Keelung 400

Keelung, Taiwan’s northernmost city, has a historical and cultural character all its own. In the port’s heyday, people here always looked out to sea, knowing that by boarding a ship they could sail toward the wider world. Even today, the shops by the harbor commissioned to sell imported goods, the shacha curry and gigula in local food culture, and the cafés that fill up every afternoon still hint at how different this city is.

The Keelung snack known as gigula (tubular fish paste) reflects the city’s distinctive history. 

 

Forts facing the world

“People used to think Keelung was a cultural desert,” says Mike San, founder of Keilang Camino, a city tour provider. It was only after he left his hometown of Keelung and went to study in Liverpool, a British port city with a storied maritime heritage famous for its shipbuilding industry, that he realized his native city, too, must possess a rich past of its own. After he returned home, that realization drew him into local history and cultural work.

A dense network of military sites is one of Keelung’s defining features. In 1626, the Spanish landed on Heping Island, bringing Keelung onto the stage of world history. The different peoples and regimes that later arrived all left military defenses here. Here in the Taiwanese city with the highest concentration of forts and batteries, Mike San recalls that when he was young, he would hop onto a family member’s scooter for little excursions to historic military facilities. 

Mike San, founder of Keilang Camino.

Rather than simply reciting flat details such as when different military sites were built, who built them, and which battles they were involved in, Mike San prefers to connect individual forts and batteries into a more comprehensive line of events, even linking them to the broader dimensions of world history.

Take Fort San Salvador, built by the Spanish. It belonged to the Renaissance-era tradition of star forts—defensive structures that developed in response to gunpowder weapons and differed from medieval castles. A similar Western fortification logic can also be seen in Goryōkaku, the famous star-shaped fort in Hakodate, Hokkaido. 

Star-shaped military fortifications emerged during the Renaissance as military technology evolved.

However, as time moved forward, Japan learned modern military knowledge from Germany and France in succession, further improving and building military defenses different from Goryōkaku. In the early twentieth century, the Japanese established groups of modern batteries around Keelung Harbor, evolving from star-shaped bastions to independent artillery platforms. “What I want to say,” Mike San explains, “is that military defense sites are the result of gradual evolution.” The evolution of Keelung’s military venues happens to reflect the development of military technology and thought over the past four centuries. 

Keilang Camino has based its tour itineraries on historical documents and local materials, inviting visitors to experience in-depth cultural and historical travel. (courtesy of Keilang Camino) 

 

Harbor lives

Having grown up listening to stories told by elders who had lived in communities beside Keelung Harbor, Mike San also remembers the prosperity of the days before the port declined, when everyone depended on the harbor for a living. His father, who longed to see the world, was able to travel abroad by working on ships. Other family members repaired vessels for Evergreen Marine, and his maternal grandfather’s small factory produced parts for shipbuilding. As a child, Mike San always looked forward with excitement to the fashionable gifts that seafaring relatives would bring home.

After the 1990s, however, that prosperity faded. With the rise of container terminals, Keelung Harbor’s water depth and hinterland were no longer sufficient, while many of Taiwan’s industries moved westward to China and exports fell sharply. “When we were doing fieldwork, dockworkers told us that for a period of time, what was loaded onto ships for export was not merchandise, but machinery dismantled from factories preparing to move to mainland China,” Mike San relates. “Looking back, isn’t the transformation of Keelung Harbor like a microcosm of Taiwan’s economic development?” 

Keelung Harbor, a microcosm of Taiwan’s economic development.

Perhaps because of this, and out of affection for his hometown, Mike San prefers to focus on the human stories within Keelung Harbor rather than offering an objective periodization of its rise and decline. Building on historical and cultural research, his workshop has organized five harbor-dependent neighborhoods on the west side of Keelung Harbor—Xiandong, Heping, Ren’an, Jigang, and Taibai—into the “Harbor-Building Cultural Route.”

Xiandong could be called the area’s core in earlier days, the place through which residents handled their purchases of necessities. Heping was home to dormitories for harbor bureau personnel during the era of Japanese rule; the buildings were renamed Gaoyuan New Village after WWII and have since been refurbished. Taibai was a community where dockworkers lived. Each neighborhood has its own cultural layers and texture.

Although these communities have faced demolition, relocation, and population loss as Keelung Harbor has declined, meaningful interpretation may allow them to be restabilized based on their 400-year histories. Such a step may give this harbor city—whose past once seemed to have been scattered to the winds—a chance to awaken from its torpor and be reborn as a tourism city. 

Although Keelung Harbor has declined, the city still may perhaps awaken from its torpor and be reborn through tourism.