Shihciang Village, located in Gongguan Township of Miaoli County, is a classic Hakka settlement. Its development history can be traced back to the time when early ancestors from mainland China came to Taiwan and began reclamation. The village was surrounded by stones and fences to prevent indigenous people from invading. That’s why the village is named Shihciang, which means “stone wall” in Mandarin.

In this historically-rich community, you can see stone monuments with historical background, the First Building that has served as a center for villagers’ religious activities, the space for women in the old days to do their laundry and chat together, and the scenes of people's lives carved on the stone wall ruins left over from a century ago. Even after so many years, and despite the stonewalls being piled up into boulders and having long been mottled and mossy, the purpose it served in the old days as a defense against outsiders can still be recognized.

The village is surrounded by red date orchards, rice paddies, and taro fields. Taiwan’s red date production areas are mainly concentrated in Shihciang Village. The red dates produced here are of high quality and high nutritional value. Therefore, the village has a reputation of being “the hometown of Taiwan’s red dates.” This region provides the most suitable environment for red dates. The Red Dates Festival and a series of related activities are held in July or August each year to market the local red dates.

Another feature of the village is its water system. Besides being used for farming and irrigation, the water in Shihciang is also used by the community’s mothers to wash clothes and other items. Local residents also use the rushing water to generate electricity for lighting, including illuminating lights on the paths at night. At the same time, the water system is also a living teaching material for local students. The community’s clean and high-quality water has no industrial pollution. It has given birth to Taiwan’s special red dates, which gives residents a deeper feeling for the water system. Therefore, there’s a close relationship between the water system culture and the high-quality red dates of the Shihciang community.

In addition to red dates and the water system, Shihciang Village used to produce straw shoes, and once enjoyed the reputation of being a straw shoe village. Nowadays, straw sandals have been replaced by plastic shoes. Most of the young people in the community also work away from the village, and the local industry is facing a decline.

However, a group of young people from other places were later moved by the unique straw craftsmanship and the culture of the village. They rented a common space in Miaoli’s Gongguan Township to live and work together. Through field investigations and interviews with the elderly in the village, they managed to record the complete development of straw sandals in Shihciang. At the same time, the team of youth also organized training activities for visitors to guide them to understand and experience Shihciang’s handicraft culture of straw weaving.

In order to encourage more young people to participate, the team used various ways in recent years to attract them to come to Shihciang for working holidays in which they experience the harvesting of red dates. This has helped solve the shortage of manpower during fruit picking season in Shihciang Village, and transfer the village’s special lifestyle and its spiritual values to younger generations.