Tainan

Tainan began as a sandbar settlement on the Taijiang lagoon. In 1624 the Dutch East India Company built Fort Zeelandia at Anping and, from 1653, Fort Provintia on the mainland shore, governing a trading colony that exported deerskin and sugar and brought in labourers from Fujian to farm land that had belonged to the Siraya. In 1661 the Ming loyalist Zheng Chenggong, known in the West as Koxinga, landed with a fleet, besieged Zeelandia for nine months and forced the Dutch out. His family ruled Taiwan from here until the Qing invasion of 1683.

Under the Qing the city — then called Taiwan-fu — was the island's capital and its main port, with a walled centre, a Confucian school, guild halls and streets of merchants trading across the strait. It was the largest settlement in Taiwan for two centuries. Two things ended that primacy: the lagoon silted up after the Zengwen River changed course, cutting the port off from the sea, and in 1887 the capital of the new province went elsewhere, first to Toatun in the centre of the island and in time to Taipei.

Japanese rule from 1895 reshaped the city. The old walls came down, boulevards, a canal to Anping, a railway station and public buildings went up, and the surrounding plain was transformed by the Chianan irrigation scheme and the Wushantou Dam. After 1945 Tainan grew outward as an industrial and university city, and in 2010 it merged with the surrounding county to form a municipality of nearly two million people. A science park on its northern edge has since made it part of Taiwan's semiconductor economy, while the old centre has been steadily restored.

Tainan carries its age lightly but insistently. It is often called the city of a hundred temples — the real number is far higher — and religious life shapes the calendar, from Mazu's birthday to the boat-burning rites for the plague gods held in the surrounding districts. Temple associations organise processions with palanquins, drums, firecrackers and costumed generals, and spirit mediums still appear at major festivals. The Yanshui beehive fireworks, in a district to the north, are among the most extreme religious events in Taiwan.

Taiwanese Hokkien is spoken more naturally here than in the north, and southerners have a reputation, which Tainan residents enjoy, for being slower, warmer and franker than Taipei people. Local identity rests on being first: the first Han capital, the first Confucian school, the oldest temples, and an unbroken sense of having been the centre before anywhere else was.

The city is also a centre of craft and design. Old shophouses in the lanes around Shennong Street have become studios, galleries, bookshops and small bars, and the university keeps a steady student population that supports coffee roasters and independent music. Traditional arts survive alongside: lantern painting, temple carving, embroidery for ritual costume, and the puppet and opera troupes hired for festival stages. Visitors are welcome in temples, but courtyards and side halls are places of worship rather than backdrops.

Nearly two million people live in the municipality, which stretches from the coast far inland and includes farming districts as well as the dense old city. The economy rests on the Southern Taiwan Science Park and its semiconductor and precision plants, on machinery and metal industries, on agriculture and aquaculture — rice, mangoes, milkfish and oysters — and increasingly on tourism drawn by the food and the history.

The day starts very early. Beef-soup shops, congee stalls and markets open before dawn and many have sold out by mid-morning; offices and schools follow, and the afternoon slows in the heat. Evening is when the lanes fill again, with families eating out, night markets setting up on their fixed days and temples lit up along the streets. Scooters are the normal way to get around, and traffic is dense rather than fast.

Housing is a mix of narrow old shophouses, mid-rise flats and suburban blocks around the science park, and prices have risen sharply with the chip industry's expansion. Recurring local issues include water shortages in dry years, flooding of low-lying districts during typhoons, air quality on the plain in winter, and the difficulty of maintaining historic timber and brick buildings in a hot, humid climate. The population is ageing, though the university and the science park keep young people in the city.

Tainan is treated by many Taiwanese as the island's food capital, and its cooking is noticeably sweeter than elsewhere — sugar was the crop the region was built on. Eating here means small portions at many shops rather than a single meal. Danzai noodles, a small bowl of noodles in pork and shrimp broth with minced pork and a prawn, began with vendors working the slack fishing season and are the city's best-known dish.

Breakfast is a serious matter. Niu rou tang is raw sliced beef scalded at the table with boiling broth and eaten with rice and ginger; milkfish, shimuyu, comes as congee, as fried belly or in soup; and savoury rice puddings, fish-ball soups and turnip cakes are sold from before dawn. Later in the day come guan cai ban, "coffin bread", a fried toast box filled with seafood stew, danzai noodles, meat dumplings called rou yuan, and eel noodles fried at high heat.

Anping supplies the seafood snacks: shrimp rolls wrapped in caul fat, oyster omelettes, shrimp crackers and dried fish. Sweet things are everywhere — tofu pudding, candied fruit, red-bean ice and, above all, mango shaved ice in summer, piled with fruit from Yujing and condensed milk. Pearl milk tea and iced fruit drinks are drunk all year, and the old shops selling wedding pastries and dried goods remain part of the city's food trade.