Cultural Experience – Places to visit in Taiwan: Winter 2019 Abroad
你好！In Taiwan we traveled to the southern part of Taiwan and visited Sun Moon Lake, an orchid factory, the Chihkan Tower in Fort Provintia along with Fort Zeelandia and the Anping Treehouse in Tainan, the Cihou Fort in Kaohsiung, and the Buddhist Fo Guang Shan temple in Kaohsiung. We have been visiting so many different and unique places that it is hard to keep track of them all! My favorite part of this weekend was riding bikes at Sun Moon Lake, especially with the beautiful landscaping, quiet environment, and beautiful views of the lake from all different angles. For this blog post, I will be comparing Sun Moon Lake with US lakes.
I loved all the views of Sun Moon Lake but was also interested in learning about its history, which seemed to be a very prevalent aspect of its identity known to Taiwanese people. Before riding our bikes around, we ventured inside of the Visitor’s Center, where we learned of the origins of the lake. The legend of the lake says that some hunters from the indigenous Thao tribe, were chasing a white deer for several days all over when they eventually came across the lake. They thought it was beautiful and were also excited at how plentiful the fish were inside the lake. It seems that this legend is pretty well known amongst Taiwanese people, which is representative of their relationship with these indigenous Thao people. The Thao and other indigenous tribes still have festivals and activities on the lake and the Bunun people still live on both sides of the lake. I found this interesting especially after discussing the Taiwanese indigenous people today in our cultural discussion class and comparing them to Native Americans in the US.
When I think of most major bodies of water or historical places in the US, I do not think of or know of any that have been well-known to have first been discovered by Native Americans. This makes me wonder how many scenic spots were actually discovered by Native Americans first that most of us just do not know the history behind. It seems that non-indigenous Taiwanese people get along well with the indigenous people from what I have seen and heard. Meanwhile, unfortunately, many Native Americans are often displaced and kicked off of their reservations. An example of this was the large conflict with the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline in 2017, when a 1,172 mile pipeline was planned to be dug through the Standing Rock reservation. This controversy brought a protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, to Washington, D.C. to protest outside of Trump International Hotel and the White House (Gambino 1).
Beyond this, in America, most bodies of water are not usually named after their shape and their shape usually does not have a significance. The lake is called “Sun Moon” because the shape of the body of water literally looks like a circle, the sun, connected to a crescent, the moon. I was intrigued by the name at first because growing up I had a friend named Sun Moon. It made me wonder if her parents naming her that had any relation to this Sun Moon Lake. Below you can find a picture of the 3D design of the lake taken in the Visitor’s Center as well as one view from outside of the center.
