Updated: Oct 21
By Tristan Finazzo
The Sky Is Green, The Tears Are Blue
Light pollution from commercial squid fishing looms over this Taiwanese archipelago, once known for its darkness. But some people are fighting to reclaim the night.
By Tristan Finazzo
Photographs by Chang-Ching Su
As a boy, Chen Weijun would lie in the sea-facing courtyard of his home in the Matsu Islands and stare up at a black sky filled with stars. Nearly 70 years later, in late August 2023, he sat in that same courtyard and shared stories of his childhood during the Chinese Civil War. As far back as he could remember, Matsu’s fishing communities had spent their nights in darkness.
This darkness was intentional. In 1949, as the Nationalist military retreated from mainland China to Taiwan, it claimed the Matsu Islands as its frontline and enforced a sundown curfew. To avoid artillery fire from the mainland, just nine miles across the channel, residents were banned from using any forms of light that could expose their position.
Chen and his family slept under martial law and mandatory dark skies for nearly 40 years, until the ban on light was lifted in 1992. And while the pristine night let Matsu’s nocturnal ecosystems thrive, generations of residents came to associate darkness with the looming risk of invasion.
Today, however, an excess of light haunts the islands. The threat of war has waned, but the night sky now smolders green with light pollution. Ever since a fleet of squid fishermen with high-powered green lure lights arrived, the stars of Chen’s youth have been replaced by a constellation of ships ablaze in the bay.
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Out of darkness
The Matsu Islands once enjoyed the freedom of anonymity in the Taiwan Strait.
Long ago, fishermen from China’s coastal Fujian Province migrated out to the small archipelago, where the fish and squid were bountiful. There, they formed communities without national allegiances and quietly prospered beyond the bounds of empire.
But the civil war eventually brought combat to Matsu’s quiet shores, dispossessing the islands of their seafaring heritage, and darkness was its accomplice.
Because of their ongoing war with the nearby enemy, the Nationalist military imposed measures to minimize the vulnerability of their newly occupied territory in Matsu. In addition to banning the use of light at night, martial law declared fishing in open waters “too visible.”
Local fishing activities were seen as a risk to national security, and fishermen were forced to renounce their professions in temples before their goddess, Mazu:
“Should I ever bring home another catch, may my boat overturn, and may I die at sea.”
But the long-time anglers of Matsu knew its waters better than any military men from abroad. They often sailed out to blind spots in the channel and consorted with their counterparts from China—fishermen with whom they shared not a common flag, but a common trade and a kindred tie to Fujian.
Some Matsu natives relinquished their homes for the safety of Taiwan and the distant possibility of change. Those who remained bunked beside soldiers in houses built by their ancestors, while their children slept on the floorboards or in courtyards under the stars.
Hailing from a long line of Matsu fishermen, Chen Weijun has since reclaimed his childhood home and refashioned it as Qinbi Wanghailou, the “Sea-Facing Building of Qinbi Village”, where he manages a traditional homestay on the northern island of Beigan.
Now in his early seventies, Chen is known universally to the island’s few thousand residents as Laoban, or “Boss,” and his endless tales of life as a swimmer, paratrooper, businessman, marathoner, and innkeeper attest to a life of hardy thrills and perspicacity.
But, where the Milky Way once crossed overhead, a sea of light now pollutes the night sky of Chen’s youth.
“The sky used to be full of stars,” he lamented over a table filled with dried fish jerky and homemade rice wine. “It was never like this before…”
As soon as China’s summer moratorium on maritime fishing ends, commercial ships rigged with green LED lights pour out from mainland ports and trawl the seas in search of mitre squid. Known locally as xiaojuan, or “little rolls,” these small white cephalopods are drawn to the specific wavelength of light used by the fishermen.
Long metal rods extend from the ships like spider legs, dangling rows of green lanterns and nets that extract up to 26 tonnes of squid per day.
“This place used to have some of the best fishing in the world too,” Chen said, recalling how the Bay of Matsu once brimmed with his favorite yellowfin seabream. But, in recent decades, a frenzy of ships has increasingly occupied the extralegal “gray zone” between the borders of China and Taiwan.
He sat staring out at the bay aglow with green.
“For every 10,000 fish you’d see then, now you see only one.”
Now the squid are all that remain in large supply, and the once-familiar sea and sky have become unrecognizable to the Matsu fishermen of old.
The wartime ban on light ended more than 30 years ago, but the islands now live with its agonizing overabundance. Instead of courtyards under the Milky Way, the newest generation of children born in the Matsu Islands fall asleep in the incandescent glow of a thousand humming ships.
They believe the night sky has always been this way. They’ve never known it to be anything but green.
