the confusion and sorrow in my heart,” she wrote.
JOURNEYS ABROAD
Sanmao (real name Chen Ping, 陳平) first met Martinson on Orchid Island in 1972. She had just returned to Taiwan after studying in Europe and the US, where she traveled extensively. They had promised to meet up again in Taipei, but Martinson left the paper with her address in a cab and couldn’t find her house on the day of the meeting. He called her home, but his Chinese wasn’t good enough then to explain to her father what he wanted, and the two lost contact.
Photo courtesy of National Central Library
Sanmao suffered several heartbreaks during this time, including the death of a fiance, and decided that she couldn’t stay in Taiwan anymore after a failed suicide attempt. In March 1973, she set out for Spain again, where she rekindled her friendship with Jose, whom she had first met in school in 1967. They got married and settled in today’s Western Sahara, where she began writing to great acclaim about their life for the United Daily News literary supplement. These stories were included in five collections of essays.
Jose died in a diving accident when Sanmao was visiting family in Taiwan, and the devastated writer returned to Taiwan where she was treated as a literary superstar. She lamented in an 1980 speech: “After I came back, I found that my name had been forcefully changed. My real name is Chen Ping, but now it’s become Sanmao … Sanmao represents those five books, but I represent myself, those are different matters.”
The pressure was such that she sought refuge in the Canary Islands in 1980, writing to her parents: “Human beings are lonely creatures, and I’m just as lonely in Taipei. People know Sanmao, but they don’t know me.” However, she still returned home in 1981 as a special guest for the Golden Bell Awards, after which she began teaching writing to college students and producing her own work.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Under the sponsorship of the United Daily News, she traveled to 12 countries in Central and South America, publishing a book and giving talks across Taiwan about her experiences.
DISCOVERING THE HOUSE
Ten years after their missed connection, Sanmao and Martinson got back in touch. In 1982, Sanmao visited Martinson in Chingchuan for the first time and translated his first book, Song of Orchid Island, into Chinese so it could be published.
Photo: Liao Hsueh-ju, Taipei Times
Despite Sanmao’s itinerant life, she was deeply drawn to Chingchuan. She visited for the third time in 1984, when the villagers held a big welcome party for her at the church. The next day, Sanmao, Martinson and a few young villagers walked across the drawbridge where an old and derelict red-brick house caught her attention.
She writes in an essay published in the United Daily News that she froze in her tracks. “This is another climax of my life of scavenging; I know what kind of treasure I had stumbled upon, and my heart started pounding.”
Martinson writes that the house was full of trash, the walls were crooked and the roof was porous. But Sanmao was certain that this was her “dream house.” She quickly drew up plans for the house, and Martinson managed to convince the owner to rent it to her for three years. She wrote to Martinson about the house, comparing it to the place where the Little Prince met the fox every day.
“The Little Prince sobbingly told me that he could no longer return to the Sahara,” Sanmao wrote. “He needs a place, where his planet is right above him, where he can rest alone and not miss home.”
However, Sanmao had become ill and mentally strained with overwork, and didn’t get to see the house before she left for surgery in the US. In May 1984, she announced in the United Daily News her intentions to open the house to young people in Taiwan:
“I welcome everyone to enjoy the Little Prince’s starry sky; those who desire to return to nature can use this house that I couldn’t even stay in for one day,” she wrote. She urged people not to use it just for tourism and for them to respect the environment and local Atayal culture with a pure heart, and to help out the locals if they could.
Martinson writes he received numerous calls asking about the house, and countless people from across Taiwan passed through due to Sanmao’s calling. Sanmao finally visited the house in the summer of 1985, before heading abroad again. That was her last visit.
Taiwan in Time, a column about Taiwan’s history that is published every Sunday, spotlights important or interesting events around the nation that either have anniversaries this week or are tied to current events.
Taiwan doesn’t have a lot of railways, but its network has plenty of history. The government-owned entity that last year became the Taiwan Railway Corp (TRC) has been operating trains since 1891. During the 1895-1945 period of Japanese rule, the colonial government made huge investments in rail infrastructure. The northern port city of Keelung was connected to Kaohsiung in the south. New lines appeared in Pingtung, Yilan and the Hualien-Taitung region. Railway enthusiasts exploring Taiwan will find plenty to amuse themselves. Taipei will soon gain its second rail-themed museum. Elsewhere there’s a number of endearing branch lines and rolling-stock collections, some
Could Taiwan’s democracy be at risk? There is a lot of apocalyptic commentary right now suggesting that this is the case, but it is always a conspiracy by the other guys — our side is firmly on the side of protecting democracy and always has been, unlike them! The situation is nowhere near that bleak — yet. The concern is that the power struggle between the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and their now effectively pan-blue allies the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) intensifies to the point where democratic functions start to break down. Both
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), and the country’s other political groups dare not offend religious groups, says Chen Lih-ming (陳立民), founder of the Taiwan Anti-Religion Alliance (台灣反宗教者聯盟). “It’s the same in other democracies, of course, but because political struggles in Taiwan are extraordinarily fierce, you’ll see candidates visiting several temples each day ahead of elections. That adds impetus to religion here,” says the retired college lecturer. In Japan’s most recent election, the Liberal Democratic Party lost many votes because of its ties to the Unification Church (“the Moonies”). Chen contrasts the progress made by anti-religion movements in
This was not supposed to be an election year. The local media is billing it as the “2025 great recall era” (2025大罷免時代) or the “2025 great recall wave” (2025大罷免潮), with many now just shortening it to “great recall.” As of this writing the number of campaigns that have submitted the requisite one percent of eligible voters signatures in legislative districts is 51 — 35 targeting Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus lawmakers and 16 targeting Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers. The pan-green side has more as they started earlier. Many recall campaigns are billing themselves as “Winter Bluebirds” after the “Bluebird Action”
RSS