Hengchun

The Hengchun peninsula was the country of Paiwan communities long before any walled town stood on it, and Qing officials treated the far south as territory beyond effective administration. That changed after 1871, when sailors from the Ryukyu Islands were wrecked on the coast and killed at Mudan, and Japan used the incident to land an expedition in southern Taiwan in 1874. The episode exposed how little control the Qing exercised over the island's southern tip.

The response was a town. Shen Baozhen, the viceroy of Liangjiang who toured Taiwan in 1875, noted the year-round greenness of the place during his inspection of 1875, and a county seat was built there; work on the walls ran from 1875 to 1879 and the new county was named Hengchun, 'eternal spring', for its climate. The wall was laid out with attention to the surrounding peaks and to feng shui, with four gates, the western one facing north-west. All four still stand, the only complete set of original gates in Taiwan, along with stretches of the wall; the site has been protected since 1979.

Hengchun stayed a small agricultural and fishing centre under Japanese rule and after 1945, growing onions, sweet potatoes and tea and sending boats out from the harbours on either coast. Tourism arrived with the designation of Kenting National Park in 1984, the first in Taiwan, which turned the beaches south of the town into a national holiday destination. The 2008 film Cape No. 7, largely shot in and around Hengchun, brought a further wave of visitors. The town has kept its own character as the everyday centre of the peninsula, while the resort economy has concentrated along the coast.

Hengchun's strongest cultural mark is musical. The town gave its name to a family of folk songs, sung to the two-stringed yueqin, whose melodies carry improvised words about work, migration and longing; the best known of them, Sixiangqi, is familiar across Taiwan. Chen Da (1905–1981), a Hengchun singer whose recordings were made by visiting folklorists, became the tradition's defining voice, and the town still holds competitions and classes to pass the songs on to younger players.

The peninsula is mixed in its make-up. Hokkien-speaking farming and fishing families, Hakka households, Paiwan communities in the hills of Mudan and Manzhou, and more recent arrivals working in tourism all share the district, and temple life provides much of the shared calendar. Local temples hold the usual cycle of birthday festivals for their deities, and Ghost Month is marked with street offerings and temple rites as it is across the south.

Everyday manners are Taiwanese: queuing, quiet voices on buses, shoes removed indoors where asked, and a general willingness to give directions to a lost visitor. The contrast between the two economies is part of the town's identity — the beach strip runs on holidaymakers and noise, while the streets inside the wall keep the rhythms of a small agricultural town, and residents are conscious of the difference.

About 30,000 people live in Hengchun Township, with several thousand more in neighbouring Checheng and Manzhou. The population is older than Taiwan's average, as younger people leave for Kaohsiung and the north, and it swells enormously at summer weekends and during festivals, when the peninsula's roads and water supply come under strain.

Work divides between farming, fishing and tourism. Onions are the signature crop, planted in autumn and harvested in early spring, with sweet potatoes, mangoes, bitter melon and a small amount of tea grown on the eastern hills. Fishing boats work out of Houbihu and the smaller harbours, supplying restaurants on the coast. The national park, the aquarium at Checheng and the hotels of Kenting employ a large share of residents, and the nuclear power station on the west coast, whose last reactor was shut down in 2025, was for forty years part of the local economy and of local argument.

The daily rhythm is early. Markets and breakfast shops open before dawn, fieldwork and fishing are done in the cool of the morning, and afternoons slow down in the heat. Scooters are the normal way to move. Wind shapes the winter: the monsoon blows for months across the low saddle of the peninsula, strong enough to bend trees and to be used for drying onions and flying kites, and it is the main reason the peak season here runs opposite to much of the island's.

Hengchun's most identified dish is ludousuan, a dessert of hulled and split mung beans simmered until soft and served in a light brown-sugar syrup — hot in the cooler months, or poured over shaved ice in summer. The name translates as 'mung bean garlic', a reference to the way the split beans look rather than to any garlic in the bowl, and several long-standing shops around the old town sell little else.

Onions run through the rest of the local cooking. The peninsula's winter wind produces small, dense, sharply flavoured bulbs, sold fresh after the spring harvest and turned into onion pancakes, crackers, pickles and sauces in the town's shops. A little tea is grown on the windy east side of the peninsula around Manzhou, and is sold mainly near where it is picked.

Seafood dominates the coast. Houbihu's harbour has a fish market and a row of restaurants working with what the boats bring in, including sashimi from tuna, mahi-mahi and sailfish, along with squid, shellfish and fish soups. Kenting's evening street market adds grilled squid, skewers, fried chicken and the usual Taiwanese night-market range, and it sells a great deal of fruit ice and cold drinks in summer. Inside the wall, the food is plainer and cheaper: braised pork over rice, noodle soups, stuffed rice rolls at breakfast, and the sweet potato and mango that grow in the fields around the town.