"Tainan -a nicer toned down version of... " a T'ai-nan Travel Page by matt_of_asia

Tainan is a nice place that is hot. It avoids the pitfalls of the nasty overdeveloped Northern and central cities and actually has taken some effort to retain some historical artifacts and has Chen-Gong universities architectural department testing out some exciting new designs on various new construction projects. It has a lot of historical sites such as fortresses and temples and some stucco houses and the like.

It was apparently one of the first places settled by the Portugese and Dutch traders back in the 1600's. It was designed originally as a trading station but evolved into a fortress. KoXingGa, a Ming general fled to here (after the Manchus whacked the Mings out of china), he booted out the Dutch traders and apparently hoped to retake the mainland of china from Taiwan. He never did. For some reason, Chiang Kai Shek decided this loser was his inspiration and did the exact same thing back in the 50's and wasted some of his stolen money on statues of Koxinga and Dutch traders paying obeisience to him.

The Japanese put their stamp on the city as well, back in the days before Chiang. They changed some historical areas into schools to attempt to indoctrinate Japanese into the populace. The island got bombed by the Americans back in the 40's as the American forces made their gambit to surround imperial Japan. Evidence of this can be found in a noodle restaurant I visited and we went down into an old bomb shelter.
For some reason in the 70's the genius who was in charge of designing ugly towers for the military crackpot in charge at the time, put a large ugly lighthouse on top of the fortress ruins at An-Ping fort. It has a good view of the river and the ocean that actually used to be under the fort if you can believe it, at least. The idea was good I guess, if not the concept of architectural integration...

Tainan apparently has some good food. I stopped at a mexican place for some tacos. (My apologies to the culturally sensitive- I tend to be used to Chinese food.) and got some of the local 'specialty' food that every town in Taiwan has. The shrimp rolls (sha-juan) are basically fried shrimp springrolls. They are indeed delicious, if not healthy!

Tainan is a town worth visiting.