Keelung

The bay was used by Ketagalan people long before Europeans arrived. In 1626 a Spanish expedition took the islet now called Heping Island, built Fort San Salvador and founded a small colony; the Dutch drove the Spanish out in 1642 and held the harbour until they in turn were expelled from Taiwan in the 1660s. Under Qing rule the settlement, then known as Kelang, remained a modest fishing and coal port, but the coal seams behind it and the sheltered water in front of it made it strategically valuable. Batteries were built above the harbour mouth, and in 1884 and 1885 French forces landed and occupied the town during the Sino-French War, losing many men to disease before withdrawing.

Japanese troops came ashore near here in 1895, and the colonial government turned Keelung into Taiwan's main gateway. The harbour was dredged and walled, a railway ran south to Taipei and on down the west coast, and passenger liners tied up where the cruise terminal stands today. Allied bombing in the Pacific War left much of the built-up area in ruins. After the war the port was rebuilt and grew enormously with containerisation, ranking for a time among the busiest container ports in the world.

Since the 1990s larger ships and deeper berths have moved much of the cargo trade to Taipei Port and Kaohsiung, and Keelung's population has slowly fallen. The city has turned instead to cruise passengers, seafood and day visitors from the capital, restoring its forts and old quays and redeveloping the land around the station.

Keelung's identity is bound up with the sea and with rain. Residents joke about the weather constantly, carry umbrellas as a matter of course, and take a certain pride in living in the wettest city on the island. The port has always brought outsiders through — Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, mainland migrants after 1949, seafarers of every nationality — and the old town is a compressed mixture of temples, shophouses and colonial-era masonry.

The city's best-known tradition is the Mid-summer Ghost Festival of the seventh lunar month, held here since 1855. It began as a way of ending feuding between settler groups from different parts of Fujian, who agreed to take turns hosting the rites rather than fighting; the clan associations still rotate the duty year by year. Lanterns are paraded through the streets and water lanterns are burned and floated off the beach to guide spirits, and the whole city takes part.

Temple life is strong for a small city: Dianji Temple sits at the heart of the night market, Mazu is honoured near the water, and processions with drums, gongs and costumed figures block the streets several times a year. Baseball, karaoke and long evenings eating outdoors are ordinary pleasures. People speak Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkien, often mixed in the same sentence, and the manner of the place is plain, unhurried and less polished than Taipei's.

A few hundred thousand people live in Keelung, in a built-up strip squeezed between the harbour and steep hills, and the number has been falling for years as younger residents move to New Taipei and the capital. Housing climbs the slopes in narrow blocks reached by staircases, and flat land is so scarce that schools, markets and car parks are stacked into whatever space the terrain allows.

The port still anchors the economy — shipping agents, customs brokers, warehousing, fishing and ship repair — alongside the cruise business, the military and coastguard presence, and the fish trade that runs through the night market and the wholesale market in the old town. A great many people commute to Taipei, and the trains and motorway buses are full in both directions at either end of the day. The city government's long-running projects to redevelop the harbour front and reopen derelict port land are a constant subject of local debate.

The daily rhythm follows the boats and the weather: fish auctions in the small hours, breakfast shops from dawn, quiet wet afternoons, and then the night market and the harbour plaza filling after dark. Landslides after heavy rain, ageing housing and the slow decline of the container trade are the issues residents raise most often.

Keelung is treated as a food destination by the rest of Taiwan, and the Miaokou night market is the reason. Its stalls are numbered and many have been run by the same families for decades. The dish most associated with the city is ding bian cuo, a soup in which a thin rice batter is poured around the sloping rim of a hot pan, half-steamed, then scraped into a broth of pork, dried shrimp, squid, bamboo shoot, golden needle flowers and cabbage. Almost as famous is the so-called nutritious sandwich, a small deep-fried roll filled with ham, cucumber, tomato, a slice of boiled egg and a thick layer of mayonnaise — a post-war invention that has become a local emblem.

Seafood runs through everything else. Crab thick soup, a starchy broth full of crab meat, appears at several stalls; so do tempura, meaning fish-paste cakes in a sweet chilli sauce, oyster omelettes, one-bite sausages, squid soup and sticky rice steamed in bamboo. Cold pao pao ice, shaved and heaped with fruit or taro, ends the evening. The wholesale fish market in the old town supplies restaurants across northern Taiwan, and the quays at Zhengbin and Heping Island serve the catch simply steamed, fried or turned into soup.

Everyday eating is plainer: beef noodle soup, braised pork over rice, thin noodles with oyster, curry rice, and the pastries and buns of the old bakeries. Taiwan's tea culture is present everywhere, from bubble tea counters to pots of oolong, and convenience stores fill the gaps at every hour.