The Oldness of Tainan Is Not on Any List

The alleys of Tainan do not run straight, and never have; they widen without warning into the forecourt of a temple and then close again to a slot barely wide enough to turn sideways in, the walls leaning at their small unrepentant angles, the signs each facing a direction of its own, so that what looks at first like disorder is in fact an order, one laid down so slowly, over so many hundreds of years, that no single generation could have intended it, and the plan of the streets has become a kind of record in which one can still read, if one goes slowly enough, where the water once came up to, where the wall once stood, where the later markets pushed out into what had been the edge of the town.

It is at Anping, out where the salt sharpens in the wind, that the oldest of these records comes nearest the surface. Here the Dutch East India Company raised its fort in the sixteen-twenties, Fort Zeelandia, and ran from it for a few decades a trade in deerskins and sugar and silver as though the arrangement might last forever; and here, in 1662, the Ming loyalist whom Europe called Koxinga laid his long siege and took the place, so that the Company sailed away, and the fort passed to the Zheng family, and then to the Qing, and then to disuse, until the brick that survives is less a monument than a sediment, warm under the hand, its edges rounded off by three and a half centuries of the same heat and the same salt. One stands before it and feels not the past exactly but its refusal to leave — the way it has sunk into the mortar-joints and the street-names and the plan of the temples rather than departing, so that the city carries its Dutch and its Ming and its Qing not as exhibits but as substrata, ground little by little into the pace of an ordinary afternoon.

And the afternoons go on being ordinary. In the market there is the smell of fried shallot and the steam off a pot of beef soup; a lane or two further and the air thickens with something sweeter, a shop selling the winter-melon tea and the rice puddings and the eel noodles that need not explain which century they belong to, since they belong to all of them at once, and are cooked, still, for no one in particular. This is the rare mercy of Tainan: that its history should run so deep and be nowhere mounted as a specimen gone cold.

On the day I left I stopped at the mouth of a narrow lane where an old man was lifting the lid from the pot on his cart, the steam going straight up, and he stirred it twice with a long ladle and turned to say something to the shop next door, and left the pot standing half open with the heat still climbing out of it. I had to go before he had filled a single bowl. The pot stayed open behind me, the steam still climbing, the city getting on with its day of its own accord and not pausing in the least because someone had happened to arrive, and was now happening to leave.