Kaohsiung "Light"--The City of Industry Diversifies

The earliest name for Kaohsiung was "Takau," a word from the indigenous Makatao tribe meaning "a bamboo grove" where enemies can be repelled. Later Han Chinese settlers took the pronunciation of the aboriginal place name and married it to similar sounding Chinese phrases-da gou ("beat the dog"), and alternatively da gu ("beat the drum"). The name originally referred to what is today Kaohsiung City's Gushan District, but later the port also came to be called Dagou Port.

Historical records indicate that the earliest Han Chinese immigrants here settled the area known today as Qijin. In the early days it was called "Qihou."

Kaohsiung has all the charms one would expect to find in a seaside metropolis.

The Japanese, who colonized Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, took the first steps to modernize the port, building up facilities there in a three-phase project that began in 1908. They also took steps to overhaul the city of Dagou. The whole purpose of these activities was to support Japan's plans for southward military conquest, but in the process they laid the foundation that would eventually support the development of the biggest port in Taiwan.

After dredging a navigation channel, the Japanese used the dredged up silt for a land reclamation project that by 1912 resulted in a whole new city district-Hamaxing.

In 1920, the Japanese gave the city the name "Takao," using for the first time the kanji (Chinese characters) that are today pronounced Kaohsiung, though pronounced takao in Japanese. In 1924, the Takao District of Takao County, which was then part of Takao Prefecture (which covered all of today's Kaohsiung special municipality plus Pingtung County) was upgraded to Takao City, and the seat of the prefectural government was relocated to the district now known in Chinese as Hamaxing. (The name Hamaxing derived from the Japanese word Hamasen, which referred to the coastal rail line that passed through the fish market.) This shifted Takao's center of gravity from Qihou to Hamaxing (the southern part of today's Gushan District).

In 1939, the seat of government was moved once again, from Hamaxing to the Yancheng district, the center by then of all that was fashionable in Takao. This included the Yoshii Department Store, which opened in 1941. The building was five stories tall, and had elevators running between the floors. This was all very new to the people of Taiwan at that time.

Before the rise of the eastern and southern parts of Takao, Yancheng was the administrative and commercial heart of the city. Statistics from 1957 show that Yancheng accounted for fully half of all the business tax revenue generated within the city, a measure of just how commercially active the district was.

In the 1960s, the focus of economic policy shifted from import substitution to export expansion. In 1966, the Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone was established in Qianzhen District, and within two years over 50,000 people were employed there, a figure large enough to account for one in every three residents of Qianzhen District.

After the government launched the "Ten Major Construction Projects" in the 1970s, smokestacks became a symbol of Kaohsiung. State-run corporations such as Chinese Petroleum, China Steel, and China Shipbuilding all created job opportunities in the local area and added to government coffers. At the same time, however, they also left a legacy of pollution in Kaohsiung.

According to Lu Wei-ping, director-general of the Kaohsiung Urban Development Bureau, Kaohsiung has always been called upon over the past 50 or 60 years to "do the dirty work" in the course of Taiwan's economic development.

"Its air is thick with the smell of petroleum. Kaohsiung has long been defined as a blue-collar metropolis."

Canned pineapples were once the principal product of the Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone, but precision instruments now rule the roost. The zone presents a microcosm of the stages of Taiwan's industrial restructuring.

Taipei, by contrast, has tended to play the role of the yuppie in Taiwan economic development.

In the late 1970s, as information technology arose as a driver of global economic growth, the government set up a northern Taiwan industrial corridor, anchored by the Hsinchu Science Park. Lu Wei-ping opines that during that round of restructuring of the national economy as a whole, Kaohsiung was still being expected to play the role of "heavy industrial city."

Kaohsiung never did raise any complaints about what it was called on to do in support of the nation's economic development. However, people did come to see that a change was needed. And top priority was the need to clean up the malodorous Ai River.

Known to the Japanese as the Takao River, the Ai River flows through the heart of Kaohsiung and into the sea at the Port of Kao-hsiung. Following the development of the local economy, most of its pollution came from household gray water and large volumes of factory discharges.

Since plans for the Ai River cleanup were first adopted in 1979, the project has continued under nine different mayors. Clear improvement was evident by the term of Frank Hsieh, the municipality's second directly elected mayor. The sewer hookup rate for households increased from 1.1% in 1995 to 40% by 2005, and as of July 2011 stood at 60%.

