The Summer Temple Fair | Daqing Tunnel and the Stone Slab Trail — Where They Trained the Legs

Lin I-hsin marches the other two up and down these steps until they stop complaining. You cannot shoulder a god-general for a full procession without legs, and 神之鄉 puts its training montage on a stairway that was built for exactly that kind of load — just not that kind of cargo. These slabs are recycled ship ballast stone. They were laid to move goods between the wharf on the Dahan River and the town on the bluff above it, and everything about them is designed around a man with weight on his back. The faces are left deliberately rough so moss will not hold and wet feet will not slide. The risers are cut low and the treads kept short, to spare a loaded porter's knees. The path zigzags rather than climbing straight, and at each turn there is a widened landing where you could set a load down. The actors are running a route that nineteenth-century coolies ran with cargo. You reach the bottom of it through the Daqing Tunnel — twenty-seven and a half metres of decommissioned road tunnel, made redundant when the newer bridge opened. Six artists spent a month painting the walls, and they graded it: black and white at one mouth, full colour at the other. You walk out of monochrome and into the old street. Open all day, free, unstaffed, and the tunnel is lit. It is steep and it is not step-free — if you need level access, the panoramic lift in Zhongzheng Park about a hundred and fifty metres west does the same climb. Go up it once at your own pace, then go up it again quickly. The second time your calves will tell you why the drama bothered to film the training at all. Location data: Daxi Historic Streets Regeneration Association and Taoyuan City tourism.