Keelung

As soon as I cancelled my flight to California, I started to compile a mental list of places I might want to see in order to make up for my scrapped travel plans. I have not yet been to Sun Moon Lake, Jiufen, or the Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum in Chiayi, all of them places enthusiastically recommended to foreign travellers. Of course, the Penghu Archipelago, the Matsu Islands, and Kinmen are all worth seeing as well, but with the current epidemic, I think it best to avoid air and water traffic if at all possible.

Another place I had not yet visited, at least until this weekend, was Keelung, famous for being one of the first Taiwanese locales colonised by the Europeans in the 17^th century, and for having served as one of Taiwan’s major ports ever since. Since Keelung is but a short train ride from Taipei, I woke up at seven, made may way over to the train station in a leisurely manner, and only bought my ticket once I arrived there. I got to Keelung before ten o’clock.

What immediately struck me about Keelung was the smell of the city. I am not quite sure what it was, but it left me with the impression that Keelung is not as clean and modern of a city as Taipei, or even Tainan, for that matter (Gaoxiong, perhaps, could rival Jilong in that it had its fair share of strange smells too). However, there is nothing better to exorcise bad smells than a liberal amount of incense, which is lucky since my first steps led to the most important temples in the city.

I began my sightseeing tour at the Qing’an Temple, dedicated to the goddess Mazu. I arrived just at the time of worship: people were bustling in and out carrying sticks of incense, and a chorus of women in black sang while standing side-by-side in front of the central idols. The focal point of the entire ceremony was the priest, who, himself clad in black robes with a black and red surplice, kneeled in front of the offerings in the middle of the courtyard while reciting prayers. Every now and then, he was approached by a visitor with an entreaty, upon listening to which he would, without any change in pace, consult the higher powers and deliver heaven’s answer to the question asked. He did so by holding the scroll out to his left and then throwing the wooden tablets on top of it into the air. The way these blocks landed on the ground (either both face up, both face down, or one face up and one face down) gave either a “yes” or “no” answer to the supplicant’s question.

 Inside the Qing'an Temple

 A priest reading a prayer scroll

 A view of the inner court from the second floor balcony

 The same priest from a different angle

 The priest holding out the tablets before throwing them into the air

Closest to the viewer is the supplicant. The priest kneeling in front of the offerings relays her question to the heavens. In front of the idols stands a group of women singing songs of worship.

After visiting another temple, called Dianji, I crossed the river in search of Zhongzheng Park. What I found was the city’s Martyrs’ Shrine, apparently serving as the entrance to the park, from which I continued up the hill before arriving at a temple that was apparently closed to the public. Figuring that the temple was not important anyway, I started looking for a way to continue to my actual goal, Keelung’s iconic twenty-two-metre-tall Guanyin statue. I had the luck of being approached by an elderly man wearing a USS Navy hat, who, after asking me where I was from and evidently not recognising the name, proudly announced that he was a US citizen who had worked at the Florida Disneyland for forty years. He told me I was very handsome (a compliment I appear to receive only in East Asia), and pointed me in the right direction.

I often read in the accounts of nineteenth century missionaries very negative portrayals of Chinese temples. The preachers frequently complained of what they called superstitions (the fortune telling I witnessed at Qing’an Temple being one example), flashy displays, and various vices like gambling. These accounts must, of course, be taken with a grain of salt, but I could see where the missionaries were coming from when I arrived at the top of he mountain and saw, before the statue and temple, families playing arcade games and children riding buggy cars as though the place were an amusement park. Admittedly, given the gaudiness of some of the statues, the decorations did not do much to dispel that atmosphere.

 A house that most definitely does not serve as a windmill

 Dianji Temple

 An idol at Dianji Temple

 The Hollywood-like sign appears to be a truly aspirational one

 I am not sure what this building is, but it caught my eye

 The same building from the platform in front of the Martyrs' Shrine

 Rhododendrons have been in bloom for several weeks 

 Keelung skyscraper behind a rhododendron bush

 Keelung Zhupu Altar standing over the city

 Zhupu Altar

 A golden Budai with Keelung's Guanyin statue in the background

Another view of the same

After consulting a bus schedule that put the arrival of the next vehicle twenty minutes in the future, I decided not to wait in the baking sun and instead headed to my next destination on foot. Despite fearing for half the journey that I had gotten lost, I persisted, and surely enough, I arrived at the entrance to the Ershawan Fortress sooner than I saw any bus do so. Its rusty nineteenth century cannons, juxtaposed against beautiful tropical butterflies fluttering through the air, made for a quite surreal spectacle, and the scene’s paradoxical ambience was completed with mechanical noises coming from the industrial shipyard below the mountain.