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A war of dark and light
The skyglow over Matsu is unlike anywhere else, and the “Matsu Aurora,” as locals now call it, hangs over an archipelago whose identity is rooted in its relationship with both natural light and darkness.
With a total area of just over 11 square miles, the Matsu Islands are home to immense biodiversity. Nocturnal cobras and orbweaver spiders fill the shadows, and rare Sika deer comprise the majority of animal life on several outlying islands.
But Matsu residents agree that its true treasure is its bioluminescence.
Tucked away in its thick grasses, the springtails and glowworms are Matsu’s terrestrial night lights. Along the coast, jumping shrimp and toothed sea fireflies glimmer in the shallow tide, while bioluminescent plankton that glow in moving water, dubbed “Blue Tears,” whirl in the waves at sea.
Blue Tears have long been the pride of the Matsu Islands and a staple of its ecotourism economy. Marketing campaigns have called visitors from around the world to experience their magical bloom, and photos of the islands are seldom without a ghostly blue contour.
In sufficient darkness, the beaches of Matsu alight, and flecks of blue can be seen chasing the tide like sapphires in the sand.
Although Matsu’s artificial lights were suppressed for 36 years, the war could do little to extinguish its natural luminosity. By the time martial law was repealed, Blue Tears flourished in every cove, and the islands’ forests teemed with nocturnal creatures that had grown accustomed to unspoiled night.
People emerged and explored their home beneath the stars for the first time to find decades of pristine and unfamiliar wonders. A cluster of fewer than 200 fireflies was discovered in the mountain glades of Beigan, and the Blue Tears that had once betrayed the positions of nighttime fishermen to the enemy were reclaimed as a natural wonder of the Matsu Islands.
After martial law was lifted, a new “democratic era” brought government compensation for Matsu’s wartime hardships. Streetlights were erected en masse, and where darkness had dominated for generations, electricity consumption soared to more than three times Taiwan’s national average to support Matsu’s renascent economy.
Matsu responded to decades of darkness with an abundance of artificial light. As is instinctual for nearly all people in the modern age, they believed that more light would bring more stability and progress.
But excessive light at night can devastate our biological rhythms. Other species are often even more dependent on darkness, and bright light at unnatural hours can disrupt critical elements of survival like migration patterns, habitat formation, mating cycles, and resistance to disease.
A 2023 study in Science, drawing on more than 50,000 observations by citizen scientists, found that the night sky grew brighter by nearly 10 percent a year, fast enough to double its brightness in less than a decade.
And just as light pollution from growing urbanization began to emerge in Matsu, the “green ships” arrived, and the islands with wartime trauma tied to darkness were suddenly overflowing with light.
Fishing with LED lure lights has been practiced since the early 2000s, but green LEDs only exploded in popularity after becoming widely available in Southeast Asia in the late 2010s.
Green light attracts more bait fish than any other color. Compared with the once-dominant white LEDs, the lower frequency of green lights was also purported to reduce “bycatch,” or the amount of non-target species pulled up in the nets. Its light-polluting effects, however, went unassessed until it was too late. Green LEDs quickly became ubiquitous among commercial fishing rigs.
Though their presence is seasonal, the light pollution caused by the ships is overwhelming, and their numbers have only grown in recent years. Chen Weijun estimates a thousand or more occupy the channel at peak season.
Their LED light engulfs the natural glow of Matsu’s Blue Tears, and with near-zero genetic diversity among its vulnerable populations of fireflies, even minor changes to their habitat could drive them to extinction in the coming years.
In the supernatural green light of the Matsu Aurora, the islands have been confronted with an unenviable choice: the devastation of a wilderness they only just regained or a deliberate retreat to the darkness that, for generations, meant war.
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A prisoner’s dilemma
When martial law was lifted in 1992, the soldiers sent from Taiwan began to leave, and with them the military economy that had sustained life in the Matsu Islands during their occupation. The waters around Matsu have been severely depleted by overfishing, and exporting what remains back to Taiwan, more than one hundred twenty-five miles away, is largely unprofitable.
For the past 30 years, trade with mainland China and tourism have served as economic lifelines for the islands, and Matsu’s economy has been kept alive by the will of its 12,000 residents. And with local communities prioritizing survival, environmental stewardship has become the charge of outsiders with both the concern and capacity to act.
The Taiwan Dark-Sky Association (TDA) has made strides toward filling this role by volunteering to help Matsu reframe its relationship with darkness.
TDA was founded in 2019, when a cohort of scientists and activists noticed an increasingly severe skyglow over urban areas in Taiwan. The group modeled its work on DarkSky International, which has spread its mission to more than 70 countries since its founding in Tucson, Arizona, in 1988. Within months, TDA nominated Matsu’s once-inhabited islet of Daqiu to DarkSky for candidacy as a dark-sky preserve.
