Lukang

Lukang grew where a creek met the Taiwan Strait on a stretch of coast facing Fujian directly across the water. Han settlement spread over the Changhua plain in the 18th century, and in 1784 the Qing authorities opened the harbour to licensed trade with Quanzhou, beginning a heyday that ran to about 1845. Junks brought cloth, pottery, timber and building stone and carried away rice and sugar from the plain, and within a generation the town was the busiest port in central Taiwan. A saying ranking the island's settlements — first Tainan, second Lukang, third Mengjia in what is now Taipei — fixed its place in the popular memory, and the town's population reached about 20,000.

Money from that trade built the town that survives. Merchant guilds organised by home region in Fujian funded the temples, and wealthy families raised brick shophouses with deep, narrow plots running back from the street. Craftsmen brought from the mainland worked in wood, stone, tin and lantern paper, and the town acquired a reputation for scholarship as well as commerce.

The decline was as clear-cut as the rise. The Zhuoshui River carried silt north along the coast, the harbour shallowed through the 19th century and larger ships could no longer reach it. Trade with Fujian was further cut after Japan took Taiwan in 1895, and the new north–south railway ran through Changhua several kilometres inland — by some accounts because the town itself refused to let the line through — leaving Lukang off the main route. The town stagnated for decades — which is why so much of it was never rebuilt. From the 1970s and 1980s the surviving lanes, temples and workshops were recognised, restored and protected, and Lukang became a place people travel to precisely because history passed it by.

Lukang thinks of itself as a town of temples and craftsmen, and the two are connected: the demand for altars, carvings, incense, lanterns, embroidery and tinware kept skills alive here long after they faded elsewhere in Taiwan. Workshops still make lanterns painted by hand, beaten tin vessels, fans and wooden ritual objects, and several are open to visitors who want to watch or try the work.

Religious life is dense even by Taiwanese standards. The Mazu temple draws pilgrims from across the island, the Longshan Temple is one of the finest pieces of Qing architecture in Taiwan, and dozens of smaller shrines mark guilds, trades and neighbourhoods. The festival calendar follows the lunar year: Mazu's birthday in the third month, the Dragon Boat races in the fifth, and a Ghost Month in the seventh observed here with particular seriousness, when street altars appear outside houses and shops.

Taiwanese Hokkien is widely spoken, and older residents use vocabulary and pronunciations traced back to Quanzhou. Folk performance survives alongside the rituals — glove puppetry, the nanguan music the town's Quanzhou settlers brought with them, and temple opera troupes hired for festival days. Residents are used to weekend crowds but live in the same lanes those crowds walk through, so doorways, courtyards and family altars glimpsed from the street are private space rather than exhibits.

About 85,400 people live in Lukang Township, most of them outside the historic core in newer housing and farming villages. The old quarter itself is small, with an ageing population, and many of the shophouses combine a shop or workshop at the front with the family's living space behind. Tourism is now a principal source of income, alongside farming on the plain, oyster and fish farming on the coast, and jobs in the factories and machinery workshops of Changhua County and Taichung.

The rhythm is a small-town one. Markets and breakfast shops open before dawn, temples fill early with older worshippers, and the lanes are quiet on weekday mornings. Crowds build in the afternoon and are heaviest at weekends and on public holidays, when coaches arrive and the snack stalls run out. Evenings are short: most shops close early, and after the day visitors leave the old streets belong to residents again.

Pressures are familiar ones for a preserved town. Young people leave for Taichung and Taipei for work and study, the cost of maintaining old timber and brick buildings is high, and the balance between souvenir shops and ordinary trades shifts year by year. Scooter traffic, parking and the strain that weekend crowds put on narrow lanes are recurring local arguments, and the county has worked to keep vehicles out of the core.

Lukang's food is coastal and old-fashioned. Oysters raised in the shallows west of town are the staple: fried with egg and starch into o-a-tsian, the oyster omelette found across Taiwan but claimed with particular confidence here, cooked into mee sua, thin wheat vermicelli in a thickened broth, or deep-fried in fritters. Shrimp cakes, squid and small fish from the strait are sold in the same stalls, and meatballs and rice dishes fill out the savoury end.

The town is better known still for its pastries, a legacy of merchant wealth and of the offerings temples required. Niu she bing, "ox-tongue cakes", are long flat pastries of flaky dough with a light sweet filling, and mung bean cakes, sesame sweets and wedding pastries are sold in boxes by shops that have traded on the same streets for generations, among them Yu Jen Jai, whose cakes are known well beyond the town. Many are bought as gifts rather than eaten on the spot.

Sweet soups and cold desserts are the other constant: tofu pudding served with syrup and beans, shaved ice piled with fruit in summer, and yu yuan, taro balls, in a warm broth in winter. Tea is drunk everywhere, much of it oolong from the Nantou hills inland, and cold sugarcane juice and plum drinks are sold from carts on hot afternoons.