Lin Family Garden

Trip Start Nov 17, 2006
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Trip End May 09, 2007


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Flag of Taiwan  ,
Tuesday, May 1, 2007

I think this is the oddest place I've visited so far in Taiwan. It beats even Yeliou's geological madness, although admittedly not in such an eye-popping manner. It sounds quite normal - an old Chinese family estate house with a nice walled garden. The odd part is it's surroundings. This being the north east of Taiwan, the green fields that once surrounded the estate are long gone. Now the garden stands between high rise after high rise, in one of the most densely populated areas of the country.

It was a nice place to visit, but to be honest there's not much I can really write about. The main thing that struck me was the insane juxtaposition with the normal world outside. It was like walking through the gate into a time warp that's inside a big bubble, so you can still see out. The traffic noise pretty much stopped, and the busy-ness just evaporated, as if by magic.
The complex was in traditional Fujianese style. The familiy that built it were pretty rich. They came over from Fujian in mainland China, and built it up over the years. The main buliding is a two storey house (super rare) called 'The Hall of the Approaching Green' because you could see all the way to the mountains over a sea of green from the top floor. Now you can just see into people's bedrooms, or maybe if you're really lucky, the Thai massage place over the road. The actual house is nice - you can't really go inside, but the outside has lots of cool designs on the walls and the roof.

The best thing was just the randomness of the garden. There were so many quirky little things to explore. There was a bridge you could walk over, or along underneath through a secret rock cave. There was a rock garden mocked up to look like mountains, little twisty turny passage ways, mini reflecting lakes, so many cute weird things. My favourite was something called the Moon Viewing Pavilion. It's a small little house in the middle of a pond, shaped like two diamonds next to each other. You could sit inside and read or think or whatever during the day, and at night you could climb up the stairs (in the shape of another fake mountain) to the flat rooftop to look at the stars. I'm not sure why being only 7 feet higher in the air would make a great deal of difference, but these days there's no stars to see anyway. Too much light, too much pollution, and the incessant cloud cover has ruined that delight.  

It's difficult to explain why I liked it there - so much of it was so bizarre I don't think I'd ever be able to get it across in writing. Still working on the photos, I'll tryto do a better job then.
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