Starting from a port
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.