Taichung

The basin was farmed by Papora and Babuza communities, who with others formed the 17th-century Kingdom of Middag, before Han settlers from Fujian began clearing the basin in the early 18th century and founding villages such as Litoudian in what is now Nantun. The settlement that grew on the higher ground, traced to 1705, was called Toatun, and a Qing garrison was placed near the present Taichung Park in 1721. Its moment came in 1887, when the Qing government made Taiwan a separate province and chose this central spot for the capital, which took the title Taiwan-fu from Tainan. The capital was ultimately moved to Taipei, and in 1895 the island passed to Japan.

The colonial administration flattened most of the walls and rebuilt the town on a grid turned at an angle to the compass, with a planned drainage system that gave the city its reputation for order, and a new name, Taichū, meaning central Taiwan. A park opened in 1903, the west coast railway was completed through the town, and the red-brick station of 1917 became its symbol. Sugar, rice and banana exports paid for the growth.

After 1945 Taichung industrialised in a distinctive way, through thousands of small workshops making machine tools, screws, hand tools and bicycle parts; Giant, founded at Dajia in 1972, grew into the world's largest bicycle maker, and Merida also builds here. The county and the city merged into a single special municipality at the end of 2010, adding the coast and the mountain townships, and in 2017 the population overtook Kaohsiung's, making Taichung Taiwan's second-largest city.

Taichung has long been Taiwan's second cultural centre, with a reputation for art and leisure rather than politics. The state fine arts museum and the natural science museum both sit here, the National Taichung Theater brought Toyo Ito's architecture to the western suburbs, and West District's cafés, bookshops and galleries make the city a byword for tea-drinking and slow afternoons. The claim that bubble tea was invented in a Taichung teahouse in the late 1980s is a matter of local pride, though a tea room in Tainan claims the invention too.

Religious life is strong across the municipality. The Mazu temple at Dajia sends out one of the island's biggest pilgrimages each spring, when tens of thousands walk for nine days behind the goddess's palanquin, and neighbourhood temples run processions with drums, firecrackers and costumed generals through the year. Military dependants' villages built for families who arrived after 1949 left their own traces, most visibly in the painted houses of Rainbow Village and in the noodle and dumpling shops of the old quarters.

Sport and making things are part of the identity too: baseball at the Intercontinental stadium, cycling on the roads that climb towards the mountains, and a culture of small workshops where owners and machinists know each other's trade. The mood is less hurried than Taipei's and less boisterous than the south's, and locals are used to explaining that the weather is better here.

About 2.86 million people live in the municipality, which reaches from the coast to mountain townships and is now the second most populous in Taiwan, though the built-up core holds only part of that number. The city grew westwards for decades: the old centre emptied as business moved to the Seventh Redevelopment Zone, and only recently have restored market halls, hostels and cafés brought life back to the streets near the station.

Precision machinery, machine tools, fasteners, bicycles and optics dominate the economy, made largely by small and medium firms in industrial parks and back lanes; the port at Wuqi, offshore wind construction and a large service sector round it out. Universities in the north and west bring tens of thousands of students, which is why night markets there trade on weekday afternoons as well as evenings.

Daily life is scooter-based, with breakfast shops from six in the morning, lunchboxes at midday, and families eating out or walking in the parks after dark. Housing is cheaper than in Taipei but rising, traffic and pavement parking are constant complaints, and winter air pollution on the western plain — blamed variously on the coal-fired power station on the coast, on traffic and on factories — is one of the city's most argued-about issues.

Taichung eats late and eats out. The night markets are the heart of it: Fengjia by the university, said to be the biggest in the country, and Yizhong Street beside the schools of North District, where fried chicken cutlets, grilled squid, stinky tofu, oyster omelettes and towering cups of shaved ice pass over the counters all evening. Several snacks now sold across Taiwan are associated with the stalls here, among them the grilled sausage wrapped in a split sticky-rice sausage known as small sausage in large sausage.

The city's two best-known products are sweeter. Bubble tea — black tea shaken with milk and tapioca pearls — was claimed to have been devised in a Taichung teahouse in 1988, a claim contested by a tea room in Tainan, and the drink is now inseparable from Taiwan's image abroad. The sun cake, a flat pastry of flaky layers around a maltose filling, originated here and is the standard souvenir, sold by old bakeries in the centre along with pineapple cakes and mung bean pastries.

Everyday food runs to braised pork over rice, beef noodle soup, thick starchy noodle soup with squid, rice dumplings and bean soups, much of it from the stalls inside the old market halls. The surrounding plain supplies the rest: rice from the basin, high mountain oolong from the ranges to the east, mushrooms from Xinshe, strawberries and pears from the hills, and seafood landed on the coast at Wuqi.