Chiayi

The plain around Chiayi was Hoanya country before Han settlement, with the Tsou in the mountains above. A Han town grew here in the 17th and 18th centuries under the name Zhuluoshan, later shortened to Zhuluo, and it became a Qing county seat with an earthen wall. During the Lin Shuangwen rebellion the town held out against the rebels in 1786, and in 1787 the Qianlong emperor renamed it Chiayi — "commended righteousness" — a name it has kept ever since.

Japanese rule from 1895 remade the city around timber. Surveys found vast stands of red and yellow cypress on Alishan, and from 1906 a narrow-gauge railway was driven up into the mountains, climbing through switchbacks and spirals to the logging camps. Chiayi became the place where the timber came down: sawmills, drying sheds, forestry offices and streets of wooden houses for Japanese staff were built north-east of the station, and the city grew quickly around them. Its agricultural school baseball team played in the 1931 national high-school championship at Koshien in Japan, a story still told here.

An earthquake in 1906 destroyed most of the old walled town, the Chungpu earthquake of 1941 struck the area again, and American bombing followed in the last years of the Pacific War. After 1945 logging continued for decades before being wound down, and the city turned to farming, food processing and services for the county. Chiayi City was raised again to the status of a provincial city in 1982. In recent decades the forest railway, the wooden staff quarters, the old prison and the tobacco factory have been restored rather than cleared, making the timber era the basis of the city's appeal to visitors.

Chiayi's identity is built on two things: the mountain and the railway. The cypress forests gave the city its wealth, its architecture and its name in Taiwan, and the narrow-gauge line remains the emblem, reproduced on shopfronts, in museums and in souvenirs. Wood is still worked here, in craft studios in the restored forestry quarter and in furniture and carving workshops.

Baseball runs deep. The 1931 Kagi agricultural school team, made up of Japanese, Han and Indigenous players, represented Taiwan at the national high-school championship at Koshien in Japan; the story was filmed in 2014 and is commemorated in the city, and the municipal stadium and school teams keep the game at the centre of local life.

Religion follows the pattern of the south-west: a city god temple at the heart of the old town, Mazu temples along the pilgrim routes that cross the county each spring, Wangye and earth-god shrines in the lanes, and a Ghost Month observed with street altars. In the mountains above the city, the Tsou keep their own language, men's houses and harvest ceremonies. People in Chiayi tend to describe their city as slow, plain-spoken and cheap to live in, with a strong habit of eating out from early in the morning, and they are used to visitors treating it as a staging post for Alishan rather than a destination in itself.

About 260,000 people live in Chiayi City, which is small enough to cross on a scooter in twenty minutes and is surrounded by the far larger and more rural Chiayi County. The economy rests on retail and services for the county, food processing, light manufacturing, schools and hospitals, and on the flow of travellers heading up to the mountains. Farming on the plain — rice, pineapples, bamboo shoots, bananas and vegetables — and tea and coffee on the slopes above supply much of the city's trade.

The day starts before dawn with markets and breakfast shops, and turkey rice is eaten at any hour, including the first one. Offices and schools empty in the late afternoon, and the night market and the food streets fill from early evening. Almost everyone moves by scooter; traffic is dense but slow, and parking takes up much of the pavement.

The city's main pressures are demographic. Young people leave for Taichung, Tainan and Taipei, the population is among the older in Taiwan, and the county's villages are emptying faster still. Water shortages in dry years, air quality on the plain in winter, flooding in typhoon season and the cost of maintaining wooden heritage buildings in a humid climate are all recurring concerns, along with the difficulty of keeping the mountain railway open through landslides.

Turkey rice is the dish Chiayi is known for across Taiwan. Huoji rou fan is a bowl of rice topped with shredded turkey meat, a spoonful of gravy made from the dripping and soy sauce, and a few slices of pickled radish; turkeys were raised here in numbers after the war, and shops selling nothing else have been trading for generations. It is eaten at breakfast as readily as at dinner, often with a bowl of clear soup and a side of braised beancurd or egg.

The other local speciality is shaguo yutou, "sandy pot fish head" — fried fish head simmered in a clay pot with cabbage, beancurd skin, taro, pork and fish balls, brought bubbling to the table. Around it sit the standards of the south-west: braised pork rice, meat-thread soup with coriander and vinegar, fish ball and squid soups, rice noodles, and the savoury rice puddings eaten early in the morning.

Sweet things and drinks follow the climate. Douhua, soft tofu pudding, is served warm with syrup in winter and cold with crushed ice and beans in summer, and shaved ice piled with mango, pineapple or tapioca pearls is the hot-weather fixture. Chiayi is the market town for Alishan high-mountain oolong, sold and brewed in shops around the centre, and a small amount of coffee is grown on the same slopes. Pineapple cakes, dried bamboo shoots and mountain tea are the things people carry home.