For all visitors to Kao-hsiung, it is now de rigueur to take a stroll along the Ai River and stop there for a coffee. Lu Wei-ping reports that a cleaned up Ai River has generated an entire riverside and dockside economy, including construction projects and infrastructure investments.

Built in the early years of Japanese rule, the stately old Qiaotou sugar plant has now been converted into a film and television studio.

In the rise to prominence of the cultural and creative industries, Kaohsiung has not taken a back seat to Taipei or Taichung. The city's charms as a seaside metropolis and ocean port, as well as the historic background of the old wharves in the harbor, have turned out to be important sources of creative inspiration.

An entertainment software subsidiary of Sony took up quarters last year in a 1650-square-meter warehouse in the Pier-2 Art Center in Yancheng District. There it has set up the largest R&D center in Asia for video game consoles, and is planning to hire software developers who have been trained by the company in cooperation with local I-Shou University.

This is the first time a major international firm has located in Kao-hsiung in the more than 20 years since local game-software giant Softworld International Entertainment set up operations here.

Pier-2 Art Center is located, as its name suggests, on Pier 2 in Basin 3 at the Port of Kaohsiung. The warehouse there, which originally belonged to the Taiwan Sugar Corporation and covers an area of about 2500 square meters, fell into disuse after the decline of Taiwan's sugar industry. The municipal government took it over in 2000, spent two years converting it into a venue for exhibits and performances, then turned over its management to an outside contractor.

It was only after the municipal government's Bureau of Cultural Affairs took over the management of the facility in 2006, however, that Pier-2 truly metamorphosed from an abandoned hulk into a dynamic arts center. Pier-2 is now home to crossover art shows such as the Kaohsiung Design Festival and the Delight of Chinese Character Exhibition, which among the younger crowd are now the most popular urban events of the year.

According to Jian Meiling, director of the Pier-2 Art Center, the facility is bursting with the energy of "an innovative generation," and is now a must-see Mecca for avant-garde designers from colleges and universities throughout southern Taiwan. The number of visits in 2008 came to 160,000, and the number jumped to 900,000 in 2010. In 2011 the number already eclipsed 800,000 by July.

Liu Xiumei, deputy director-general of Kaohsiung's Bureau of Cultural Affairs, remarks that Sony was attracted to Pier-2 not so much by its portside location as by the young, bold, and boundlessly creative atmosphere of the place.

The Kaohsiung City Economic Development Bureau estimates that the Sony subsidiary could generate NT$1.8 billion in sales during its first decade at Pier-2. In addition, the bureau expects that nearly 100 game makers and cinema production firms may locate at the facility within the next five years.

Sony's move into the Kaohsiung harbor zone has piqued the interest of other big international players in the digital industry. According to the Bureau of Cultural Affairs, other companies that have expressed serious interest in locating at Pier-2 and visited numerous times to study the area include Rhythm & Hues Studios (a big Hollywood visual effects studio) and Huhu Studios (a digital media firm from New Zealand).

In the early post-war years, the Ai River was used to transport imported logs. After several decades of rapid economic growth, the Port of Kaohsiung grew to handle the world's third-largest volume of container traffic.

Following the merger of Kaohsiung County and Kaohsiung City, the second step in Greater Kaohsiung's migration from heavy industry to a culture-centered "light economy" has been to take the Qiaotou sugar plant in former Kaohsiung County and convert it into a filming studio for cinema and television.

Director Wei Te-sheng spent NT$700 million making Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale, an epic tale of the struggle of an indigenous tribe in Taiwan against the Japanese colonial authorities. In just its first four days in the theaters, the film grossed over NT$100 million at the box office. It has been a huge morale boost for the domestic film industry, to be sure, but has also trained a spotlight on the serious lack of film studio facilities in Taiwan.

Kaohsiung was once derided as a cultural wasteland, but things have changed. The municipal government in 2003 budgeted NT$10 million for subsidies to attract movie makers to film in the city. The subsidies are given to any movie maker who agrees to do a film in which at least a quarter of the movie takes place in scenes shot in Kaohsiung, provided that the film wins a prize at a major international film festival. In 2009, the city created the nation's first center for the support of movie filming. These days, there is no place in Taiwan that is more cinema-friendly than Kaohsiung.

