Along Chrysanthemum Bookstore Introduction
Yan Ju Bookstore is the action of the Penghu Settlements Cultural Creation Story Museum. Penghu has always developed distinct characteristics in various aspects such as immigration history, industry, beliefs, and customs, maintaining a village-based structure for individual settlements and engaging in exchanges based on these settlements. The most fundamental unit of Penghu culture is a village. The recognizable island settlement culture includes linguistic life, faith customs, temples, traditional houses, docks, and architectural layouts. In the past, Penghu's cultural operation was based on settlements, achieving a sense of community cultural identity. Competition and assimilation also occurred at the settlement level, leading to the development of cultures such as Jibei's traditional house culture, Chikan's clove culture, Nanyiao's farming culture, and Pengnan's fishing culture. Even marriage customs have given rise to differences in cultures like Magong's fried jujube culture and Wang'an's glutinous rice jujube culture. These settlement characteristics existed in a micro but historical manner in the past. However, with population outflow, generational cultural discontinuity, and regional changes, the independence of these cultures has ended, altering lifestyles and replacing them with pop culture, leading to the rapid disappearance of Penghu's settlement culture. The current generation of Penghu people no longer engages in fried jujube during weddings, does not consume dried fish in daily dietary culture, sees traditional houses abandoned, and experiences the demolition of old houses. Within the next 20 years, we will witness the decline of Penghu's settlement culture, which is foreseeable if no action is taken or if the actions taken are not precise enough. To rescue the Penghu settlement culture, both the government and the community have invested many resources in community development, achieving results in issue description, advocacy education, and data construction. However, when discussing local revitalization, experiences from Japan and Europe and America tell us that local revitalization actions begin with local styles but are completed through cultural economic models for sustainable industry. Culture is the life of the previous generation. It possesses universality and value along its time axis, generating beneficial effects for life and livelihood, as well as for economic survival and social development. Therefore, actions toward cultural preservation must also allow endangered and disappearing cultures to produce both altruistic and self-interested benefits in contemporary society. Cultivating a cultural economy can create universality; once popularization occurs, culture will be preserved. This is the core value of Yan Ju regarding cultural sustainability and local revitalization. By creating the altruistic and self-interested benefits of old cultures in contemporary society through a cultural economic model, we establish a cultural business model, which will significantly boost cultural revival. Yan Ju has adhered to this principle in its 20 years of cultural actions in Penghu. We have collaborated with numerous communities, producing cultural economic resources, and facilitating the development of settlement cultures towards sustainable modes of living. This is also the concept behind the establishment of this museum, assisting Penghu settlements in becoming a cultural incubator for livelihood, completing the final piece of the local revitalization puzzle—cultural livelihood. Yan Ju Bookstore is located within the historical building cluster of Duxing No. 10 Village, a 30-ping Japanese-style century-old building, operating stably over 300 days a year. The cultural creation center currently features functions including walking tours, art creation exhibitions and sales, local revitalization, community product development and sales, lectures, and experiential workshops, attracting over 80,000 visitors annually and collaborating with more than 30 community and artist projects. We have long invested in experimental cultural actions, including the hosting of cultural markets. The cultural creation center will be renamed Penghu Settlement Story Museum in 2025, enhancing its broader perspective.
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