 This book is a discourse on how space changes through history, focusing specifically on the changes in Hakka society settlements and landscape from the Ching Dynasty to the Japanese colonial period. On the surface, this period appears as the replacement of one government by another, but from the perspective of socio-economic development, it also represents the transformation of Hakka society from a natural economy based on small-scale farming, to one founded on a colonialist capitalist economy. This issue is addressed through an historical analysis of the physical landscape of the Meinung plain and space and society in Chutouchiao, Shouchinliao and Meinung villages.
The Meinung community today includes Meinung Township and part of Liukuei and Shanlin rirual areas and is one of the few areas in Taiwan where traditional Hakka society and culture have been preserved relatively completely. Its culture is an extension of a Hakka group from the Pingtung plain - the "Liu Tui (six camps) community," one of the earliest areas to be settled by the Hakka people. As a result of interethnic conflict in the early Ching period, the Hakka originating from Mainland China formed a cross-clan, cross-area "settlers' militia" - the "Liu Tui" community, to protect their settlements, homes, lives and property.
 However, the area inhabited by the "Liu Tui" community also coincided with that of the indigenous Pingpu tribe's "Fengshan Pashe" (Eight Villages of Fengshan) area. In the face of strong pressure on the westcoast from Fujianese people from Changchou and Chuanchou, the Hakka continued to encroach further east into the Eight Villages of Fengshan. Unable to stand up to the organized militia strength of the Hakka, the Pingpu tribe could only flee into the Tawu mountain range in the east. As a result, they came up against the high mountain Paiwan tribe and were trapped in an area that is today the Chaochou fault zone.
Most of the Fengshan Pashe Pingpu tribe were ultimately assimilated by the Hakkas on the Pingtung plain. However, research on the effects on the "Liu Tui" community's society and culture of this large-scale assimilation of the Pingpu people by the Hakka, and the pre-attributes of the Meinung community, which can be used as basic material for the Meinung area, is lacking.
In light of Meinung settlements, the fundamental development of inhabitances and villages was undertaken in 1730 and closed to finish in 1760. Since 1829, more people took part in the imperial examination. As written records such as the household register and the title deed of landholdings in terms of the settlers and gentry were barely preserved, references as to decode the conventional history and the expansion of the Meinung settlement during the Ching period were untraceable.
It was not until the expansion of small farming production and settlers' militia that shaped most areas, known as today's Meinung inhabitance. It consisted of the history of the Meinung community, social and cultural settlements, regional developments and productions in farming bound by specific historical conditions and geographic factors of "Yu Tui" sited on the central of the Meinung area. The "Liu Tui Militia Settlers" served to ease the tensions evoked by different ethnic groups and to protect the isolated areas. Thus, a solid social basis of the Meinung community was established.
Since the invasion of Japan took place during the isolated political climate, the Meinung community of feudalism and semi-natural production economy started reforming accordingly. With great Japanese colonial resources and engineering techniques in use of against natural forces, farms of large-scale joint-venture production were constructed, of which numerous Hakka tenant farmers from the North were attracted to settling in Meinung and resulted in another assimilation of communities.
The comprehensive irrigation facilities set up in the Meinung plain played a key role of rice production in the Kaohsiung area. The exploitation in production, however, led to a result of delivering huge amounts of crops back to the mother country, Japan. In the mid 20th century a new production method of planting tobacco was introduced to the Meinung plain, replacing the traditional production which enjoyed 200 years' long. Huge tobacco leaves and houses, built up in accordance with the cultivation of tobacco next to the traditional courtyard "Huo Fang houses," took on a new look in characteristic landscape and labor force in the Meinung plain.
 The process of social change during the Japanese colonial period was at the core of the changing spatial environment. Fundamental to this process were the imposition of imperial rule on the colonized, as well as the spatial policies and effects of the development (and reproduction) of Japanese capitalism. As a consequence, changes in the functions and powers of rural and urban space occurred in concert with the suppression of resistance in plains (and Taiwan) society by the Colonial government, resulting in spatial changes as Taiwan was transformed into a market and producer for the mother country. Urban areas overpowered their rural counterparts, becoming bases for the further expansion of colonial capitalism. Due to this, the development of the dialectic between the machinery of imperialism and the opposition of colonial society and its historical and social instantiation determined the spatial production of Meinung's characteristics and social groups.
The oppressive agricultural policies of the post-1945 period, with their system of protected contracts for the tobacco industry, linked both human and land production systems. The tobacco industry's intense demand for labor enabled extended families to maintain their lifestyle until overwhelmed by outside factors: the uninterrupted trend toward export oriented activities throughout Taiwan's economy in the 1960s, the establishment of export processing zones, and the flood of young workers out of rural areas. In the Meinung area there was a complete upgrade of tobacco drying equipment and facilities to keep pace with agricultural land rezoning, urban planning, and the flow of labor outward to the newly-constructed industrial districts.
 During the 1990s Meinung was incorporated into the greater Kaohsiung metropolitan area. Tobacco leaf production gradually declined, and land underwent commodification by speculators. This caused Meinung, with its 260-year history of Hakka culture and sweat and toil in the tobacco industry, to lose its historical appearance and authenticity. The intimate relationship between the people and the land has been severed. The society and culture of Meinung, unique in the annals of Taiwan, has entered a new phase of history.
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