Yilan

The Lanyang Plain was the country of the Kavalan people, who farmed and fished its river mouths in dozens of villages and long resisted outside settlement because the mountains cut the plain off from the rest of Taiwan. Han Chinese arrived in force only in the late 18th century, when a party led by Wu Sha pushed in from the north and built a stockade at Toucheng. In 1810 the Qing authorities set up a formal administration on the site of modern Yilan, the Komalan sub-prefecture, and the town wall was completed the year after. The Kavalan lost most of their land within a few decades and many moved south towards Hualien.

Under Japanese rule from 1895 the walls came down and were replaced by the ring of roads that still circles the centre, and the plain was reorganised around rice, timber from the mountains and a new railway, which reached Yilan in 1919 and was completed as the Yilan line in 1924. Government offices, schools and wooden official residences gave the town its administrative character, which it has kept ever since.

For most of the 20th century Yilan remained hard to reach from Taipei, either by a slow coastal railway or over a winding mountain pass. That changed in 2006 with the opening of the Hsuehshan Tunnel, almost 13 kilometres long, which cut the road journey to about an hour. Weekend visitors, homestays and retirement houses followed, and the plain has been remaking itself around them since.

Yilan thinks of itself as a cultural county rather than an industrial one, and county government has spent decades on festivals, museums and parks rather than factories. The children's folklore festival on the Dongshan River, held since 1996 apart from a break in the late 2000s, is the best-known result, and the National Center for Traditional Arts nearby keeps glove puppetry, Taiwanese opera and craft workshops going as living trades rather than museum pieces. Taiwanese opera, the only form of Han traditional drama known to have begun in Taiwan, started here.

The town's own rhythms are those of a small administrative centre: temple festivals, school events, morning markets and the county fair. The city god temple and the older Mazu and Guandi halls organise processions with drums, firecrackers and costumed guardians several times a year, and in the seventh lunar month the whole plain makes offerings, culminating in the pole-climbing contest at Toucheng, where teams scale greased towers hung with offerings.

Kavalan identity, long suppressed, has been publicly revived in recent decades, and their name is attached to everything from the plain's history museums to its whisky. Newcomers from Taipei have added cafés, galleries and small presses. The manner of the place is rural and unhurried; Taiwanese Hokkien is widely spoken alongside Mandarin, and people are used to weekend visitors but not shaped by them.

About 95,000 people live in Yilan City, and roughly 450,000 in the county as a whole, spread among the market towns of the plain rather than concentrated in one centre. Luodong to the south is busier commercially, and Su'ao holds the harbour, so Yilan's role is administrative: the county government, courts, hospitals and senior schools are here, and much of the working population is employed by them.

Farming still shapes the landscape, above all rice, with the long scallions of Sansing, kumquats, pears and vegetables on the terraces above. Fishing works out of Su'ao and the smaller harbours, and the mountains behind supply water and, historically, cypress timber. Tourism is now a mainstay: hot-spring hotels, hundreds of homestays among the fields, and weekend traffic that regularly backs up in the tunnel on Sunday evenings.

Life is low-rise and slow by Taiwanese standards. Mornings begin early at temple markets and breakfast shops, the afternoon is quiet, and the night markets do their trade after dark. The issues residents discuss are familiar ones: farmland turned into holiday villas, water and flooding on a plain that drains badly in heavy rain, ageing villages as young people commute or move to Taipei, and the persistent damp of the winter monsoon.

Yilan's food is plainer and sweeter-edged than Taipei's, built on what the plain grows. The three-star scallions of Sansing — long, white-stemmed and mild — are the county's emblem, chopped into the flaky fried pastries known as scallion pancakes that are sold at roadside stalls, or into omelettes and dumplings. Duck is the other great local product: smoked or roasted, sliced over rice, shredded into congee, or served as duck noodle soup in restaurants across the plain.

The most distinctive local dish is gao zha, a thickened stock of chicken or pork enriched with egg, set firm, cut into blocks, crumbed and deep-fried so that the outside is crisp and the inside almost liquid. Banquet cooking on the plain also keeps up the old Taiwanese outdoor-feast repertoire of steamed fish, taro and pork dishes. Kumquats are candied or pressed into a sour-sweet drink, and glutinous rice cakes, peanut brittle rolled with ice cream and coriander, and preserved plums turn up in markets and gift shops.

Night markets are where most visitors eat: Dongmen in Yilan and the larger Luodong market to the south, where mutton soup, fried buns and shaved ice draw long queues. Tea, bubble tea and cold-brewed drinks are everywhere, and the Kavalan distillery just outside the town has made Yilan an unlikely name in single malt whisky.