Taitung

The plain behind Taitung holds one of the most important prehistoric sites in Taiwan. The Beinan site, exposed in 1980 during construction at the railway station, revealed a large settlement of house foundations and several thousand slate coffins, thousands of years old, whose jade and pottery are now held in the national prehistory museum in the city. Austronesian communities — Puyuma on the plain, Amis along the coast, Bunun and Rukai in the mountains, and the Tao on Orchid Island — have occupied the region continuously since long before written records.

Han settlement came late and slowly. The Qing left the east almost ungoverned until the 1870s, when the Japanese expedition of 1874 pushed them to open roads over the mountains and to establish an administration; the Pi-lam (Beinan) subprefecture was set up in 1875 and renamed Taitung Prefecture in 1888, and its main village remained small. Under Japanese rule from 1895 the town was laid out on a grid, a harbour and hot-spring resort were developed, and the narrow-gauge railway up the valley to Hualien was completed in 1926, bringing sugar and rice down to the port.

After 1945 Taitung became a county seat and grew with migrants from the west and with veterans settled in the valley. It stayed the most remote corner of the island: the South-Link railway to Kaohsiung only opened in 1991, completing the round-island line. The old city station closed in 2001 and became an arts site, while the new station drew development to the north-west. Since the 2000s the county has built an identity around Indigenous culture, cycling, festivals and slow travel rather than industry.

Taitung County has the highest proportion of Indigenous residents of any county in Taiwan, and that shapes the city. The Puyuma, who call themselves Pinuyumayan, have their main villages at Nanwang and Zhiben on the city's edges, and their year-end hunting and initiation ceremonies in December are among the most carefully maintained rituals on the island. Amis communities line the coast to the north, and the Tao of Orchid Island are linked to the city by the boats and flights from Fugang.

Music is the most visible expression of this. Taitung produced several of Taiwan's best-known Indigenous singers, and the small stage at Tiehua Village has become the place where their successors perform; the Amis elder Difang Duana, whose recorded drinking song reached a global audience in the 1990s, came from a village on the city's edge. Festivals fill the calendar, from the harvest cycle in late summer to the Lantern Festival ritual in which a man on a sedan chair is pelted with firecrackers in the streets.

Han traditions run alongside them: Mazu and Earth God temples, opera at temple birthdays, and Hakka communities in the valley. The manner of the place is relaxed and unhurried. People cycle, know their neighbours, and talk about the weather and the sea. Residents are conscious of living far from Taipei and tend to present that distance as the point rather than the problem.

About 100,000 people live in Taitung City and about 234,000 in the county, which is large, mountainous and thinly settled. The city is the county's hospital, government and schooling centre, and people travel in from the valley, the coast and the offshore islands for services that exist nowhere else nearby.

The economy rests on agriculture, public employment and tourism. Rice from Chishang and Guanshan in the valley is among Taiwan's most prized, and the plain grows sugar apples, pineapples, tea and daylilies; fishing boats work out of Fugang and the smaller harbours. Incomes are below the national average, and young people leave for the west, so the population has been shrinking slowly — although the county has also drawn in people from Taipei running guesthouses, cafés and studios.

Days start early and end early. Markets open before dawn, the seafront fills with walkers and cyclists at sunrise, and the heat of the afternoon empties the streets. Scooters outnumber cars, rents are low by Taiwanese standards, and the mountains and the sea are both within a few minutes of the middle of town. Typhoons, heavy rain and earthquakes interrupt the year, and the reliability of boats and flights to Green Island and Orchid Island is a standing local concern.

Taitung's most identified dish is mi tai mu, short rice noodles with a slippery texture, served in a clear pork broth with fried shallots and chives, or cold in brown-sugar syrup as a dessert. Beside it on the same counters sits pork blood soup, cubes of set pig's blood simmered with chives, and the plain, careful beef and pork noodle bowls that are the standard of the east coast.

Fruit is the county's calling card. Sugar apples are the crop the county is known for, sold from roadside stalls from autumn through the winter, both in the knobbly traditional form and as the larger, creamier atemoya; pineapples, mangoes, custard apples and roselle from the hills follow through the year. Rice from Chishang in the rift valley is sold in the city as a premium product and served in the railway lunchboxes that the valley made famous.

Indigenous cooking is easy to find here. Millet, sticky rice steamed in bamboo, flying fish from the waters off Orchid Island, wild greens such as bird's nest fern and vine shoots, freshwater shrimp and grilled pork appear at the night market and in village restaurants. Fugang harbour supplies sashimi and grilled fish. For something sweet, the city runs on shaved ice with fruit in summer and on red bean and taro in winter, and the hot springs at Zhiben have their own trade in eggs boiled in spring water.