Ecological expert Lee Yie-hsing (李業興) is a native of Miaoli City. In 2000, he bought a piece of land of 550 ping in Miaoli’s Shitan Township. Ten years later, Lee built a building named Blue House on that piece of land to establish a workshop for educating the public on nature, humanities and ecological environment in Shitan.
(All photos courtesy of Blue House’s Facebook page)
After graduating from university, Lee worked in the insurance business for 12 years. However, he was not suited to the fast pace of the workplace and city life, so he quit his job and went to Miaoli to work as the project manager of the local ecological association. Shitan Township is a place that has preserved the original ecological environment well and is quite suitable for the development of eco-tourism. The main reason is that it was developed relatively late. During the Japanese occupation period (1895-1945), its development was still based on its mountain and forest resources; no industrial development occurred here and there was only a little agricultural reclamation.
After Lee became a project manager at the ecological association, he led eight people into Shitan Township to investigate the ecological resources in the area and later developed small tours in the township, but in just three years, the tours had to stop due to the end of the project. Lee, however, did not give up; he continued to explore the local area and update the content of his guided tours. He later went to Hsinchu’s Chiao Tung University to study for a master's degree in Humanities and Social Sciences, and made his guided tours more in-depth. In doing so, Lee, who was once only familiar with ecological knowledge, also enhanced his understanding of humanities and history.
After accumulating several years of experience in giving guided tours, Lee gradually encountered bottlenecks. In 2012, due to fate, he met Professor Chen Hong-cheng (陳弘正) of Yu Da University of Science and Technology, as well as researchers who were familiar with designing board games. It was then that he realized ecological education can also be designed as a board game, and that learning about ecology becomes more interesting through gameplay, so he decided to take the time to develop an ecological board game that belongs to Shitan. Based on his accumulated ecological observation experience in the past eight years, he developed an ecological board game called "Lizard’s Adventure," which is suitable for both adults and children.
Lee was proud that the board game is not only applicable to Shitan’s ecosystem, but also to Taipei’s, because environmental organisms are inherently connected to each other, and the game design is very simple. Children and adults can gain knowledge from it. By playing this engaging game, many parents and children can learn about the ecological environment. He even promoted the game in schools.
When the Blue House was established, it attracted the curiosity of the locals. Lee Yie-hsing believes that, as an outsider, if he wants to gain a foothold in the local area, he needs to take time and make efforts to slowly let local residents understand what he is doing. At the same time, he also tried to cooperate with local businesses to eliminate the worries that locals might have about them being there just to grab work or earnings. For instance, the meal parts of events organized by the Blue House are outsourced to the shops in the village, which not only narrows the distance with locals, but also promotes the local catering industry, bringing about a win-win situation.