Hualien

Amis villages worked the Hualien plain and Truku communities the gorges behind it long before Han settlement. Chinese farmers from the west reached the river mouth in the nineteenth century and called the place Kilai; the Qing pushed roads over the mountains after 1874 and began to govern the east directly, and conflicts with Indigenous communities ran through the period. The later name Hualien is usually explained as a description of the swirling water where the river meets the sea.

Japanese rule from 1895 made the modern city. The colonial government laid out a grid of streets, dredged a harbour at the rocky shore, and built the narrow-gauge east coast railway from Hualien down the valley to Taitung, completed in 1926; Japanese farming villages such as Yoshino, now Ji'an, were settled nearby, and sugar, timber and rice moved through the port. The Truku war, fought between May and August 1914, broke Indigenous resistance in the mountains and opened them to logging and, later, to the road through Taroko.

After 1945 Hualien became a county seat and an industrial town of marble and cement quarried from the mountains behind it, with veterans who had built the Central Cross-Island Highway settling in the area. The round-island railway was completed in 1991 and the reworked Suhua highway opened in 2020, both shortening the journey from Taipei. Earthquakes have repeatedly marked the city: a strong shock in February 2018 brought down buildings in the centre, and the April 2024 earthquake damaged the gorge and hit the tourist economy hard.

Hualien County has one of the largest Indigenous populations in Taiwan, and the city is where that shows in an urban setting. The Amis, whose own name for themselves is Pangcah, are the most numerous, with Truku communities in the mountain townships and the Sakizaya, recognised as a distinct people in January 2007, centred on Hualien itself. Harvest festivals from July to September, circle dancing, woven and beaded clothing, and wild mountain vegetables in the markets are all part of everyday life here rather than a display for visitors.

Layers of migration sit on top of that: Hokkien and Hakka farmers from the west, Japanese colonial settlers whose wooden houses and shrine remains survive in Ji'an and Meilun, and mainland veterans who arrived after 1949. The city is also the home of the Tzu Chi Foundation, the Buddhist charity founded here in 1966, whose hospital, university and volunteers in blue and white are a visible presence.

Stone is part of the local identity too — marble from the gorge appears in pavements, public art and souvenirs, and the city's craft economy grew around it. Manners are Taiwanese and unhurried: people queue, speak quietly on trains, take shoes off where asked and are generous with directions. Residents are proud of living on the quiet side of the mountains and quick to point out that recovery from the last earthquake is still going on.

About 100,000 people live in Hualien City, with roughly 320,000 in the county as a whole — one of the least densely populated parts of Taiwan, strung along a plain that is nowhere more than a few kilometres wide. The city is the county's administrative, hospital and school centre, and people come in from the valley and the coast for offices, markets and medical care.

Work is in government, health and education, in tourism, and in the cement and stone industries that quarry the mountains and ship out through the port. Farming in the surrounding townships produces rice, daylilies, sticky rice, betel and fruit. Younger people leave for Taipei and Kaohsiung, and the population has been slowly falling, though some return to run guesthouses and cafés.

Days follow the weather and the train timetable. Mornings begin early at the markets, the sea breeze picks up in the afternoon, and evenings gather at the night market and along the seafront. Typhoons and earthquakes interrupt the pattern, and the closure of much of Taroko after April 2024 has been the central economic fact for the tourism businesses that many families depend on. Housing is cheap by Taiwanese standards, the mountains are visible from almost every street, and the pace is markedly slower than in the west.

Mochi is the city's signature. Soft pounded glutinous rice cakes, filled with peanut, sesame, red bean or taro, are made in shops that have been trading for generations and sold in gift boxes that leave on every train; a related speciality is thin sheets of mochi-like rice dough wrapped around sweet fillings. The other classic souvenir is the sweet, crisp rice cracker and the peanut brittle sold beside it.

Everyday eating is plain and good. Wonton soup, with thin-skinned pork dumplings in clear broth, is a Hualien institution with several shops of long standing. Biandang lunchboxes — rice under braised pork or a fried chicken cutlet with pickled vegetables and an egg — belong to the railway and are eaten on the platform as much as at a table. Beef noodle soup, sticky rice rolls at breakfast and scallion pancakes fill in the rest of the day.

Two things set the region apart. The first is Indigenous food: wild greens such as bird's nest fern and bitter melon vine, betel flower, freshwater shrimp, flying fish, millet wine and sticky rice steamed in bamboo tubes, sold at the night market and in village restaurants. The second is what the valley grows — daylily buds, dried and fresh, in soups and omelettes; rice from Yuli and Fuli that is among Taiwan's most prized; and pomelo, sugar apple and pineapple in season. Cold drinks lean on local fruit, and the mountain water is a point of local pride.