by Yuen-Hsien Tseng
tseng@lins.fju.edu.tw
2002/10/15
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Pao-Li («O¤O) is a traditional Taiwanese countryside village. Pao-Li-Ts'un (Pao-Li village) has about 1800 people or 530 families. Most of the village people are modest farmers of several generations. The earliest families are believed to have migrated to Pao-Li for 240 years. Pao-Li is located at the southern tip of Taiwan , near Ken-Ding National Park. It occupies about 20 square kilometers, with 75% of the areas filled with mountains of several hundred meters high. The resident area is beneath these mountains and has several creaks flowing around. Pao-Li has this scenery colored in mostly green. The air there is simply fresh. The tropical climate makes it a place with ever-changing sky. I was born in Pao-Li and educated in the local primary school. My family, like most of the others, has stayed there for at least 6 generations. I left Pao-Li for higher educations but my life is still connected with it as my father still live there. My childhood there is the most precious part of my memory. When I heard that my primary school teacher, Tien-Ching Chang (also my uncle), was going to write a book about our Pao-Li history, I was fascinated with his work. When I was a child, I often asked my great grand mother to tell me about the life when she was young, when our ancestors led their nearly isolated life based only on the earth they own. My curiosity was fulfilled when the stories were told. But at the same time I felt that as time goes by, these stories will become less and less well known. Now my teacher and some of the knowledgeable persons in the village are going to preserve part of this memory. And they finalize it in a well edited book: "«O¤O§ø»x" (Historical Development of Pao-Li-Ts'un). I feel it is my obligation to publish them in the Internet, since they are generous to give this book to any interested persons without profit and since I was the one who knows the Internet better than them. With their permission and with the help of my students, the book was converted into digital pictures and texts by an image scanner and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. The digital pages are then edited in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) format. The choice of XML is an experiment to us. We expect that this online version will evolve more easier into a well-developed electronic book over time. This preface is written in English in the hope that more people will know this local history book. But I am not so fluent in English. Any comments on better introduction of this book to the international community are welcomed. |