A trip to Nanliao 1

Written by Tsai Ming-lin

Position: Senior, Department of Sustainable Tourism, TransWorld University

In the early time, Nanliao and Beiliao were regarded as one place, called as Guibikangshe. Most of the residents of Nanliao village are farmers and the maintenance and management of farmlands in Nanliao are different from those in Penghu. As Nanliao is located at the east of Penghu, the Occasional Monsoons are exceptionally strong. In the past, after the harvesting of peanut and sweet potato, we could see the special scene of rolls of small coral stones laying in the fields. The small coral stones functioned to prevent the sand soil from being blown away by the Occasional Monsoons. When spring came, there was still plenty of sand soil for farming.

When people had fuel, they needed equipment for it. In the 1960s, when fishery was in a bloom, there were at least 5 fish cooking kilns in Nanliao. Now, there is only “Fuji Fish Cooking Kiln” left. In a fish-cooking kiln, there is equipment as follow: stove, chimney, salt sauce trunk, bellow (wind cabinet), and more. When fishing boats anchored in the port, the villagers would buy fishes and brought them to the fish cooking kilns. After washing the fishes clean, they were put in a round bamboo sieve, which was put in a huge pan with sea salt to be cooked for a few minutes. Then, they were taken up and placed on the stove to drain off the salt sauce, which was collected in the salt sauce trunk to become fish sauce. Then, the cooked fishes will be put on the ground to be sunbaked into dried preserved fishes. At last, they were boxed and transported to Taiwan for sale.

The tree house located at the east of Fuji fish cooking kiln is a very interesting place. In the early times, it was a drugstore. In the past, when local residents were sick, they would go to the temple (Baoning Temple) and pray to deities. They told them their conditions, and requested for prescriptions. Then, they went straight to the drugstore to have their prescriptions dispended. However, with the drug control laws and regulations nowadays, we can no longer dispense our prescriptions in this manner. For elderly people, it is a classical memory. Outside the west chamber of the tree house, there is a small room with two little openings. Hardly any people can guess their functions. According to the owner of the house, it was the pigeon cage. Those two small openings were the entrance and exit for the pigeons to enter and leave the cage freely.

The ancestors migrated to Nanliao 400 years ago. Worshiping Baosheng Dadi, Baoning Temple is their religious center. According to elders, one day the fishermen could not catch any fish. They heard that the deity in Weiling Temple at Houliao Village always answered to people’s prayers, guaranteeing fishermen full loads of fishes every time they sailed out to the sea. Therefore, they requested Baosheng Dadi of Weiling Temple to split its divinity, and worshipped him in Nanliao to appease people. Now, the Baosheng Dadi of Baoning Temple at Nanliao and Weiling Temple at Houliao are still regarded as brother temples. In the early times, fishing boats were not as well equipped as those we now have and fishermen could not forecast the weather and conditions of the sea before their departures. In agriculture, they have to grow different crops in the four seasons. When there were droughts, they could not grow any crop easily. To seek spiritual comfort, they would regard religions as their refuges.