I am sitting writing in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
Kaohsiung is not somewhere people go for holidays, or as tourists. It’s not a city most people have heard of, particularly, unless they’re in shipping. If you’ve ordered goods from Taiwan, they were probably sent from Kaohsiung.
Taiwan, these days, is known for high-tech chip-making, and being a potential trouble-spot. Older generations mention “made in Taiwan”, remembering cheap and cheerful items with that label from before China grew up, ate the manufacturing world, and loomed over Taiwan itself.
Kaohsiung is at the unfashionable end of the island, the far south, equivalent to the UK’s north. It has the chippy industrial feel, too, like Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle rolled into one. Taiwan’s people in general have a modern independent air, these days, still deeply rooted in a communal Chinese background – now consciously leavened with indigenous culture – but progressive and easy-going. But where those in Taipei and Hsinchu put themselves among the international elite, treating any hint of national feeling as a bit cringe, Kaohsiung is unapologetically local. Not just proudly Taiwanese, but proudly southern.
Being southern, it’s well past the tropic line.
So, a sprawling industrial urban area, around a commercial shipping port, in a backwater in the hot and humid tropics. Just where you’d want to spend August.
But Taiwan is still, past the bustle of daily life, Formosa – the beautiful island, as the Portuguese named it when they found it. And Kaohsiung has a beauty and charm, more likely to get under your skin as it has mine for being subtle.
The beauty the Portuguese meant still surrounds the city, poking up through it in a few places like Monkey Mountain, where you can hike up from urban roads into jungly trails, hiding your backpack zips and packed food from macaques on the way to views out over the port and the Pacific.
I didn’t find much beauty in the city itself on my first visits. Tropical weather, I slowly learned, is hard on anything left outside, and that includes the buildings, so a lot of the city looks permanently tired and weathered at any point. Plants will take over given the slightest opportunity, so anything allowed to weather too much will have trees growing out of it.
That makes the city surprisingly green, though. Shade is prized, so many streets are wide enough for trees to be part of the design, and many residents grow things in pots, around their doorways, on balconies, anywhere something can sprout. Once I could see past the weathering and the sheer bustling busy-ness of the typical Kaohsiung street I learned to like what I see.
When I first visited Taiwan, as a younger man, the beauty I appreciated initially, having arrived in the city and not seen the island itself, was the normalisation of bare legs everywhere. But I got married in that first visit, so I don’t dwell on that.
And, on that point, the Love river flows through Kaohsiung. Not majestically, more apologetically via the channels where it’s permitted, whiffing a bit in places, but the name is enough.
… am I selling the city to you? Maybe not.
Some places are subtle. The flaws come easily to the eye and the memory, while we wonder what it is, exactly, that we like.
Kaohsiung is an easy place. Without pressure to be something (except for neighbours observing that you could be thinner), but plenty of potential to do what you do want. A “yes, and” place, more than a “but” place.
Every year or two there’s another glossy multi-story mall or department store, with exotic food and designer brands, yet the streets of awnings, local shops, 24-hour furniture stores and greengrocers, the street food, all remain.
The metro is growing. Next year a new line and a new station are due to open just by where we live when we’re here. And the recent tram line is brilliant. Not only convenient but attractive, in places a pleasure to ride through scenes that feel like a Miyazaki film. But the streets are still dominated by motor-scooters, even if a lot of them are electric these days.
So it’s comfortable. The kind of comfortable of somewhere that isn’t trying to be something, but just gets on with improving things. And you can do the same if you wish, no pressure.
This year we haven’t done much. We booked our son daily one-to-one swimming lessons with a coach we now discover is a national swimming champion, in a pool that was only opened a few weeks ago, which all feels normal for Kaohsiung, but has meant staying around. Which is fine.
Normally we’d head to the mountains for a few days, with their winding roads, curated hiking, astonishing greenery like a slow-motion biological explosion. We might visit Pintung for walks along the beach. Almost certainly we’d drive somewhere seemingly random to test food that is only made there. We haven’t done any of that this time, which does give me the opportunity to write about Kaohsiung.
It’s an easy place to be, relaxed. I was warned it was hot, but it’s not even that, really. Yes, I’ve hiked up Monkey Mountain at 30C in February, but now in August it’s not much more than that, 32-34C since we’ve been here, and it’s built for it in ways the UK isn’t even as summers reach similar temperatures.
So I’m in Kaohsiung, and I like it.