【Yizhuxiang】Abundant Luck Taiwanese Hokkien Gift Box (Dragon Boat Festival / Includes Gift Bag)

Winner of First Place Silver A' Design Award in Packaging Design from Italy. The first design work in Taiwan's history centered around Taiwanese Hokkien, recognized with an international award. This is Taiwan's first gift box that directly imprints "endangered mother tongue"—Taiwanese Hokkien—onto the food itself. It transforms text from paper into an edible surface, allowing language to be tasted. Through gifting and "mother tongue transparent stickers" that can be kept and affixed to everyday objects, it is shared in daily life. By integrating archival documents and industrial memory, it revives an endangered mother tongue through taste, turning a 250-year-old cultural heritage into a shareable and collectible emotional experience. The packaging also uses FSC-certified paper and vegetable-based inks to support more responsible and sustainable production methods. The inspiration for this project comes from the 1774 "Siraya Wenski" (Xingang Documents)—generations of treasures held by the Guyuan Huang family in Tainan. It combines indigenous languages recorded in Romanized script, Chinese characters, and hand-drawn maps. The "Xingang Documents," which record indigenous languages in Romanized script, are one of the earliest forms of writing that put language into written form in Taiwan, providing an early historical foundation for the Romanization of Taiwanese languages. It bears witness to early Taiwanese language writing and land exchange, and is evidence of how different ethnic groups understood, exchanged, and built trust. This artifact is treasured by Huang Longzheng of the Guyuan Huang family in the prefecture city. "Taiwanese Hokkien" on the cake: Right: "Hó-ūn lóng lâi" (Good luck comes abundantly) Left: "Tak-kang sū-sī" (Daily peace and well-being) By directly imprinting the characters onto the honey cake, language is not confined to paper, history, or memory. Instead, it re-enters our senses and daily lives through the food itself, the packaging visuals, and the collectible transparent stickers. Through the interweaving of documents, land, sugar industry, language, and food craftsmanship, 250 years of cultural memory are transformed into a shareable and collectible emotional experience. Language becomes not just an object of reading, but an entity that can be seen, tasted, shared, and carried. The mother tongue, which was gradually drifting away from life, returns to the spaces between family, gifts, and everyday living, forming a gentle yet powerful cultural resurgence. Taiwan is a high-quality sugar-producing region. In the 18th century, sugar was one of Taiwan's major export products. The land on the deed, located around present-day Zuozhen District in Tainan, was owned by indigenous Siraya Zhuohou people. Much of the land leased through the Xingang Documents was used for growing sugarcane and rice. After harvesting, the sugarcane was refined into sugar and exported to Nagasaki, Japan, via maritime trade, becoming an important ingredient for Nagasaki cakes. This path, from land, agriculture, production, to maritime export, is the historical backdrop of this work. Yizhuxiang Honey Cake inherits the craftsmanship of Nagasaki cake, using traditional "pine wood box" baking methods and incorporating natural longan flower honey. It is a popular and long-selling product. It not only references history visually but also continues the sweet tradition that spans East Asian maritime trade in its food craftsmanship, creating a complete link between language, land, industry, and artistry. The outer packaging uses the visual appearance of the Xingang Documents land deed, translating the map, text, and paper texture to recreate the visual weight of historical documents. The inner box is presented in gold tones to evoke a sense of gifting and the preciousness of desserts, balancing history with contemporaneity, and culture with commerce. The gift box packaging uses FSC-certified paper and vegetable-based inks to support responsible and sustainable production. Beyond the cultural narrative, it also responds to contemporary design demands for material responsibility and production ethics. (Correction: Tsò-hué bat Tâi-bûn - Let's understand Taiwanese together)