Kinmen

Kinmen, long known to outsiders as Quemoy, was settled from the Fujian mainland opposite and takes its Chinese name, "golden gate", from a fortified post built in the Ming dynasty against coastal pirates. Salt, fishing and trade supported the villages, and the island supplied scholars and officials in numbers out of proportion to its size; the granite Wentai Pagoda and the ancestral halls of Qionglin survive from that period. Deforestation left the island exposed to the north-east monsoon, and generations of men emigrated to Singapore, Malaya, Indonesia and the Philippines, sending home the money that built the Western-style mansions still standing at Shuitou and elsewhere.

Unlike Taiwan's main island, Kinmen was never part of the Japanese colony established in 1895, and it remained a county of Fujian. In 1949, when the Nationalist government withdrew from the mainland, its troops held the island, and an attempted landing that October was defeated at Guningtou in the north-west. Heavy bombardment followed in the crises of 1954 and 1958, driving villagers into tunnels and cellars; shells carrying propaganda leaflets continued to fall on alternate days until 1979.

For four decades the island was under military administration, with tens of thousands of troops stationed among a civilian population under curfew and travel restrictions. Military rule ended in 1992, the garrison shrank, and the battlefields, bunkers and tunnels were reopened as visitor sites, many of them inside Kinmen National Park, created in 1995. Direct ferries to Xiamen began in 2001 under the arrangement known as the Mini Three Links, and the island is governed by the Republic of China as Kinmen County, while Beijing claims it as part of Fujian.

Kinmen's culture is Southern Fujianese rather than that of the main island. Hokkien is the everyday language, and the architecture is the clearest expression of that inheritance: red brick and granite courtyard houses with swallowtail ridges, carved screens and painted eaves, built in tight rows around ancestral halls that still organise village life. Alongside them stand yanglou, the Western-style mansions raised by emigrants who made money in South-East Asia, their verandas and balustrades copied from the port cities where they worked.

Wind lion gods are the island's emblem — stone or ceramic lion figures, some centuries old, set at village entrances and on rooftops to tame the winter monsoon and ward off misfortune. Villagers dress them, make offerings to them and count them as protectors rather than decoration. Temple festivals follow the lunar calendar, with the City God procession in Jincheng the largest, and ancestral worship remains strong in a place where most people belong to one of a few long-established clans.

The Cold War is the other layer of identity. Almost every family has stories of shelling, tunnel digging and billeted soldiers, and the military left a working inheritance: knife-makers who forge kitchen blades from the steel of spent artillery shells, slogans painted on cliffs and walls, and a landscape of bunkers, anti-landing spikes and windbreak plantations. Overseas Kinmenese communities in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia keep close ties, returning for festivals and funding temple repairs.

Kinmen County has a registered population of about 140,000, but only some 57,000 people actually live on the islands, since many register for the county's generous benefits while working in Taipei or Kaohsiung. Jincheng is the county seat and the busiest town; Shanwai in Jinhu is the second centre, and the rest of the population is spread through villages of a few hundred people each. Lieyu holds a few thousand, and the small island of Wuqiu is administered from Kinmen as well.

The economy rests on three things: the county-owned distillery, whose kaoliang sales fund much of local government; tourism, drawn by the villages and the battlefields; and public-sector work, including what remains of the garrison. Sorghum and groundnuts are grown in rotation, and oysters are farmed on the tidal flats, worked with the stone posts that fringe the coast. Trade and day trips across to Xiamen shape shopping, business and family life.

The rhythm is rural and early. Villages wake at dawn, markets in Jincheng are busiest in the morning, and evenings are quiet outside the main streets. Ageing and outward migration are the county's pressing concerns, along with water supply, and the fog that can close the airport for days at a time is a fact of life rather than an inconvenience.

Kaoliang, a clear sorghum spirit usually bottled at high strength, is the island's best-known product, distilled at Kinmen since the 1950s and served at banquets across Taiwan. Locals drink it in small glasses with food, and it also flavours the island's cooking: sorghum-fed beef is a Kinmen speciality, served in hotpots, noodle soups and stir-fries, and the spent grain from the distillery is fed to cattle.

Everyday eating is Hokkien. Mian xian, fine wheat noodles hand-pulled and dried in the sun on frames outside village houses, come in a light broth, often with oysters gathered from the tidal flats; oyster omelettes and oyster soups appear on most menus. Guangdong-style congee, eaten for breakfast, is cooked until the rice dissolves and served with pork, squid or liver. Taro grown on Lieyu turns up steamed, candied or in soup.

The sweets are gifts as much as food. Gongtang, a brittle of peanuts and maltose cut into slabs, is made in small workshops around Jincheng and boxed for travellers, alongside sesame and peanut cakes. Shops in the town centre stack their windows with these and with bottles of kaoliang, and the pairing of the two is the standard way to arrive home from Kinmen with something in hand.