Films are a multinational agglomeration of capital, and a medium that roams the globe. The financial subsidies provided by the city of Kaohsiung may seem like a big waste of money that couldn't possibly build Kaohsiung into "the Hollywood of Taiwan," but they are, in fact, a sure-fire way to market the city. Mayor Chen Chu explains that a film set in a given city is the fastest way to familiarize the world with that city, which is why she hopes to "use cinema to write the history of Kaohsiung" and get the city known internationally.

Bureau of Cultural Affairs director-general Shih Che points out that from 2007 to 2010, over one-third of all domestic productions were filmed in Kaohsiung. The city features prominently, for example, in Leon Dai's No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti and Tsai Yueh-hsun's Black & White.

If the film and television industry continues to be a major policy focus, then it should be industrial policy we're talking about, not just culture policy. The first thing that is needed is to establish filming sets or entire film studios.

Now that Kaohsiung County and Kaohsiung City have merged, Kaohsiung has a much bigger hinterland. The former Kaohsiung County government once lent director Yang Fan the Qiaotou sugar plant for the filming of Prince of Tears, after which the plant became a hotspot for the film and television industry.

Built in 1901, after its closure in 1999 the sugar plant became a tourist attraction thanks to the many fine examples of old baroque and Japanese architecture on the premises.

Liu Xiumei, deputy director-general of the Bureau of Cultural Affairs, notes that the sugar plant differs from the avant-garde, post-modern Pier-2 in that the Qiaotou site still preserves the atmosphere of the 1950s.

Canned pineapples were once the principal product of the Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone, but precision instruments now rule the roost. The zone presents a microcosm of the stages of Taiwan's industrial restructuring.

In addition to Pier-2 and the Qiaotou sugar plant, other Greater Kaohsiung cultural hotspots include the Da-Dong Art Center and Wei Wu Ying Center for the Arts. The former is scheduled to open late this year while the latter will open the year after next, both in Fengshan.

In addition, Kaohsiung has ambitiously set its sights on replacing Kending as the home of the annual Spring Scream rock festival. The venue it has in mind is the Kaohsiung Maritime Cultural & Popular Music Center, which is set to open in 2014 at piers 14 and 15.

Urban Development Bureau head Lu Wei-ping stresses that the municipal government first did a study and made sure that there was sufficient demand for such facilities before undertaking the project. They "aren't going to sit in disuse and become 'mosquito palaces' because the demand for places like this has yet to be satisfied in Kaohsiung."

Kaohsiung's switch from heavy industry to a "light economy" driven by the service sector is in keeping with a global economic restructuring trend. The "world's factory floor" has moved off to places like Southeast Asia and Africa, where wages are far lower than in China and India. Taiwan long ago lost the competitive advantage it enjoyed 20 or 30 years ago as an exporter of OEM goods. There were 2,347 factories in Kaohsiung City in 1991, but the number had dropped to 1,461 by 2010.

But just as global economic restructuring cannot come to fruition overnight, neither can the remaking of Kaohsiung be achieved all at once. For all the municipal government might wish otherwise, it must still accept the reality that factories and smokestacks remain a feature of the skyline in both urban and rural Kaohsiung.

"The people of Kaohsiung got used to this 'co-existence' a long time ago," says Lu Wei-ping. "It is true, on the one hand, that Kaohsiung still has smokestacks all over the place. On the other hand, though, Kaohsiung does have a clean Ai River and so many urban wetlands that we have strung them together into a wetlands corridor."

Lu Wei-ping goes on: "In rating the competitiveness of cities, we always used to focus on population, financial resources, human resources, and city size; now, however, we look at culture, the state of the environment, sustainability, and the ability to link up with the rest of the world. A city that doesn't score well on these latter benchmarks can be nothing more than 'an OEM city.'"

In the course of its urban development, he says confidently, "Kaohsiung won't be looking back."

A vibrant cultural scene has emerged in Kaohsiung in recent years. Shown here is a piece of installation art at the Delight of Chinese Character Exhibition.

Kaohsiung Department Store was known during the Japanese colonial period as Yoshii Department Store. It is located in Yancheng District, the bustling heart of Kao-hsiung in the store's early years.

In the early post-war years, the Ai River was used to transport imported logs. After several decades of rapid economic growth, the Port of Kaohsiung grew to handle the world's third-largest volume of container traffic.