A Day Trip to Chiayi’s Rural Countryside and Koji Pottery Art Village

Text / Compiled and reported by the editorial team of MOOK Scenic Spots Travel Life Network

 

Chiayi’s Ban Tou Village, once an obscure small rural village in Chiayi, had nothing but vast rice paddies, a few farmhouses, and the most ordinary, simple pastoral scenery. Few people knew that Ban Tou Village is actually a key place preserving Taiwan’s temple Koji pottery and ceramic mosaic art, home to numerous Koji pottery workshops, as well as the Ban Tao Kiln, which is open to visitors.

In the past, Ban Tou Village had a century-old sugar railway track, which crossed the Fuxing Iron Bridge over the Beigang River and connected to Beigang. In the early days, when the road system was underdeveloped, villagers traveled north and south on this “five-foot-gauge train” railway. Especially during the period around the birthday of Mazu, pilgrims from all over the province traveling to Beigang Tianhou Temple or Xingang Fengtian Temple relied on this railway. As a result, this line was once the most profitable passenger route for the Taiwan Sugar Corporation and was called the “Golden Railway.”

As road transportation became more developed, fewer and fewer people took the five-foot-gauge train. In 1982, the Taiwan Sugar Corporation suspended passenger service on the five-foot-gauge railway, keeping only freight trains. As a result, the entire rural area declined. Mr. Chen Zhongzheng, the owner of the Ban Tou Kiln Koji pottery workshop, a native of Ban Tou Village, passed by the tracks every day and felt deeply saddened to see the once memorable five-foot-gauge railway now overgrown with weeds.