By following the trails, I saw most of the fortress, but was somehow spat out into a forest path, which led uncertainly in directions I did not expect it to. Without really knowing how, I ended up at a four faced, Thai-style Phra Phrom, around whose octagonal pedestal sat meditating visitors. Finding the statue on my phone (which for my whole trip did a horrible job of determining my location), I was able to navigate my way down the hill, in the direction of my next stop.

 Wild flowers at the Ershawan Fort

 A cannon

 Keelung's noisy port as seen from the Ershawan Fort

 A fenced off path down to the harbour

 The lower gate of Ershawan Fort

 Another view of Ershawan's gate

 The Phra Phrom of Keelung

 The octagonal pedestal of the four-faced god

A monument to the Japanese Prince Kitashirakawa Yoshihisa

My destination was the French cemetery in Keelung, a truly unique sight whose uniqueness was somewhat belied by the fact that I was the only visitor there. The cemetery, nestled under the windows of some shabby-looking apartment buildings, serves as the final resting place of French soldiers deceased during the Keelung Campaign of 1884-5 (part of the Sino-French War). I write “deceased” rather than “killed” since most of the soldiers died not as the result of armed conflict but from tropical diseases.

 An obelisk commemorating the French expedition in Keelung

 The inscription on the obelisk

 The sign explains that two of the commanding officers were originally buried at Penghu and were later exhumed and transferred here

 A grave

 More pillars

 Another obelisk

 Another obelisk inscription

A closer view of one of the pillars

To my luck, dozens of taxis kept coursing through the roads outside the cemetery, so there was no difficulty in hailing one and continuing to the final place I wanted to visit in Keelung: Heping Island Park.

To be honest, I forgot why I had wanted to visit the park in the first place, but its singularly impressive sights jogged my memory. The island (connected to the Taiwanese mainland by a bridge) is home to a Martian landscape full of outlandish geological features that have been worn down into improbable shapes by millions of years of erosion. Some look like doorknobs, some – so say the signs – like pig trotters, and some – again, borrowing the metaphor – like a field of human heads. There is even a rock with a little cave in it, said to have been the refuge of a few fearful Dutchmen during Koxinga’s takeover. None of my sources really talk about what was happening in north Taiwan while Koxinga was besieging Fort Zeelandia, so that tall tale is something that I might want to check up on should I ever make a deeper study of VOC documents than those translated into English by Campbell and Blussé.

 The picturesque scenery at Heping Island Park

 The so-called "island within an island"

 Keelung Islet emerging behind the rock formations of Heping Island Park

 The natural beauty of Heping Island Park

 Another view of Keelung Islet

 A tribute to the Ryukyuan fishermen killed during the 2/28 incident

 An eastward view across Heping Island Park

 The Heping Island Park gazebo

 Strange rock formation

 Even stranger knob-like rocks

 A closer inspection of the beige rock on the right truly does reveal at least one cave

 Another view of Keelung Islet

 More views of the strange rocks of Heping Island Park

 Another view of the gazebo

 More knobs

 A lighthouse and mountains in the distance

 And yet more knobs

A serene scene of a lighthouse and blue mountains

Keelung Islet rising over hundreds of rocks resembling heads

Anyway, by the end of my visit to the park, I felt rather tired and ready to return to Taipei. I took a taxi back to the Guanyin statue, hoping that the sun would not be right behind it and that I would not be blinded trying to take a look. It was a little cloudier than in the morning, so I half-succeeded. I also made another stop by the Qing’an Temple, as I hoped to see its idols which had been blocked from my view by the choir of older Taiwanese women. To my surprise, they were still singing. I had no choice at that point but to head back to head back.

 The Bodhisattva Guanyin

 More rhododenrons

 An azalea - all right, I have clearly been guessing up until here, but I am pretty sure about this one

The goddess Mazu