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History

Tainan in 16 moments

Tainan grew from Siraya villages and a Dutch trading post founded in 1624 into the seat of government for Taiwan under the Zheng family and then the Qing, a role it kept until the 1880s. The Japanese rebuilt its centre in the early 20th century, and the forts, temples, gates and shophouses of each period still stand among the streets where people eat today.

Read moreDutch Formosa: The VOC in TainanHow the Dutch East India Company ran its Taiwan colony from Anping between 1624 and 1662, what is left of its two forts, and where to eat near them.

Timeline

  1. Before 1624

    Siraya villages on the coastal plain

    The Siraya lived on the flat coastal plain of south-west Taiwan, in villages such as Sinckan, Mattauw (now Madou), Soelangh (Jiali) and Baccloangh (Shanhua). The Sakam people of the Sinckan group lived where the city centre is today. By the late 16th century Chinese fishermen and traders were also using a sandbar they called Taioan, now Anping.

  2. 1624

    The Dutch East India Company moves to Tayouan

    Forced out of the Penghu islands in 1624, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) moved to the Tayouan sandbar. Its first fort was named Orange. The company renamed it Zeelandia in 1626, and the fortress was finished in 1634. It became the seat of Dutch rule and trade on the island.

  3. 1653

    Fort Provintia on the mainland

    In September 1652 a farmer, Guo Huaiyi, led Chinese settlers in an uprising against Dutch taxation. The Dutch put it down with the help of Siraya allies, and about 4,000 Chinese were killed. In 1653 the Dutch began Fort Provintia at Sakam, across the inland sea from Zeelandia, and finished it in 1655.

  4. 1661

    Koxinga's siege

    Zheng Chenggong, known in Europe as Koxinga, sailed into the Taijiang inland sea on 30 April 1661. Fort Provintia surrendered soon after, but Fort Zeelandia held out for about nine months. Governor Frederick Coyett signed the surrender on 1 February 1662, ending 38 years of Dutch rule.

  5. 1665

    Tungning and the first Confucius Temple

    Under Koxinga's son Zheng Jing the city was the capital of the Kingdom of Tungning. In 1665 his minister Chen Yonghua built a Confucius temple and school, the first in Taiwan. A temple to Guan Yu south of Fort Provintia, the forerunner of today's Official Martial Temple, dates from the same years.

  6. 1684

    Taiwanfu, seat of a Qing prefecture

    Qing forces defeated the Tungning fleet off Penghu in July 1683. Zheng Keshuang surrendered, and Qing officials arrived in Taiwan that October. In 1684 the island became a prefecture of Fujian province, with its seat, Taiwanfu, in present-day Tainan. The same year the Ming prince Zhu Shugui's former residence was turned into the Grand Matsu Temple.

  7. 1725

    A walled city

    The city's first wall, a wooden palisade, was begun in 1725, and its gates were rebuilt in stone in 1736. After the Lin Shuangwen uprising of 1787 to 1788, the wall was rebuilt in earth between 1788 and 1791. The Great South Gate is one of the gates that survive.

  8. 1858

    Anping reopens to foreign trade

    After the Treaty of Tianjin in 1858, the port of Anping was reopened to foreign trade, and a customs house followed in 1864. The British firm Tait & Co. set up its Anping base in 1867, trading in sugar and camphor. Its offices and warehouse still stand beside the Anping Tree House.

  9. 1874

    New coastal defences

    After a Japanese military expedition to southern Taiwan in 1874, the Qing envoy Shen Baozhen was sent to strengthen the island's defences. He built the Eternal Golden Castle at Anping between 1874 and 1876, designed by French engineers. He also petitioned for an official shrine to Koxinga, built in 1875.

  10. 1887

    A province, and the name Tainan

    Taiwan was made a province in its own right in the 1880s, and the provincial capital moved north. The old Taiwanfu was renamed Tainanfu, seat of Tainan Prefecture, by 1887. That is where the city's present name comes from.

  11. 1895

    Japanese rule begins

    Taiwan passed to Japan in 1895. A Japanese army reached Tainan in October that year, and the city was handed over without resistance after negotiations led by the Scottish missionary Thomas Barclay. The railway station opened in 1900, and most of the city wall was taken down by about 1917.

  12. 1915

    The Tapani Incident

    An armed uprising against Japanese rule, planned at Xilai Temple in Tainan, broke out in July 1915, and its main battle was fought at Tapani, now Yujing, in August. Its leader Yu Qingfang was captured on 22 August. A special court in Tainan sentenced 866 people to death, though most sentences were later commuted.

  13. 1932

    A new city centre

    The Tainan Prefecture Hall, designed by Moriyama Matsunosuke, was completed in 1916. The Hayashi Department Store opened on 5 December 1932 as one of only two stores in Taiwan with lifts. Both were damaged by American bombing at the end of the Second World War. Today they are the National Museum of Taiwan Literature and, since 2014, a department store again.

  14. 1945

    Post-war Tainan

    The Republic of China took over Taiwan on 25 October 1945, and Tainan became a provincial city. During the February 28 Incident of 1947, the lawyer Tang De-jhang was arrested in Tainan on 11 March and publicly executed on 13 March. The city held its first mayoral and council elections in 1950.

  15. 2010

    City and county merge

    Tainan County and Tainan City merged on 25 December 2010 to form a single special municipality. Former county towns such as Yanshui became districts of the city.

  16. 2026

    Siraya recognition

    On 30 July 2026 the Executive Yuan recognised the Siraya as an Indigenous people, Taiwan's 17th officially recognised group and the first recognised under the new Plains (Pingpu) Indigenous status law. The decision followed a law on Plains Indigenous status passed in October 2025 and more than three decades of campaigning.

