The origins of the Taiping Blue workshop go back to the 921 earthquake of 1999. The chairman of the Watersource Cultural and Educational Foundation, Yeh Chin-yu (葉晉玉), invested in community work for post-disaster reconstruction, bringing in the foundation’s resources and partners to revive the local economy and help with the employment of people who had been affected. And in traditional Hakka culture that had disappeared, he found a way to turn around the community’s difficulties, starting up the Taiping Blue workshop in Toubiankeng Community (頭汴坑社區) in Taichung’s Taiping District (太平區).

(Photo: CNA)

Toubiankeng is the only Hakka village in Taiping District. In earlier times, for the blue-shirted Hakkas, blue dyeing was a part of daily life. While taking part in disaster relief efforts, Yeh Chin-yu chatted with locals and found out that local Hakka farms had developed the craft of blue dyeing in the past but the onset of industrialization and chemical dyes had caused this craft to die out in Taiping almost a hundred years before. The story inspired Yeh to revive Hakka blue-dyeing, and cultivation began next to Bat Cave, a locally famous beauty spot.

Post-disaster rebuilding wasn’t just about construction but also about reclaiming the local residents’ feel for the land. The foundation decided to proceed from crafts and ecology. Toubiankeng Community has a well-known Bat Cave. Promotion of conservation led in time to bats gradually returning to their former home. In addition, the foundation worked with experts to cultivate varieties of indigo plant, the raw material for blue dyeing, around Bat Cave, literally replanting the culture of dyeing in Toubiankeng’s soil. But how should this community craft be seen by the public, and how could it distinguish itself from the several other blue-dyeing crafts in Taiwan? The foundation decided to bring in the aspect of design and after recruiting design exports to join the team, it officially established Taiping Blue blue-dyeing craft brand in 2011.

To provide work opportunities for unemployed women in remote areas, Yeh trained and hired local middle-aged women in the craft of blue-dyeing. Teachers in the workshop include Chiang Chieh-yu (江婕妤) and Chan Ya-wen (詹雅汶) who are responsible for main product design and promotion work, as well as Tang Wen-chun (湯文君), the most important craft enlightenment from National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute, and Professor Lin Ching-mei (林青玫) of Asia University’s College of Creative Design, who assists in design creation.

Taiping Blue maintains traditional blue-dyeing techniques, starting from the cultivation of plants; harvesting, washing and after soaking the leaves adding lime to make the blue dye material indigo. Ten kilograms of leaves will yield just one kilo of this material. While this process alone is troublesome and complicated, sorting out 12 kinds of gradient colors is likewise very tiring. In the development stage, the design experts themselves did the dyeing. After making adjustments to arrive at the best process, they turned production over to the community craftworkers. Each color gradient has a dye vat, and each goes through a process of 16 dippings before the color is stable and saturated.

In 2017, Yeh took Hakka blue-dyeing to Maison & Objet Paris, one of Europe’s three main expos that is seen as an indicator of mainstream home decoration trends, Taiping Blue brought a series that combined indigenous cultural elements with their Hakka blue-dyeing in home furnishings like placemats, tablecloths, pillows and table lamps. Regardless of fineness or creativity, all made a great impression at the exhibition. Taiping Blue, a local blue-dyeing craft brand from a small local Hakka village in Taiwan, had begun to make its mark on the international stage.

In 2018, Taiping Blue won a Golden Pin Design Award for its Indigo Deco clock. Indigo Deco was composed of 12 segments of gradated blue to show the passing of time and the changes in the sky. The meticulous construction shows off all the various shades of blue dyeing for a truly impressive visual presentation. After winning the award, designer Chiang Chieh-yu said the gradual blue-dyeing represented the unique characteristics of Taiping Blue.