Great men and women of Asia-Children's series 

On any given Sunday morning in the small city of Chiayi in south-central Taiwan, a merry band of citizens can be seen boarding trucks and riding off to the countryside. In private cars and on motorcycles, others join the convoy until, from near and far, they all assemble at a single site beside a river. Donning bamboo sun hats and baseball caps, the pilgrims take up shovels and hoes, baskets and pails, to build a bridge. Leading the party will be seventy-three-year-old HO MING-TEH, a bald and jolly Pied Piper who has built more than two hundred bridges in Taiwan's Yunlin, Chiayi, and Tainan Counties during the past twenty-five years.
HO Ming-teh, a devout Buddhist and former grocer, had already embarked upon a few modest projects, mending local roads and suspension bridges, when in 1971 a flood swept away an old wooden bridge in nearby Chungpu Township and took the lives of two brothers. As HO well knew, the countryside was full of decrepit wooden bridges. Moreover, no bridges at all spanned many of the region's rivers and streams; to reach towns and markets, rural folk had to ford them. Bridges were needed?proper concrete bridges. HO resolved to build them.
But they are also something more. These bridges have motivated many thousands of Taiwanese to devote themselves weekly to the cheerful work of helping others. HO Ming-teh, the inspiring force, seeks no credit. Buddhism, he notes, enjoins its followers to do good. And so he does.
In electing HO MING-TEH to receive the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his improving rural Taiwan with good deeds and sturdy bridges.
Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Community Leadership, 1995
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[16 p.] : col. ill. 26 cm