In Lukang, a Cake Keeps the Time Slow

The first thing is the smell of a cake still warm from the oven, and it reaches you before the sign does. Someone has pressed the dough into a carved wooden mould and turned it out, so that the flower or the character on top stands up in low relief, already a little blurred at the edges. You could learn a good deal about Lukang from that alone: a thing made by hand, in a shape older than anyone now selling it, and eaten without any ceremony while it is still warm.

The plain ways in are the Old Street, the lanes that run off it, and the Mazu temple; but the town is really in the air between them. The lanes are narrow and take many turnings. Overhead: old eaves, a low painted tablet, a lantern. Underfoot the smell keeps changing — cake, then the roasted-grain drink they mix with hot water, then oyster batter on a griddle, then the thin grey smell of incense ash. None of it is set out to be admired. It is only what the town happens to smell of while it bakes, and opens its shops, and burns its incense, and takes its afternoon walk.

Lukang was a harbour once, and a rich one, until the coast silted and the ships stopped coming and the place had no more reason to raise its voice. Quiet suited it. It kept the width of the lanes exactly as they were; it kept the weight of the temples and the older skills, and a way of cooking that has adjusted its sweetness over so many years that no one now remembers adjusting it. The baker's hands know the mould without looking. The greeting is the same greeting. Even the sugar has been settled for a long time.

You come back, in the end, to the cake. You have eaten it, walked three or four lanes, put your incense in the pot at the temple; the sea wind that built the town went a century ago, and still the sweetness and the incense hang close together in the lane. The cake cools by degrees in the flat of your hand, and goes on cooling the whole way home.