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Taoyuan Literature

About Taoyuan Literature

  • 發布單位:桃園文化局
  • 發布日期:2025/03/13
About Taoyuan Literature
About Taoyuan Literature

The term “Taoyuan Literature” refers to the literary works created by Taoyuan people, or in other words, all literary works created by Taoyuan people belong to Taoyuan Literature. In reality, however, it is impossible for all literary works written by Taoyuan people to be collected, let alone passed down, so a more pragmatic definition is: all literary works written by Taoyuan writers belong to Taoyuan Literature. The so-called “Taoyuan Writers” here only refers to Taoyuan literary writers, emphasizing that writers who create literary works as their main genre, i.e., poets, novelists, playwrights, and literary essayists, are the writers defined on this site.


Overview of Taoyuan Literature 

The formation of “Taoyuan Literature” is based on the geo-literature of administrative regions and local divisions, and its exploration is part of “Taoyuan Literature,” which is also a local literature (regional literature).

At present, there is no common standard or discussion process for defining space, authors, and works in the history of literature in different counties and cities, and the academic community has not yet reached a unified view. According to the concept of local literature, Taoyuan literature can be roughly categorized into three types:


  1. Literary works by writers born in Taoyuan.
  2. Literary works by writers who were not born in Taoyuan, but have lived there for a long time and whose literary works have Taoyuan's local customs as their target or background.
  3. If the above two conditions are not met, and the author only stays in Taoyuan for a short period of time to create works, or creates works with Taoyuan as the theme, then the works are categorized as Taoyuan Literature under loose conditions.

As one of the administrative districts of Taiwan, Taoyuan is also closely related to Taiwan's history, politics, ethnic groups, culture, and social trends.

On the whole, Taoyuan Literature was limited by the population growth, economic activities, cultural and educational construction, and cultural creation in Taoyuan, and its development was relatively late. It was only during the reign of the Qing Dynasty that some literati began to write about Taoyuan in their prose and poetry, mostly about their travels, but these literati were not from Taoyuan, so under strict conditions, their literary works only met the third condition mentioned above, which is recognized as Taoyuan Literature under the lax conditions. The earliest literary works written by “Taoyuan writers” were created around the middle of the Japanese colonial period (1930s). Therefore, the development of Taoyuan Literature before the Japanese colonial period could be said to be still in a state of inter-literary flux, where creativity had not yet taken root.

In order to make the overall outline of Taoyuan literature more complete, contextualized, and easy to understand, this article discusses the more notable types of literary development in each period according to the development of Taoyuan. In the first half of the article, the first half of the article looks at the development of Taoyuan literature from the Aborigines and the Qing Dynasty under loose conditions, while the second half of the article looks at Taoyuan literature from the period of the Japanese Occupation up to the present day under stricter conditions. It is hoped that this overview of Taoyuan Literature will guide readers into the hall of Taoyuan Literature.


(Excerpted from Taoyuan Literature, Issue 10, “Literature and Life” - An Overview of Taoyuan Literature)


Overview of the development of Taoyuan Literature

Around 1943, Principal Chang Liu-Shui Hsu of Da-Yuan Elementary School discovered the Da-Yuan Tsien Shan site (located in and around present-day Da-Yuan Elementary School in Taoyuan City), which is the first post-war archaeological site in Taiwan and the only designated site in Taoyuan City, and it contains rich archaeological evidence of the Yuanshan culture and the Yuanshan culture of the late Neolithic period. It is the first post-war archaeological site in Taiwan and the only designated site in Taoyuan City that contains rich deposits of the Yuanshan and Botanical Garden cultures of the Late Neolithic Period, as well as sporadic deposits of the Hsintangpu culture of the Middle Neolithic Period. It is amazing to see how the archaeological history of Taoyuan has explored its origins! However, as time goes by, Taoyuan is often misunderstood by outsiders as not having a strong literary culture, at least until the Qing Dynasty ...... . It was not until 1865 (the 4th year of the Tongzhi period of the Qing Dynasty) that Li Tengfang (1814-1879), who was born in Daxi, became the first person in Taoyuan's history to be successful in the village examination. However, there was no one to take the honorary title for the next level, so the impression that Taoyuan's literary style was weak may have arisen from this. 


