Exploring a literary landscape
Since the establishment of the Yeh Shyr-tau Literary Memorial Museum in 2012, the Tainan City Cultural Affairs Bureau has regularly sponsored the “Yeh Shih-tao Literary Landscape Tours.” To date, four major routes have been established, covering some 90 literary sites. They provide visitors with the means to “read” the author as they stroll. They also extend the reader’s imagination beyond Yeh’s texts—as expressed via handwritten manuscripts and old photos—to include the pleasure of personally visiting places that appear in his works.
Starting from the museum, visitors can take in Chikan Tower on the site of the former Dutch Fort Provintia, which made an appearance in Yeh’s short story “The Last of the Siraya,” and Shijingjiu, next to Rice Street (now Xinmei Street), where Yeh used to eat rice cakes and fish-ball soup; and then walk over to Fortune-Stick Lane and Fortune-Teller’s Lane, near the God of War Temple. Amid the temple’s unembellished old-style lanterns and air of dilapidated opulence, you can imagine you’re in a scene from “Spring Dream at Gourd Alley.” The Grand Matsu Temple and the Shuzhuanglou (“Mazu’s Boudoir”) with their gorgeous carvings and colorful decorations, and ornate yet dignified architecture, were places where Yeh played and hung out when young.
As you stroll down lanes off Minsheng Road, you arrive at Tainan’s current hotspot for Instagram photoshoots—Snail Alley. Besides counting for yourself the artistic iterations of snails in different settings, you can search for remnants of the ambience suggested in Yeh’s works, and experience the languid feel of Tainan’s alleyways.
With book in hand—be it Romantic Heart, the Cultural Affairs Bureau’s collection of Yeh’s short stories, or now the Spring Dream collection in Vietnamese—readers can trace their way through the cultural landscape described in Yeh’s works.
For a taste of the pace of life in Tainan as portrayed by the master storyteller in his Spring Dream at Gourd Alley, take a stroll down Fortune-Stick Lane and Fortune-Teller’s Lane beside the God of War Temple.