The Summer Temple Fair | Daxi Zhongzheng Park — The Man Teaching Children to Spin Tops

Hsia Tien-lung, head of the Sheng-en association, crouches on the plaza teaching children how to throw a wooden top. It is the softest thing the character does in ten episodes, and it happens in a park that has an actual Spinning Top Plaza, registered under that name by the Ministry of Culture.

The park is stranger than it looks. It was laid out in 1912 on top of the old town cemetery, voted one of Taiwan's eight views and twelve scenic spots in 1927, and registered as a cultural landscape in 2020. Two rows of stone lanterns still line the approach path of the vanished Daxi Shinto shrine, and the path ends at a pavilion that used to be the shrine's worship hall, standing beside another pavilion converted from a Japanese war memorial.

Then there is the sumo ring. There was a Japanese-era one here; it was demolished in 1945 and flattened into a roller rink; and in 2017 it was physically rebuilt, funded partly by Japanese industry. A town that spends money putting a sumo ring back is a town with a specific relationship to its own past, which is the subject of the entire drama.

Near the equestrian statue there is a bronze of Hsiao Yao-yu, who drowned saving a schoolchild.

Open all hours, free, unfenced, with a bike dock and a coffee shop in it.

One thing to get right: the scene where Chih-hsun beats a group of kids and their battle tops with a plain wooden one is not here — that was shot at Ximen Cinema Park in Taipei. What is here is the teaching. Go and watch the plaza on a weekend afternoon and someone will be doing it for real.

Location data: Taoyuan City tourism and Taiwan Tourism Administration. Registered cultural landscape, June 2020.