Sugar (Taiwan), Oyster (Britain) Industrial Railway Tidbits


The history of the Colchester oyster dates back to Roman times. 
Off-season oyster beds. Smelly discarded shells. @Colchester Oyster Fishery 2023


At Horse-New-Year lunch, we talked about our mutual friend Dafydd’s new book - "The Twilight Years of Taiwan’s Sugar Railways" and conversations went quite interesting - 

Hawaii’s Sugar Trains On Narrow-Gauge Rails



We all think an amazing and relatively unknown fact is - Taiwan’s narrow-gauge railway built in 1907 adopted the (successful) transport method from Hawaii.

Then I remembered a bottle of some  'Sugar from Northern Taiwan' I was shown at Kew Gardens London - donated (or sample collected) in 1882 by a Brit Thomas Watters (who if I remember correctly also donated tea to Kew). 



And of course on the subject matter here is Tamsui's miniature railway system which served Tamsui-Sanzi (淡水 - 三芝) during Japanese colonial era. 

Thomas Watters (1840-1901), who had joined the British Consular service in 1863, was Robert Swinhoe's Consular Assistant at Taiwan-foo and Takow in 1865, subsequently becoming Acting-Consul for the absent Swinhoe in 1866. Watters was later to return to Taiwan as Acting-Consul in 1876/7, and again as Vice-Consul at Tamsui from 1880 to 1883.

Erudite friend Victor brought the conversation 'forward' to Great Britain  - 

“Britain’ railway is great and historical” - yeah we all know that. 

“Railway was expanded so people in the city could eat fresh oysters 生蠔.” - Wow! THAT I did not know and straight away I thought about Colchester oyster fishery which I visited (off-peak) in 2023. 

Quick google result showed that indeed Colchester benefited greatly from the railway expansion in 19th-century. 

“In 19th-century Britain, the expansion of the railway network transformed oysters from a locally consumed food into a mass-market commodity, allowing them to be transported rapidly from coastal areas (such as the Thames Estuary and Colchester) to London and inland cities”

“The development of railway infrastructure allowed the transportation of massive amounts of oysters to the big cities. During the 19th century, newly discovered reefs in the English Channel provided oysters that were a food of the poor (Neild 1995). In London alone, over 700 million oysters were consumed in 1864." 

Colchester Oyster Fishery 





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