Yang Kui’s Old Age ─The days of writing poetry on the land
I write every day by using spade to write on the land. ---Yang Kui
Yanf Kui was arrested to jail because he drafted “Peace Declaration”, in the hope of stopping killing between native Taiwanese and people who just immigrated from Mainland China. He was sentenced in prison for 12 years by military law, and was released in 1961. After going home, Yang Kui had already been forgotten by Taiwan society and literary. However, he was still concerned about the society and wanted to resume writing. Yet, because of the pressures from real life, he could not help but stop writing. To Yang Kui, it is really a helpless matter to him.
Yang Kui borrowed fifty thousand NT dollars to buy a wasteland on Tatu mountain near Tunghai university. After that, he enjoyed living like a farmer. He said that he never stopped writing but he adopted another way, he used his spade to write poems on the land he loved. Soon many artists, professors, students came to visit this old literature veteran who used to be the leading writer in Japanese colonial period. Tunghai Garden thus became a communication center where all the artists and writers could consult Yang Kui.
Tunghai Garden in the 1970s gradually became the area of the exchange between Taiwan's postwar new generation and Japanese colonial period. Since Yang Kui's death, Tunghai Garden was gradually forgotten by people.
