Taiwán

Nangang: The District That Keeps Being Reminded It Was Once a Port

Q: Where can I experience authentic tea culture in Taipei away from the crowds of Maokong?

While most tourists flock to Maokong, Nangang is the true birthplace of Taiwan’s famous Pouchong (Baozhong) tea. In the late 19th century, master tea makers developed a unique oxidation process in Nangang’s hills, producing a tea celebrated for its natural, elegant floral aroma without using artificial scenting. Today, the misty slopes of the Nangang Tea Mountain (Jiuzhuang area) offer a serene, authentic escape. Walking along the historic tea trail or visiting the Nangang Tea Processing Demonstration Sector allows travelers to immerse themselves in original Taiwanese tea heritage, sample local brews, and enjoy panoramic city views without the crowds.

Nangang means "south port," though the port vanished a century ago. What follows is a history of a place that has spent a hundred and fifty years being repeatedly, almost punctually, reminded of what it used to be — by tea, by smoke, by state violence, and four times by water.

The Flow of the Water-Vein_ A Century of Backflow in Nangang

A historical walk through Taipei's Nangang District — once a river port, then a coal town, a site of political massacre, home to Taiwan's foremost research institute, and now a rail hub. This is the story of a place that keeps being flooded by its own forgotten name.

There's a particular kind of place-name that outlives its own meaning — a fossil word, still spoken daily by people who've stopped noticing what it once described. Nan-gang: south port. Say it enough times on the platform announcements of the metro and it stops sounding like a claim about the world. But claims about the world have a way of persisting long after the world has moved on, and this one, it turns out, has spent the better part of a century and a half quietly making good on itself — not through nostalgia, but through recurrence. Water, once excluded from a place, tends to apply for readmission. Nangang's history is, among other things, a long record of that application being granted.

An Opening Note on What This Is

This isn't a guide to Nangang's cafés or its shopping mall. It's an account of five things that happened in a corner of eastern Taipei that most visitors pass through on the way to somewhere else — the high-speed rail terminus, mostly, or a connecting metro line — without ever suspecting that the ground beneath the platform has an unusually long memory. What follows draws on the district's tea archives, its industrial records, a national commission's findings on a 1952 political massacre, and Academia Sinica's own institutional history of being, repeatedly, rained on.

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I. The Grounded History: Five Things Nangang Remembers

1. The Tea Hills (Qing Dynasty–Early Japanese Colonial Period)

Four hundred years ago, the lower reaches of the Keelung River belonged to the Ketagalan people — the Tatuyu, Lichi, Malysyakkaw, and Volangits communities, who fished and farmed along its banks in a pattern of settlement the written record barely registers before Han migration erased most of the evidence of it. That erasure matters, and this account won't pretend otherwise: what we know of Nangang's deep past is a gap, not a story, and the honest thing is to say so rather than dress the silence up as mystery.

What the record does hold begins properly in 1885, when two men from Anxi in Fujian — Wang Shui-chin and Wei Ching-shih — arrived in the hills above what's now Nangang and noticed something the land was already doing: its temperature, its rainfall, its gravelly soil, were quietly, almost accidentally, perfect for tea. They planted. The variety that took hold there — baozhong, a lightly oxidised oolong — would come to define Taiwanese tea for the next half-century, and Nangang became its capital. Under Japanese colonial rule, the two men were retained as instructors at a purpose-built research station, training tea farmers sent from every growing region on the island. For a few decades, this quiet river district was the place other places sent their sons to learn a craft.

The Tea Hills (Qing Dynasty–Early Japanese Colonial Period)

2. The Black Township (1950s–1970s)

Tea, as an economy, is patient and slow-yielding. Coal is neither. As the tea trade declined in the closing years of Japanese rule, coal mining and brick-making took its place in Nangang's hills, and in 1955 the Taiwan Provincial Government formally designated the district an industrial zone. What followed arrived with the particular speed of postwar reconstruction: a rubber-tire factory, a state fertiliser plant, flour mills, chemical works, a shell-casing arsenal. Prosperity came with them, and so did a specific, unlovely nickname — locals in the rest of the city began calling Nangang the Black Township. Laundry hung on bamboo poles came in grey. Children's lungs, in ways nobody would fully understand for another thirty years, were quietly filing away a debt.

3. Luku (December 1952)

A note before this section: what follows is written without the vocabulary of feng shui or spiritual resonance that frames the rest of this article. State violence is not a matter of ill-aligned energy, and dressing it in mystical language would be a way of softening something that shouldn't be softened. This is written, instead, in the plainer register of trauma geography — the study of how landscapes hold the memory of what was done to the people in them.