Nowadays, one of the key objectives of examining the literary development of Taoyuan is to discover the richness of Taoyuan's literature; perhaps the literary style was not strong in the Qing Dynasty, and the development of economy, culture, population migration, and land development... were all relatively slow, but after the Japanese rule period, a different atmosphere has emerged. According to the article “Overview of Taoyuan Literature” in the 10th issue of Taoyuan Literature edited and published by the Taoyuan City Government and the article “The Past and Present Life of Taoyuan Literature” written by Lin Yang-min, Taoyuan Literature is categorized into three types as defined in the previous section based on the concept of local literature.


This statement echoes the words of Taiwan literary scholars such as Ngan Kun-Yang, Chen Ming-Tai, Shih Yi-Lin, and Jiang Bao-Hai-Man, who said, “Regional cultural awareness should never be mistaken for the mental prison of ‘drawing one's own limitations’”. This is the first time in the history of Taoyuan that we have recognized the cultural consciousness of the region.


In the world of Taoyuan Literature, the first category refers to writers who have their origins in Taoyuan, such as Li Xianzhang (1914-1999), Chien Kuo-hsien (1917-1954), Chung Shiu-ch'ing (1925-2020), Lin Jong-lung (1930-2008), and Fu Lin-tung (1933-2020); the second category refers to those writers who do not have their origins in Taoyuan but are now living there, such as Lo Tsing, Lo Ching, Lin Ching, and Fu Lin-tung (1933-2020); the second category refers to those writers who are not from Taoyuan but now live in Taoyuan. The third type refers to writers who are not from the previous two categories, but whose works are related to Taoyuan, such as Yueh-Wen Chen and Eun-Chin Fang's juvenile novel The Brave Bald Gang, which depicts their storytelling efforts in the Children's Cancer Ward of Chang Gung in Linkou; Jiao Tong's prose Taste of Yunnan in Lungang, which examines Lungang's special Yunnan-Burma-Yunnan cuisine; and Xiao-No's Taste of Yunnan, which examines the special Yunnan-Burma-Yunnan cuisine of Lungang; and Xiao-No's Taste of Yunnan, which examines the special Yunnan-Burma-Yunnan food of Lungang, and which examines the special Yunnan-Burma-Yunnan food of Lungang. Xiao Niao's “Home in Longing Village” records his peaceful rural life in Longtan Longing Village, where he moved to for a short time; Fang Qun's “Poetry Walk in Taoyuan” uses poetry as a lens to record the natural scenery of Taoyuan's waterfront such as the Jhuwei Fishing Harbor, the Caoluo Sand Dunes, and the Guanyin Lotus Garden; and he also takes a poetic walk to the Fenghuang Feifei Storytelling Hall, the Yehheng Terraces, and Lara Mountain to see the mountains and forests and their humanistic changes. This kind of landmark poetry can be traced back to the “Eight Scenic Poems” or “Twelve Scenic Poems” that were popular among traditional poetry societies and literati in Taiwan since the Qing Dynasty, and they have carved the face of the land. Another example is the school song written by the famous Japanese nursery rhyme poet Kitahara Shiraki (1885-1942) for the Daxi Public School (now Daxi Elementary School), and an even more special example is Cheng Ching-wen (1932-2017), who was originally born in Taoyuan, and then passed on to his uncle in Hsin-chuang when he was one year old. The rural scenes in his many novels are mostly derived from the memories of his birthplace, Shui-bian-tou in Taoyuan, where he was born, and where the pei ponds on the Taoyuan Plateau were surrounded by water and clouds, and where the canals were linked to the drainage canal. In the early days of Taoyuan, the plain and simple rural scenery is still recognizable. All of the above can be summarized as the scenery of Taoyuan literature.


As for the geographic identification of Taoyuan, it belonged to Nankan Sishe under the Danshui Department of Taiwan Province during the Kangxi period of the Qing Dynasty. During the Qianlong period, the Han Chinese in the area planted peach blossoms all over the area, giving it the name “Peach Garden”. In 1920 (the 9th year of the Taisho era), the system of “five prefectures and two departments” was restored, and most of the Taoyuan Department was reorganized into Hsinchu Prefecture, and part of it was merged into Taipei Prefecture; under Hsinchu Prefecture, it was divided into three counties, namely, Taoyuan, Jhongli, and Daxi, and the geographic scope roughly corresponded to the whole area of today's Taoyuan City. Therefore, Taoyuan's geographical and administrative jurisdiction has changed several times, but it can still be separated from the neighboring Taipei and Hsinchu, so the literary development of these two counties will not and cannot be mixed with that of Taoyuan.

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  • 最後更新:2025/03/13
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