Edible Heritage Gift Set

(The following responses are provided by Yeh I Chun, Creative Director of E G Sain. Throughout this interview, "I" refers to Yeh I Chun.) Archival documents like the Sinkan Manuscripts are not widely known, even within Taiwan. However, as a native of Tainan, I have long been aware of their existence. They are not merely historical records of Tainan; they symbolize the early interactions between Indigenous peoples and Han settlers, representing a precious linguistic legacy where spoken language was first transformed into written script. For years, I have yearned to bring the lifestyle stories of our ancestors and the cultural memories of this land into a broader public awareness.When I resolved to create a Taiwanese-language (Taigi) cultural gift set, the Sinkan Manuscripts immediately came to mind. Upon deeper research, I discovered that this specific land deed from 1774 is extraordinarily rare. Among hundreds of surviving manuscripts, it is virtually the only one that simultaneously features Siraya Romanization, Han characters, and a hand-drawn map. It has been exhibited by prestigious institutions like the National Palace Museum and Academia Sinica. However, the true serendipity occurred when I searched for the current custodian of this document—only to discover it was held by my own granduncle. When I called him to request authorization, he asked for my maternal grandfather's name, laughed warmly, and granted me a free, perpetual license on the spot. The entire call took just ten minutes. This experience taught me that cultural inheritance is never just about archiving paper; it is a cross-generational relay race. Throughout the creative process, I felt a profound sense of responsibility toward my family and history—as if our ancestors wished, through our generation, to ensure Taiwan's culture and memory would be seen by the world. To honor this, we meticulously detailed the historical context on the back of the packaging. We want to deliver not just knowledge, but a deep sense of respect and sincerity.

Taigi is my mother tongue, yet in daily life, I find myself using Mandarin more frequently, and I have always felt a pang of regret that my own fluency is not where it should be. For the past eight years, I have actively dedicated myself to the revitalization of another endangered language—Hakka; however, my inability to invest equal effort into Taigi, which faces a similar crisis of survival, remained a persistent regret in my heart. Therefore, conceptualizing and creating Taiwan's very first Taigi-infused cultural food gift set carries a deeply personal significance for me. In the past, language preservation was heavily confined to academic research or governmental policy advocacy. We chose a different entry point—utilizing food, gifting, and shared memories to reintroduce the mother tongue into the natural rhythm of daily life. We firmly believe that language does not just live in dictionaries; it thrives around the dining table, inside gifts, and within the collective memories shared by families. Through this project, the mother tongue ceases to be dead text in a textbook; it becomes something that can be seen, tasted, gifted, and preserved in everyday life. Following the launch, we proactively reached out to the Association of Taiwanese Literature and language researchers, receiving profoundly moving feedback. Many users left emotional messages online—deliberately typing in written Taigi rather than Mandarin. This beautifully demonstrated that when a language is returned to a living context, people naturally yearn to speak it again. It reassures us that this design has struck the right chord.

As a food manufacturer with half a century of heritage, we have previously experimented with printing patterns or branding standard text onto our honey cakes, but we had never thought to place the Taigi script directly onto the food itself. Because the language is currently facing an existential threat of disappearance, this deliberate act took on a much deeper symbolic resonance for me. Language is traditionally preserved in books, dictionaries, and research papers. We wanted to pose a counter-question: Can language also be preserved in taste? When a language is consumed, it transcends mere written text and becomes a part of our somatic memory. By entering the body through food, it leaves its fragrance and memory lingering between the palate and the mind. Compared to the intellectual act of reading, the physical act of tasting allows individuals to experience the existence and preciousness of their mother tongue at the most intimate sensory level. This somatic experience serves as a powerful reminder that preserving, learning, and speaking our mother tongue is not just an archival duty—it is an ongoing act of building connections between ourselves, our land, and our ancestry.