Located in Beipu Township, the Nanpu community is like a paradise in the prosperous Hsinchu City, with its natural beauty and simplicity. Yet it is rarely known to outsiders until it won the "National Gold Medal Rural Award" a few years ago, and was gradually seen by everyone, which also aroused our curiosity about this small but beautiful community and wanting to further understand its charm of winning the gold medal.

It turned out that everything that seemed to be great in the Nanpu community has gradually declined due to the long-term disrepair and siltation of the water canal, which caused insufficient supply of irrigation water sources. Therefore, the beautiful Nanpu community was faced with problems such as inability to cultivate and the emigration of young- and middle-aged population. Like many remote villages in Taiwan, what you see before you seems only to be in decay. In recent years, fortunately, a group of young people who love the Nanpu community have cooperated with local associations and villagers, communicating with one other to reach the decision of "a year of fallow in the whole village", and of working together to repair and dredge the water canal. What was especially valuable was that even the elders in the community collaborated with young people to share the wisdom of life accumulated over years of experience, and solved the problem that irrigation water was interfering with residential land at that time. It was clear that everyone, regardless of age, worked hard together during the process.

To preserve the most valuable natural landscape and cultural resources in Nanpu community, we held the spirit of a friendly environment and used the most natural but also most laborious construction methods to repair the irrigation function of the canal. In the silting canal, the silt is cleaned manually by basket through mining tools. Because the smallest width in the canal could only allow one person to pass through, everyone thought of tying the bamboo baskets one by one with a rope. The person outside the hole was responsible for assisting in pulling the rope and pulling the bamboo basket full of silt out of the hole. They also kept an eye on the status and safety of the dredging personnel in the cave.

Such a dangerous and difficult dredging project was done voluntarily by a group of community elders who were over fifty years old. At first, everyone didn’t know what to do. After understanding the siltation situation, one of the elders remembered that he knows a friend who used to be a miner. The difficulty and conditions of dredging were similar to those of coal mining, so I asked the friend to help guide the group of elders, regarding the tools used, safety precautions, etc. to complete this difficult task.

What made us most curious was that the process of dredging the silt was so difficult at the beginning. Why were the elders willing to do it? Wouldn't their families worry about it? The words that the interviewee Mr. Zhuang Qianda have been talking about "For the sake of future generations" have said it all! To keep pure water in the environment to allow for sustainable development in the community and for future generations to live here, they understated the dangers of dredging when asked by family. Such a spirit was deeply admired.

Among these young people, Mr. Wei Ziqiang was an important promoter of Nanpu community reconstruction. He holds a master's degree from the United States, but because of his love for the Nanpu community, he decided to give up his annual salary of a million dollars and to help lead the Nanpu community. Residents engaged in friendly agricultural farming and assisted in the repair of the century-old water canal. After the water canal was restored, he put his knowledge of Nanpu and his research on the environment and local agricultural products into practice. He also devoted himself to the community development association, leading local farmers in organic planting and establishing a community development association. The mode of operation consolidated everyone’s consensus on the community, in hopes to lead the farmers in the Nanpu community to create a more stable revenue on the premise of complying with environmental protection and natural ecological cycles.

After in-depth interviews and research, we gained a better understanding of the reasons why Nanpu community was selected as a "gold medal village", just as Mr. Wei Ziqiang mentioned in the interview: "When we won the award, we also asked the judges of the organization. We didn’t have many large-scale constructions like other communities Why was it that we won the prize?” The judges simply said: “You did something by doing nothing! " This was their spirit of rebuilding a sustainable community with the most environmentally friendly belief. It was also the most difficult task for them. It was their spirit of working together that clean and pollution-free water could once again flow through every small ditch in the Nanpu Community. Every traditional washing kiosk on the side of the ditches and roads reproduces the simplest and most beautiful vitality of the once declining Nanpu community.