The Making of an Ordinary Woman | Jin De Xing Pharmacy — The House That Raised Chen Jia-ling

This is the house. Not a set standing in for it — the actual hundred-year-old herbal pharmacy in Jingliao where 俗女養成記 filmed the Chen family's whole domestic life. The kitchen, the grandmother's room, the parents' bedroom, young Jia-ling's bedroom, the hall where the family crowds around a television watching The Fly and screaming at it. The backyard where her father arm-wrestles his friend Hu A-hsing, loses, and his daughter watches, burning with a humiliation she is too young to name.

The building has been moved once already. It was put up in the Qianlong era as a Lin family ancestral house in Chiayi, bought, taken apart, and re-erected here in 1910. Ruan Qian bought it after that and opened the pharmacy; he wrote the merchant's twelve precepts onto the wall himself in 1917, and a calligrapher supplied the shop plaque in 1925. It has been a municipal monument since 2005.

Read the shopfront before you go in. Blue-grey painted timber gone chalky and dry, carved lattice panels, a dark plaque above the centre doors, raw red brick at the base of the wall, two stone drum bases under the arcade. Inside, ceramic decocting pots still sit on the shelves — and the room smells of dust and old wood, not of herbs. The pharmacy stopped trading long ago. That absence is the honest thing about the place.

Read this part carefully. The backyard is a ticketed attraction, fifty NT dollars with thirty redeemable, Thursday to Monday, closed Tuesday and Wednesday. The street-front house is still the Ruan family's home. Look at the front from the street. Pay to go round the back.

Stand in the hall and look up into the mezzanine gallery running round three sides. Beams go straight into the dark up there. A nine-year-old with a good imagination would have found that ceiling terrifying, and the drama knows it.

Location data: Tainan City Government tourism and the national cultural heritage registry.