After 148 years of history, scholars at home and abroad are amazed. You Yongfu, the owner of a small bookstore in the deep mountains, spent 18 years "looking for Thomson".

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In 1871, John Thomson, a member of the Royal Geographic Society, traveled to Xiamen and met Dr. James Laidlaw Maxwell, a Scottish villager who was practicing medicine and preaching in southern Taiwan, who half coaxed and half tricked Thomson into abducting Thomson to Formosa, from Dagou Port and Fu Cheng to the mountains inland, crossing bad terrain, and filming the life in Zuo Town, Neimen, Jiaxian and Liugui Pingpu, leaving precious images of the interior of Taiwan in the 19th century.

148 years later, the new book "searching for Thomson-the Great Discovery of Taiwan Cultural Heritage in 1871" was published. after 18 years of fieldwork, the author examined John Thomson's path in Taiwan at that time. Contact British, American and French history and art scholars, collectors and museums to provide literature clues to figure out how Thomson first saw Taiwan, thus setting a new milestone for the study of Thomson Images.

This book has been recommended by many scholars and writers at home and abroad, and what amazes scholars is that this pen pal who corresponded with them has no title or academic background they are familiar with. Instead, he modestly calls himself "the owner of a small bookstore in the mountains of southern Taiwan," ── you Yongfu.

You Yongfu (right) in the process of "looking for Thomson" in the past 18 years, he kept speculating on the mood of Thomson, who entered this "forbidden land" 148 years ago, as if their minds had inadvertently produced a rendezvous beyond time and space. _ Lin Jiyang photographed a small bookstore in the mountains to make international research.

At 04:00 before dawn, you Yongfu is up, chanting mantras after doing morning exercises and then having breakfast-usually a papaya and a handful of mixed nuts. At 06:30 he pulled up the iron gate of the bookstore to greet the students who commuted to school with the first guests ── on a day in the hill city.

The small bookstore, called Pumen, is located next to the Jiaxian public market. although the population of Jiaxian continues to hit a new low, the number of new primary school students is plummeting, and there are fewer and fewer pedestrians on the street. Occasionally, a few electric scooters shuttle through the streets, and the small bookstore opens day after day.

Over the past few years, he has been so busy that he has no time to open a shop and devote most of his time to the field investigation and literature collection of the Thomson Route. Research findings are published irregularly in various journals, and a blog "Rizhao Jiaxianpu" is set up to publish the latest research findings.

Feldliam, an American historian and editor of Li Xian's Journey to Taiwan, wrote in the Preface to recommendation: "he walked, spent time, observed more photos and analyzed more historical documents than Thomson, and worked harder." Writer Liu Kexiang believes that the author uses the historical background of the 19th century and Thomson's travel route to carry out skillful fieldwork on the ground to "get out of an unspectacular style that is completely different from other translators" and "open up a new perspective for the account of early travel in Taiwan."

Tom was born in the Moon World in 1871, and the picture seems to show the cracks in the glass negatives. The Wellcome Museum was destined to spend his whole life with books, but it also covered him with injuries.

Since high school, you Yongfu has been crazy about books. From Jiaxian to Fengshan for high school, he had to ask his father to help carry books with two poles. He, who likes to write poetry, has a dismal youth. After failing in college, he went to work in Kaohsiung Bookstore. At that time, because of the serious industrial pollution, he went to Taipei to join his second sister.

In 1974, you Yongfu, 22 years old, first went to Wanhua Laosong Bookstore, and then to Jianhong Bookstore on Chongqing South Road. You Yongfu, who loves to keep company with books, likes the Buddhist sutra "beautiful words" most, and "deja vu" seems to have buried the Buddha's fate a long time ago. At the age of 24, he made a vow to study Buddhism. He has been a vegetarian for 43 years since then. At that time, the economy took off and the book market was very good. You Yongfu saw a large number of Tamsui universities. In 1978, he opened the first "Pumen Book Company" on Zhanqian Yingzu Road. He also got to know his wife and had children in Tamsui because of Buddha's fate.

Ten years later, real estate skyrocketed, and the meagre profits of bookstores could not keep up with the soaring rents. First, they moved and could not support the closure of business. When his wife entered the temple for spiritual practice, he was left alone to support the bookstore. From 06:30 to 11:00 in the evening, he had physical and mental problems, so he had to go back to Jiaxian before making plans.

When the family is separated, the wife enters Buddhism, and the old father denies it angrily.

Like many postwar immigrants on the island, you Yongfu's father came from Meishan to Jiaxian in Chiayi and worked hard to become a mid-market businessman collecting dried bamboo shoots. The old father saw that the youngest son who had been single-minded and cultivated had gone northward to struggle for more than a decade, and only got a dragging library of books to return to his hometown. in the face of a house full of books, he could not hide his disappointment and anger, so he became a stranger. Father and son live in the same street all day long, but the old father turns a blind eye to each other.

Fortunately, the eldest brother set aside a vacant room to reopen his business, which is still called "Pumen Book Company." Soon, his wife decided to escape into the empty door and ask for a divorce, leaving him and his only son in primary school to live together.

Later, when the old house caught fire, you Yongfu ran back to the old house to pick up his sick mother and ran away. seeing that his father was still cold, he could not help but kneel down and beg his father's forgiveness, and the father and son recognized each other again under the witness of his relatives. Later, when his father was critically ill in Kaohsiung Hospital, you Yongfu escorted him all the way back to Jiaxian. He said, "fortunately, father and son successfully repaired it."

"in order to gain a foothold, my father worked hard all his life to value the economy, and he could not accept my failure." Looking back on this period of separation in middle age, you Yongfu is still smiling and there is no fluctuation in the corners of his eyes.

You Yongfu, who modestly claimed to be the owner of a small bookstore in the deep mountains, spent 18 years leaving important historical and cultural assets for the small mountain city. Lin Jiyang filmed and cultivated the literary history of Jia Xian, accidentally passing through the history of 148 years ago.

He also opened a bookstore to write poems and met Jiang Mingshu and others in the literary circles of Qishan. The 1990s was the era of great excavation of local literature and history. You Yongfu successively published a collection of poems, "Lace Scissors" (2006). And "Jiaxian Literary and Historical Chronicle" (2006), to fill the gap for Jiaxian local culture.

While collecting historical materials from Pingpu, he found that Chia Xianpu, which had few records in the Qing Dynasty, "in 1871, there was a world-class explorer, Thomson, who stayed for one night, and the residents even held a hot party to welcome the guests!" He excitedly plunged into Thomson's study for eighteen years.

His research room is a small corner of a small bookstore, commuting from here to Thomson researcher letters from Britain, the United States, and France for eighteen years. Government subsidy is zero, so it is more difficult to disassemble historical clues.

You Yongfu also thought about applying for subsidies. The former people's Association, the Ministry of Culture, and the Bureau of Culture all proposed plans, but they actually got nothing. Apart from the long and wasted time of official document travel, he was even more puzzled, why not subsidize staff costs? It is only after being mentioned by others that it takes write-off skills to bottle up the surplus to apply for subsidies. He sighed: "I would rather rely on myself than cheat."

The business of the small bookstore is slow, and with deposits fluctuating between five and four figures for several years in a row, he can't help but worry that cheques written to manufacturers will jump one day. The shortage of resources is not an obstacle, and it is difficult to interpret Thomson's images and text clues one by one.