Dark-sky preserves are naturally dark places with specific lighting protocols that regulate the presence of light pollution. In Taiwan, the Matsu Islands are known for their isolation. When typhoons make landfall in July, storms can render their sea-level runways unusable, prohibiting the passage of tourists, residents, and supply ships for weeks. In the eyes of TDA, the remote islet of Daqiu was a natural candidate for dark sky preservation.
The group proposed Daqiu as a site for the promotion of dark sky tourism in an effort to conserve the starry skies and nocturnal life that had characterized the Matsu Islands for decades, and the local government was convinced by its potential to help support Matsu’s economy.
What they did not foresee was the surge in green light caused by squid fishing just months after their proposal. At the outset of the 2020 squid fishing season, shortly after TDA arrived in Matsu, an explosion in the use of green lure lights ignited the sky over the islands.
“Of course [Matsu residents] don’t like the green lights,” said Zhou Xiaoma, a Nangan native and Matsu’s preeminent tourism photographer. “The light affects all things in Matsu, including my photography.”
Residents like Zhou feel uneasy carrying on under the green glow each night, but the solution is daunting and complex, and people must prioritize their livelihoods.
“If the stars came back, they could become a selling point for ecotourism,” Zhou said. “But light pollution is a great injury to the night sky, and China and Taiwan are too at odds. We have no means to cooperate.”
Just outside Taiwanese waters, the predominantly Chinese squid fishermen are untouchable by Matsu local officials or TDA. In addition, the green light thrives in the blind spots of international awareness and national jurisdiction.
Unchecked fishermen evade oversight in the gray zone waters beyond the borders of China and Taiwan, and their ill-defined liability makes it difficult for the Matsu local government to call upon the mainland for a solution. Only communication between the governments of Taiwan and China could hope to effect change, and light pollution is eclipsed by the endless list of geopolitical disputes that dominate the discourse.
Elevating the problem of unregulated fishing in the international dialogue requires not a single incident, but a cascade of political action beginning at the grassroots level. Concerned Matsu residents and organizations like TDA represent initial steps in this direction. They believe, in part, that the pressure of public outcry and unfavorable visibility can move the responsible nations to address the root causes of light pollution.
“It’s become an unwinnable fight,” said Axiou Lin, co-founder and chairman of TDA. As long as the green light remains, the skyglow over Daqiu Island will hinder its certification as a dark-sky preserve.
“Every party is a loser in this prisoner’s dilemma,” Lin said. “Fishermen damage their eyes, ship owners overspend on power, and consumers are unaware that they are participating in the destruction of ocean ecology.”
All the while, Matsu’s endangered species seek refuge in the disappearing shadows. Far from the spotlight of public discussion, they fight in vain with the green light.
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A window to the stars
In late summer 2023, veteran astronomer Li Qixin led me through the lightless, web-laced footpaths of Daqiu Island on a quest to quantify its darkness.
As co-founder of TDA, he was tasked with conducting a “lighting audit”—measuring the brightness of the sky from open vantage points around Daqiu—for evaluation by DarkSky International.
Cicadas rumbled all around us as Li led the way through Daqiu’s dense hemlock forest. Periodically, he raised a handheld measuring device toward the night sky and captured its magnitude per square arcsecond with the press of a button.
With the glow of the full moon and our scarlet headlamps, the reading on Li’s digital meter was faint but visible: 19.6 at worst, 20.9 at best. The “dark sky” over Daqiu hovered somewhere between “typical suburban” and “bright rural” on the Bortle scale, the international standard for measuring the brightness of the night sky.
On the other side of the island, a congregation of two hundred was spread out across its grassy summit, serenaded by a group of zitherists from Taipei. They had convened under a handful of pale stars for the annual Daqiu Dark Sky Night.
In 2019, TDA began welcoming conservationists, musicians, artists, and Matsu locals to gather atop the islet in support of its fight against light pollution and in defiance of the goliath fleet of squid ships hovering in the bay below.
By the time Li and I arrived, the music had come to a lull. Murmurs in the audience were hushed as Li pulled out a laser pointer and took to a podium before the crowd.
“Sometimes, when we turn down the lights, things become more visible.” His voice projected up toward the stars. “And tonight, you’re all very lucky.”
Two hundred heads tilted back, mouths agape, as Li aimed his laser upward. The faintest band of stardust could be seen cutting across the sky.
Despite the green light, Daqiu remains one of the darkest places in the Matsu Islands. And the sounds of amazement that evening suggested it was the first time many residents had laid eyes on the Milky Way.
Later that night, Li and I took shelter from a fierce summer squall in a fluorescent 7-Eleven back on Beigan.
