The Two Rivers Cultural Association (兩河文化協會) from Zhudong Township in Hsinchu County has long conserved the Hsinchu area’s intrinsic cultural heritage and worked to raise the local cultural environment and quality of life, as well as consolidating the community’s cultural awareness. From 2006, the association has carried out a census of Hakka cultural resources and in-depth surveys, and has tapped into what new local residents bring. The association interviewed 20 Indonesian Hakka new residents in Zhudong, learning about the situation for new residents in Taiwan and about their original hometown of Singkawang.

In 2017, through the Hakka Affairs Council’s Hakka Community and New Southbound Policy Collaboration Program, the Two Rivers Cultural Association traveled to Indonesia to find out about Hakka communities in the cities of Pontianak and Singkawang and carry out exchanges with local Hakka groups.

The group from Taiwan got to experience a special kind of local industry -- bird’s nest. Indonesia is known as the home of bird’s nest, producing over 80% of global output. In Chinese culture, edible bird’s nests are highly prized for medicinal and culinary uses and as a nutritional supplement. At a time when awareness of environmental protection issues is gradually rising, Indonesia still ranks first in the world for bird’s nest production, which can be chiefly attributed to well-established techniques in raising swifts.

In West Kalimantan, it is not hard to discover signs of swift houses. Those who raise swifts build houses for them, where humidity, temperature and air conditioning are maintained at the right levels for the swiftlets to build their nests. This way of raising swifts is said to have been invented by Indonesian Chinese, and the techniques have already undergone more than a century of evolution. In the past, workers who collected swifts’ nests from cliffs and precipices risked their lives to do so. Because the risks and costs were so great, the workers would grab the nests whether or not there were eggs or young birds in them, which took a devastating toll on the swiftlet habitat. Building swift houses therefore not only protects the physical safety of workers, but more importantly protects the swiftlet’s habitats, making it a win for both the industry and the environment.

The Two Rivers team also visited a local Hakka church and an orphanage set up by the church's pastor and funded and run by Hakka people. When the pastor gave his sermon in Indonesian, he would also pepper his speech with Chinese and Hakka words. The young people of the church wrote worship songs in Hakka. To take care in this way of the development of each group’s language in Indonesia, a country with a largely Malay population, is highly commendable. Especially since Indonesia’s government from the 1960s forbade Chinese from speaking the Chinese language, banned the public celebration of Chinese religious and cultural festivals, forbade the use of Chinese names and closed all Chinese schools. Fortunately, from the 1990s there has been continuous progress on respect and tolerance for different religions and ethnic groups in Indonesian society.