🎵 Terraced fields in my hometown were the most beautiful green land I had ever seen 🎶
🎶 The Terraces Are Gone, Replaced by Hotels 🎵
Some landscapes stay in our memories not only because they are beautiful, but because they carry the sounds of life: water moving beside the fields, cattle grazing, children walking home, and people beginning another day of work.
Jay Chou’s “Terrace Field” sings of home while tracing how land changes over time. As cities and tourism draw closer, the question is not simply how to preserve a view, but how nature, livelihoods, culture, and travel can support one another.
Bayen Settlement in Jinshan, New Taipei City, offers a meaningful case. Its water terraces, stone irrigation channels, stone houses, and volcanic landscape have attracted growing attention. Media coverage once brought many visitors and tourism benefits, but their arrival also placed new pressure on residents and the land. Bayen reminds us that the central question of ecotourism is not simply whether a place should be open, but how people can live with it together.
Memories of land are often found in ordinary places.
They may be a small ditch beside a noodle shop, a stream that becomes visible after rain, or a plant growing beside a field ridge. These details may seem unrelated to grand natural scenery, yet they are what make a place feel like home.
The value of Bayen is not limited to the terraces visitors see. Water flows through stone irrigation channels, across the settlement and fields, connecting agriculture, ecology, and everyday life. Water is not merely scenery. It also supports the wet terraces and surrounding habitats.
A place like this cannot be understood only as an attraction. Visitors need to learn more than how to identify an old house or photograph a reflection. They need to understand how a channel supports daily life, and how farmland can function both as productive space and wildlife habitat.
The Terraces Are Gone, Replaced by Hotels
The question is not simply whether development should happen, but what development chooses to leave behind.
Bayen received increased attention after being featured on television and in magazines. Visitors brought tourism benefits, but their arrival also placed strain on relationships between people and the land. Local organisations and residents later worked through dialogue to reconsider the relationship between everyday life, production, and the environment.
This experience is central to any discussion of ecotourism. Ecotourism is not simply about bringing people into nature or arranging activities that appear to connect visitors with the land. It must ask whether residents are willing to receive visitors, how access should be managed, whether benefits return to the community, how many people the environment can support, and whether local rhythms are respected.
Without these conversations, even a beautiful landscape can become an entry point for exhausting a place. More visitors do not automatically mean greater prosperity, and being seen by more people does not necessarily mean the land is being cared for.
Travellers Look Out for the View, but See Only Another Hotel Above
When travel becomes only a matter of looking, landscapes can easily turn into decorations outside a window.
People may set out to experience mountains, coasts, forests, and local life, only to arrive and find a taller building blocking the view. This is not merely about scenery. It also reminds us that when a place loses its ecological and cultural character, development may become increasingly indistinguishable from anywhere else.
Bayen suggests another possibility. Ecotourism there does not need to copy the model of a large-scale attraction, nor turn every corner into a viewing platform. It can begin with resident-led walks, farming experiences, learning about stone irrigation channels, and respecting the boundaries of settlement life.
Past activities in Bayen invited residents to share agricultural practices, stonework, and community stories. Participants did more than take photographs; by touching the soil and joining farming work, they encountered local knowledge through experience. The purpose of this kind of travel is not to see more attractions, but to build a deeper relationship with place.
The balance between cities and nature is not a fixed boundary. It is an ongoing process of adjustment.
Bayen has faced abandoned fields, population decline, and deteriorating irrigation channels. Later restoration efforts worked to bring water back into the terraces and reconnect agriculture, ecology, and local livelihoods. These projects addressed not only the landscape, but also biodiversity, traditional stonework, and resident participation.
This is where ecotourism can make a difference. It should not turn a community into a performance. Instead, it can help visitors understand the challenges a place faces and support residents through thoughtful participation and spending.
Responsible travel may mean joining locally led experiences, respecting areas that are open or closed, avoiding farmland without permission, leaving plants untouched, refraining from feeding wildlife, and treating quiet settlements as living communities rather than photo sets. Travellers should take away understanding and leave behind support, not more waste or disturbance.
Returning to Nature
Perhaps we cannot return cities to a time before change, nor should we imagine nature as a space that can never be touched.
What we need is another vision of development: cities can grow without covering rivers, tourism can prosper without erasing local identity, and buildings can exist by adapting to their surroundings rather than forcing nature to adapt to them.
Bayen does not offer a simple answer. It shows that restoration takes time, community trust must be built, and ecotourism cannot be completed through a single event. What matters is the willingness to ask, before each opening, construction project, and journey: Who benefits? Who bears the cost? Does nature have enough time to recover? Do local people still have the right to say yes or no?
“Returning to nature” does not necessarily mean going back to the past. It means recognizing nature as a condition of shared life. When urban development leaves room for water, trees, wildlife, and residents, and when travel slows down, ecology and everyday life may have a chance to remain together.
In the end, the song of the earth may not simply ask us to remember landscapes that have disappeared.
It reminds us that every construction project, journey, and purchase helps determine what a place will retain in the future.
Bayen shows us that true ecotourism does not turn nature into a product. It helps visitors understand the place they are entering, while giving communities the ability to decide how they are seen, used, and sustained.
We do not have to choose between cities and nature. What matters is whether development leaves room for ecosystems, whether tourism respects local rhythms, and whether we are willing to see the people and living beings that make a landscape possible.
When travel leaves understanding, support, and care behind instead of taking only photographs, cities and the earth may continue singing together.
Easter Egg
On Octobor 1, 2026,
Hamstein stands at the edge of Bayen Settlement,
examining the small forms of life moving
through the stone irrigation channel with her magnifying glass.
