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Updated Thursday, March 6, 2008 0:00 am TWN, By Emily Lee, Special to The China Post

Get your hands dirty at Yingge's pottery street

Perhaps you've lived in Taipei for a while now. And perhaps there are times when you realize, "hmm, my life here isn't so different than it was back at home," and so in an attempt to soak up some atmosphere and culture, you hustle off to Danshui or Jiufen or any other small, mountainous village, only to realize that once you've been to one "lao jie" (old street), you've pretty much been to them all. I mean, how often can you meander down a twisting alleyway, pressed against all the other tourists, checking out overpriced souvenirs and having various vendors yelling at you to buy their wares, before it starts to get a little tedious?

Well, if you want an experience a little different than your typical lao jie experience, look no further than Yingge (鶯歌). And while yes, Yingge is a small, mountainous village boasting its very own lao jie, there's a little bit more than meets the eye here.

Easily accessible by train, Yingge is a well known "ceramics town" located about a half an hour southwest of Taipei. Yingge, which loosely translates to "parrot's song," gets its name from a legend where a parrot (don't laugh) once guarded a mountain pass and with its deadly breath would poison all who breathed it in. One day, a general tried to get through the mountain pass, only to be confronted by the parrot (stop laughing). The general ordered his troops to blast the bird, and once the bird died, it turned into a rock, which is now a famous landmark in Yingge.

A short bus ride from the main train station (look for a small bus with the word "Holiday" on the side—for NT$99 you get admission to the ceramics museum as well as unlimited bus rides around town) will drop you off at the foot of the mountain atop which Yingge Rock resides, where you can admire it from afar and try to make out the shape of the parrot. Or if you are so inclined, you can also embark on a fairly short, but rather vigorous climb up to the top to see the parrot up close and personal.

Yingge is also home to the Yingge Ceramics Museum, where you can spend a leisurely hour or so exploring the history of ceramics in Taiwan and, more specifically, in Yingge. Check out the kiln on the second floor, designed to simulate an actual fired kiln, complete with fake red-hot bricks that looked so convincingly real that I hesitated a moment before touching them.

Yingge's lao jie is different from the ones you'll find at some other places in many ways. For one, the streets are wide and spacious, so you're not crammed against a thousand other people, all trying to squeeze their way through stifling alleys. Secondly, the stores sell all manner of ceramics and pottery, many at very affordable prices. If I had only known about Yingge when I first moved here, I wouldn't have spent all my hard-earned money buying the overpriced dishes at IKEA.

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	A display of ceramic figurines in the Yingge Museum. (By Emily Lee, Special to The China Post) More Photos (3)


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