Today’s wondrous Lyu-chuan was once extremely polluted and a plan was made to intercept upstream flow of the canal to Zhonghua water treatment plant, which substantially brought down its level of pollution.
Some days are remarkable and this is my day in a city far away from home. Walking through the National Chung Hsing University (NCHU) campus in the central Taiwanese city of Taichung, I came across a signboard hidden within a bush with fresh spring to it.
It was titled “Riverfrontology” and it described a “design philosophy” of urban landscaping. It detailed how “river, community and campus” are key to establishing a riverfront lifestyle along the Lyu-chuan or the Willow River. After arriving in Taichung, the Lyu-chuan had caught my eye—the neat pathways on its edges, the tall willow trees lining it and above all the layers of flower beds that decorated its side walls. It was a discovery to uncover its design philosophy and to realize in principle how design inspires life and vice versa. After all, civilizations have flourished and evolved on river fronts.
Encouraged by what I had encountered, when I reached a bridge over Lyu-chuan, for the first time since I had arrived in the city, I peeped into its water and saw fish swimming through its clear, placid waters. Today’s wondrous Lyu-chuan was once extremely polluted and a plan was made to intercept upstream flow of the canal to Zhonghua water treatment plant which substantially brought down its level of pollution. Lyu-chuan’s story based on a highly efficient water quality improvement plant and what its engineers call “humanistic waterfronts” proves what all is achievable in the urban development of traditional waterways. We should reflect here that “humanistic waterfronts” aren’t a one-time phenomenon and need a constant human touch.
Taiwan’s population is less than that of Delhi. I would refrain from drawing enthusiastic parallels to what in India we can learn from Lyu-chuan’s revival and revitalization for our capital’s Yamuna river. I would however surely like to think about what we can learn from Lyu-chuan’s “riverfrontology” for our smaller towns with comparable demography and urban development needs. For example, Roorkee which like Taichung also boasts of a great educational institution of national repute—Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee—and has the colonial period Ganga canal can certainly learn from Taichung’s “riverfrontology” vision.
For Taiwanese who don’t know about IIT Roorkee, it’s a leading Indian institute at the central Himalayan foothills and it’s recently in the news because one of its researchers, Dr Sreelakshmi K.M. has won this year’s prestigious Marie Curie Fellowship for her innovative work on smart lighting.
CROSSING OVER THE BRIDGE
After crossing the bridge as I walked past the evening traffic of Taichung, I came across an antique junkyard (or rather an antique shop that appeared like a junkyard). Particularly drawn in by a big Laughing Buddha, a small wooden Daoist deity with a fan and other visibly old looking Chinese sculptures, I stopped by its door to check with the shopowner. He was idling on a chair outside his shop on the footpath, probably working with a toothpick. I wanted to know if he sold English books.
The junkyard manager encouraged me to look inside and pointed at a few shelves where I could find English books. Language has been a limitation since my arrival here and finding old, precious English books in the junkyard of a Taiwanese city was another bonus after the Lyu-chuan discovery.
I waded through a maze of bookshelves and contours of more books on the floor. Overwhelmed by a sea of another civilization’s literature around me, for the first few minutes I just walked around like an excited child unable to focus and pick up something. Then suddenly my eyes were drawn by the word “soul” on a binder. My hands picked up another discovery this time. It said, “Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian—winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.”
I flipped it over to read its back cover.
“In 1983 Chinese playwright, critic, fiction writer, and painter Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer and faced imminent death. But six weeks later, a second examination revealed there was no cancer—he had won ‘a reprieve from death’ and had been thrown back into the world of the living. Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison farm, Gao fled Beijing. He travelled to the remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in Southwest China and from there back to the east coast, a journey of fifteen thousand kilometers over a period of five months. The result of this epic voyage of discovery is Soul Mountain.”
The soulfulness of the “Soul Mountain” had already owned me. As I looked at the shop owner for its price, he took out a bundle of currency notes from his pocket and flipped up a 100 NTD note towards me. My middle-class Indian mind quickly did the currency exchange calculation and walked away with a prize.
As I walked through the streets of a strange city, the spring’s breeze appeared so familiar—there was music audible only to my ears and a bright cloud to my countenance. Was it Taichung’s breeze under my Indian feet or is this path about my Indian feet in Taichung? The “Soul Mountain” had enlivened my spirits and it didn’t matter that I’m unfamiliar with the language and culture of this country. It seems to be owning me in strange ways of companionship—probably much like Gao Xingjian’s solitude.
How powerful is design. How powerful is literature. It has a language but it goes beyond into something universal—the soul. Aren’t design and literature two worthy subjects of deeper exchange between India and Taiwan? Things worth pursuing as much as the semiconductors—worth more than the chips of our conductors.
* Venus Upadhayaya is a MOFA Taiwan 2025 Fellow from India. Media and Journalism, Global South Geopolitics and Sustainability and Leadership are her areas of interest.