During my year of field research, I observed and recorded the steps followed by the tobacco farmers. Sow in August, grow seedlings in September, and add soil in October. At the end of the year, after fertilizing and spraying the plants, and picking off the flowers, the tobacco leaves are roasted at high temperature. After the golden tobacco leaves are ready, the farmers press them in the form of large tobacco bricks. As the farmers finish the year’s hard work, they send the tobacco bricks to the public sales office and wait for confirmation of quantity and price from the cigarette factories after a quality check. In terms of tobacco cultivation, I am particularly interested in the ethnic relations and the economic and industrial conditions during the Japanese occupation as well as the human traces that have been ignored by history. In the complex ethnic milieu of the time, Hakka, the aborigines, Hokkien, and the Japanese, all played important roles in the development of the industry. There were periods of cooperation and conflict between the different ethnic groups. 

Long before the Han Chinese immigration to Taiwan, the aborigines grew tobacco leaves in the mountains. The indigenous Paiwan people planted tobacco in almost every household and used bamboo nets to dry and collect tobacco leaves. The crushed tobacco leaves were put into pipes for smoking. Famous Taiwanese painter Chen Jin (1907-1998), who taught at Pingtung Girls’ High School for a time, depicted the scenes of Paiwan women smoking tobacco with pipes. During the Occupation period, the Japanese even allowed the aborigines to grow tobacco privately and purchased the tobacco leaves at high prices, often in exchange for information about firearms and munitions among the Aboriginal tribes. Zhong Li-He’s (1915-1960) article “Gullible” (假黎婆) discusses the interaction between the aborigines and the Han people. Indigenous people have played an important role in the cultural history of tobacco. In addition to being the early growers in the entire economic system, they were also the least visible laborers in Taiwan’s tobacco industry. 

Finally, I began to think about how to use tobacco leaves as a medium to convey people’s beliefs about their land and spiritual values, the relationship between ethnic groups, and the historical context of Taiwan’s position under different regimes. Dried tobacco leaves on the white mesh, used by local farmers to build greenhouses, the “Tobacco Leaf Carpet” (2017) is a collage depicting tobacco leaves and farmers transformed into mina-birds hard at work in the tobacco fields. The “Bamboo Slip Album” (2017) is made from tobacco leaves rolled into cigars and bound together with thread. It echoes the literati culture supported by the farmers. The numerous manuscripts, clippings, and objects, let me cherish this special tobacco industry and cultural memory.