We Are Born By The River: Collaborative Notes of Millennium River Basin Culture

“Tell me, where is the island—” writer LAI Hsiang-yin cries out in her renowned work Island, to her hometown Tainan that she keeps returning to in her dreams, searching for the missing protagonist “Island”, but “Island” is nowhere to be found. She steps into the study room of “Island”. “She went through all the data on Island’s table, her impressions of the southern city in her mind nearly reshuffled, hardly believing that between Chihkan and Anping there was once a vast ocean. Zeelandia, Provintia, the Taijiang Inner Sea, Wu Tiao Gang (the Old Five Channels), as if in a space voyage, she drifted in the southern city she had lived in, unable to touch the ground beneath her feet.” If Tainan is an “island of streaming” floating on the sea, this ever-flowing island is intimately related to the millennia-long history of the island of Taiwan. Then, “Tainan 400” could be an opportunity for us to pose a question to this floating city in southern Taiwan: Where do we come from? Where are we going?

We Are Born By The River. Rivers carry all things from the forests and mountains, forming hills and plains. Of course, we also come from the sea. Ocean currents carry the changes of world history back and forth, turning into ports and harbor cities. Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, from the evolution of modern colonial wars and tribal societies, from the habitats and history of islands, deduced an important conclusion: Culture is not only created by humans but is created together with the environment. And the formation of human civilization might not depend on mountains or seas, but it cannot exist without significant rivers. Taiwan’s central mountain range forms a natural water-collecting barrier, coupled with abundant rainfall, hence the island’s characteristic dense network of rivers, rapidly accumulating on both the east and west sides with a steep gradient, forming a landscape of rapid topographic variations, vast differences in flood and drought flows, and short, sharply eroding rivers that flow into the sea, which are characteristic of the island of streaming. Therefore, as writer WU Ming-yi pointed out in his article Let Us Cross the River: Discussion on the Possibility of Taiwanese River Writing/Literature, the texts of Taiwanese literature have transformed Taiwan’s rivers into three basic “cognitive maps” of “nurturers,” “aggressors,” and “victims.” The six rivers of Tainan not only nurtured the city of Tainan but also inflicted this land with torrential rains, debris, and floods, further making the rivers victims under the development of modern capitalism. We are born by the river, but where are we going?

By 2024, the effects of climate change and extreme weather, including floods, droughts, and the retreat of coastlines, have become increasingly apparent. The relationship between the entire city and its aquatic biodiversity, after 400 years of change, now faces the millennia-old question of “We Are Born By The River” that needs rethinking.