“Matsu’s elementary school children are unaccustomed to a normal night sky,” he sighed as we sat in the front window, staring out at the storm.
“It’s uncanny for us, their parents’ generation, who grew up when the night sky was always dark.” Now the Director of the Kaohsiung Astronomical Society, Li recalled a time before the green lights when the night was full of natural wonders, ripe for observation.
“But tonight might have been the last Daqiu Dark-Sky Night,” he admitted as the skies outside began to clear.
He was right.
Government funding for the project halted not long after the event, and while the threat of shelling has ceased, worsening cross-strait relations continue to push issues of light pollution and fishing regulation further down the diplomatic agenda. In 2024, TDA was forced to abandon its Daqiu Dark Sky project altogether.
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Defending darkness
Working out of Matsu’s oldest military high school, a single-story row of white stone classrooms that bakes in the Nangan sun, Huang Kaiyang has been a tireless advocate for the people of Matsu his entire career.
Before founding the Matsu Youth Development Association, where he now helps young Matsunese professionals connect with the culture of older generations, Huang served as TDA’s first liaison to the Matsu Islands. He drafted a 400-page proposal for dark sky conservation on Daqiu Island and successfully lobbied Matsu’s county leadership to pass one of the nation’s first pieces of legislation aimed at controlling light pollution.
Developed in coordination with Matsu’s Environmental Resource Bureau, the light pollution ordinance recognized the “impact of the Matsu Aurora on the lives of local people,” Huang recalled. But its primary focus was on creating policies to address light pollution from sources within the Matsu Islands, where the jurisdiction of the county government is unambiguous.
It enabled the creation of “light-sensitive areas” to protect the islands’ Blue Tears and rare fireflies and banned development on outlying islands, where light pollution disrupts the migration of Matsu’s critically endangered crested terns. Upper limits were placed on the brightness of street lights, roadside advertising was restricted, and fines were imposed for violating limits on artificial light.
Despite acting in the interest of the islands’ environment, however, government-enforced restrictions on light occupy an unsettling place in the memory of Matsu natives.
“Up until 1992, the concept of ‘dark skies’ was a kind of trauma for the people of Matsu,” Huang explained. But in 2020, when a rare species of flightless fireflies reappeared in the grass beside a hostel on Beigan, local people started to consider the protective value of dark skies.
“When the fireflies returned, so did people’s childhood memories,” he said. “This is how the dark sky concept began to appeal to people’s identity.”
For some, trauma from the wartime ban on light was overcome by memories of Matsu’s natural beauty. Others recognized the ecotourism value of its bioluminescent wonders. In either case, residents of the Matsu Islands began to consider a willful return to darkness.
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The Mother Ancestor
On my last night in Matsu, I sat at a lacquered wooden table in the courtyard of the Sea-Facing Building of Qinbi Village, staring out across the channel. Inside his childhood home, Laoban prepared a feast of dried squid, sea bream, fish noodles, and other delicacies fresh from the sea.
With a full pipe and a bottomless supply of rice wine, he regaled me with stories of his past lives in the light of the Matsu Aurora; stories of the “mythical terns” he had ventured to see on the faraway island of Liangdao; of the arrival of electric lights; of the 50,000 soldiers who had once occupied Matsu during the war, and the 3,000 that remain in reserve.
In recounting Matsu’s long and tortuous history, he spoke of a legend that has endured since the time of its earliest inhabitants:
It was said that, during the Song Dynasty, a fisherman’s daughter named Moniang was consumed by the vengeful seas. Overcome by devotion, she had swum into the monsoon in search of her lost father and, having succumbed to exhaustion, her body later reached land on the shores of Nangan. Moved by her piety, the villagers of Tieban built a grand temple in honor of Moniang, and she was resurrected as the Mother Ancestor, Mazu (Matsu), protector of fishermen, and the namesake of her descendants’ home.
Today, the Cold War has thawed in the fever of globalization, and many of the fishing families once displaced from Matsu have returned and laid down roots. Instead of mountaintop military men, a 100-foot statue of Mazu now towers over Nangan, protecting her communities. Each night during the fishing season, the Mother Ancestor is met by an armada of squid fishermen that dominate the sea and sky.
TDA’s effort to curb artificial light in the Matsu Islands is a Herculean ambition, and the global epidemic of light pollution is even more daunting. The fate of the night now rests on the cooperation of historically warring nations, raising awareness about a problem most people see as a solution, and protecting the parts of our world that stand to lose the most.
But night is immortal in this place. Despite the whir of ships in the bay, the cicadas rumble in the distance, and Blue Tears still gather in the shadows.
Even in exile, the stars are fighting their way back.