In the mountainous border where Nangang meets Shiding and Xizhi, a small, defensible pocket of terrain called Luku became, in 1949, a hideout for a handful of underground Communist organisers fleeing the crackdowns that followed the February 28 Incident. Over three years they recruited quietly among local miners and farmers — many of them illiterate, most of them with only the vaguest sense of what they were being asked to sign their names, or press their thumbprints, to.

On the night of December 28, 1952, nearly ten thousand military police surrounded the mountain. What followed over the coming weeks was the largest single political prosecution of Taiwan's White Terror period: more than four hundred people detained, thirty-five sentenced to death, most of them coal miners and farmers with no meaningful understanding of the ideology they were accused of serving. Among the dead was the writer Lü Heruo, once called "Taiwan's first genius" — he is said to have died of a snakebite while hiding in the hills, refusing to have the bitten arm amputated, and was buried without ceremony or a marked grave.

The crueler detail, and the one this article can't set aside, is what happened to the miners who survived and were eventually released. Most went back to the only work they knew. Many died decades later of pneumoconiosis — black lung, the coal dust finally calling in what the interrogators hadn't finished. Politics and industry, working separately, took the same men's lives twice.

4. The Institute and the Flood (1954–present)

In 1954, Academia Sinica — Taiwan's foremost national research institution, in exile since the 1949 retreat from the mainland — selected a site to rebuild itself: Nangang Jiuzhuang, "Nangang Old Village," which happened to be the exact original settlement site of the Qing-era river port the district was named for. Nobody involved in the decision seems to have registered the coincidence. The Institute of History and Philology moved in first; over the following decades the campus grew into dozens of research institutes spanning the sciences and humanities, and Hu Shih, the philosopher and diplomat, served as its president until his death there.

What the planners hadn't accounted for was the Sifen Creek, a tributary of the Keelung River, running directly alongside the new campus. In 1977, a mountain flash flood submerged roughly half the campus buildings, including the Institute of History and Philology's archaeology museum and Hu Shih's memorial hall. In 1984, the "June 3rd Flood" struck again, prompting the city government to straighten the creek's course in an attempt to control it. It wasn't enough. In 2001, Typhoon Nari drove the creek over its banks a third time, flooding the basement levels of seven research institutes — irreplaceable archaeological samples, precision laboratory equipment, and rare manuscripts among the losses, with damages estimated above NT$200 million and research losses beyond estimation.

Holographic Sensory Cue: the air thickens before a summer downpour, the creek water turning the colour of wet clay, a swirl visible before the first drop falls. Inside the rare-book stacks of the Fu Ssu-nien Library, the low hum of the climate-control system runs against the rising sound of rain on the roof — the whole building seeming to hold its breath, as though it remembers, in whatever way a building can remember, the times the water got in anyway.

The Institute and the Flood (1954–present)

5. The Gateway (21st Century)

As the polluting industries closed or relocated, the fertiliser plant's grounds became the Nangang Trade and Exhibition Park; a television network moved its headquarters in; and the city's "East District Gateway" plan began threading rail lines through the district — two metro lines, then, in 2016, the terminus of Taiwan's High Speed Rail, making Nangang Station a genuine three-rail interchange: HSR, the Taiwan Railway main line, and the metro's Blue Line. The old tire factory site is now under redevelopment as a mixed-use tower complex; insurance companies and developers have moved in. Local planners now describe Nangang, without apparent irony, as Taipei's largest emerging business district of the coming decade.

II. The High-Dimensional Lens: Reading Nangang Through Daoist Water-Doctrine

To understand what Nangang has actually been doing for a hundred and fifty years, it helps to set aside the tidy Western narrative of progress — agriculture, then industry, then tragedy, then knowledge, then commerce, each phase quietly superseding the last — and instead pick up the interpretive framework the district's own settlers actually carried with them: the Daoist doctrine of water, shuifa (水法), inherited alongside the broader logic of feng shui and the dragon-vein (longmai, 龍脈) reading of landscape.

In that tradition, water is never simply an obstacle to be removed. It is the carrier of qi, of fortune, of circulation itself — and the discipline of shuifa lies almost entirely in guiding water, never in blocking it outright. A watercourse straightened or built over may solve an immediate problem, but it severs water from its own preferred path, and water, denied a path, does not disappear. It waits, and it returns with more force than before.

Seen this way, Nangang's tea hills weren't simply agriculturally convenient — they were, in the vocabulary the Anxi settlers themselves would have used, a textbook configuration: hills forming a protective enclosure to the south, the Keelung River as the mouth through which qi (and, not incidentally, trade) could gather and disperse, mountain spring water running clear. The site that suited tea and the site that satisfied the old geomantic instincts for a good dwelling were, it turns out, the same site, because both instincts were reading the same terrain.