How history shaped the food

Milkfish and the fish ponds

Milkfish farming is believed to have been brought to Taiwan from Indonesia by the Dutch in the 17th century, although the record is thin. A popular legend ties the fish's Chinese name, shimuyu, to Koxinga, and it is still sometimes called Koxinga's fish. Tainan farms more milkfish than anywhere else in Taiwan, about 4,980 hectares of ponds producing some 24,000 tonnes a year, mainly in Qigu, Annan, Beimen, Xuejia and Jiangjun. In Tainan it turns up at breakfast as pan-fried belly, in congee and as fish balls.

Dishes: Milkfish · Tainan savoury congee · Milkfish ball soup · Milkfish skin soup

Where to taste it: A Xing Shi Mu Yu · A Hsing Congee · Yung Chi Milkfish Balls · Wang Shih Fish Skin Dishes · Kaiyuan Road No Name Milkfish · Yung Tung Milkfish · Chang Ying Seafood House

Sugar and a sweet hand

Sugar was the main export of Dutch Formosa. In 1658 the colony produced 1.73 million catties, most of it shipped to Persia and Japan, from cane grown by Chinese settlers the company had brought in to farm. Sugar money built towns as well as forts: the Octagonal Tower in Yanshui was completed in 1841 for the Ye family, who had made their fortune in the trade. In 1946 the big Japanese-era sugar companies, among them Dai-Nihon, Meiji and Ensuiko, were merged into Taiwan Sugar Corporation. A survey of Taiwanese cuisine links the island's widespread use of sugar to this long commercial sugar industry.

Dishes: Old-style black tea · Taiwanese shaved ice

Where to taste it: Shuang Chuan Black Tea · Chiang Shui Hao · Yuan Zai Hui (Guohua Street) · Long Quan Ice Shop (Madou)

Where to see it: Octagonal Tower (Bajiaolou)

Danzai noodles and the slack season

Danzai noodles are said to date from around 1895, when a Tainan fisherman, Hong Yutou, began selling noodles to get through the slack months, the typhoon seasons when it was too dangerous to fish. He first carried his stall on a shoulder pole, the danzai of the name, and later set up in front of Shuixian Temple, the merchants' temple of the old Five Harbours district. His lanterns read 度小月, 'getting through the slack month', the name still used by the Du Hsiao Yueh shops. A bowl is small: noodles in a shrimp broth with shrimp, minced pork, coriander and garlic.

Dishes: Danzai noodles

Where to taste it: Du Hsiao Yueh Danzai Noodles (Original Store) · Small Park Danzai Noodles · Traditional Tainan Feast (Anping)

Where to see it: Shennong Street

Temple feasts and banquet cooking

Banquets cooked on site, called 辦桌, are held in Taiwan for weddings, funerals and temple festivals, with cooks setting up stoves in temple squares or roadside tents. The custom came with migrants from Fujian and Guangzhou. In the late Qing, gentry families hired cooks for banquets in their reception halls, and under Japanese rule restaurants began catering village feasts. Tainan's old Taiwanese restaurants keep that repertoire on the menu: Amei has been cooking banquet classics for more than 60 years, and at Hsin Hsin the chef Ah-Tu, who trained for six years at Ahsia, still makes his family's crab-meat balls. Eat to Fat, by the Grand Matsu Temple, serves squid and whelk soup, a banquet dish the Michelin Guide says is now rare in the city.

Where to taste it: Amei · Hsin Hsin Restaurant (A-Tu Shi) · Eat to Fat · Zhu Xin Ju · Traditional Tainan Feast (Anping)

Where to see it: Grand Matsu Temple

Sakariba and coffin bread

Sakariba is the Japanese word 盛場, a lively market, and under Japanese rule it was the name of a snack quarter in central Tainan, today's Kangle Market. Xu Liuyi opened a stall there in 1935 selling Japanese, Western and Taiwanese snacks. After the war he made a fried bread box filled with chicken liver, squid and vegetables, and when a friend joked that the lid made it look like a coffin, he kept the name: 棺材板 went on the sign in 1959. Another account says a visiting professor came up with it.

Dishes: Coffin bread

Where to taste it: Chikan Coffin Bread

Japanese tastes: shrimp rice and oden

Japanese rule brought washoku and Western-style yoshoku cooking to Taiwan, along with bento and miso soup. Ye Cheng, nicknamed Ai Zai Cheng, trained at the Japanese restaurant Mingyuelou and started selling shrimp rice at the Ximen Market in 1922, working the recipe out for Japanese tastes. His shop still serves it with miso soup. Oden arrived the same way and became o-lian in Taiwanese, written 黑輪 in Mandarin, with local additions such as pork balls and blood pudding. The Hayashi Department Store, opened in 1932, belongs to the same era and again has cafés and an observation deck.

Dishes: Tainan shrimp rice · Taiwanese oden

Where to taste it: Ai Zai Cheng Shrimp Rice · Ji Pin Shrimp Rice · Pao Ko Oden

Where to see it: Hayashi Department Store

Salt pans on the lagoon coast

Salt was made from seawater on this coast for 338 years, until the Qigu salt field stopped production in May 2002. Jingzaijiao in Beimen, laid out by salt farmers in 1818 and redesigned with tiled pans in 1952, is the oldest surviving tile-paved field and still shows visitors how salt is raked and collected. The same coast, from Qigu and Beimen to Xuejia and Jiangjun, is now the centre of Tainan's milkfish farming.

Dishes: Oyster fritter · Milkfish

Where to taste it: Black-faced Spoonbill Canteen · Chang Ying Seafood House · Hsiu Li Oyster Fritters

Where to see it: Jingzaijiao Tile-paved Salt Fields · Qigu Salt Mountain · Nankunshen Daitian Temple

Sources