The Golden Ports

In mid-eighteenth-century Taiwan, as the gunpowder smoke of rebellions and ancestral feuds slowly settled on land, a golden artery — woven from wealth, sails, and the currents of the Black Ditch — began to pulse violently along the western coast. It was an age called "Taiwan's money up to the ankles." As the Kangxi Emperor's once-strict crossing prohibition collapsed before the sheer pressure of survival, waves of Han migrants who had gambled their lives to reach Taiwan cut irrigation channels across the western plains, turning wilderness into endless seas of rice paddies and sugarcane fields.

This island, once dismissed by the Kangxi Emperor as a useless overseas waste, unleashed astonishing productive power. But under the Qing's restrictive "designated port crossing" policy, Taiwan's own market could not absorb such vast quantities of rice, sugar, and tea. Meanwhile, the densely populated coastal regions of Fujian and Guangdong across the strait hungered for grain. This massive supply-and-demand pull pried open a sweeping age of maritime commerce in the Taiwan Strait. The folk saying "first Fu, second Lu, third Bangka" — 「一府、二鹿、三艋舺」 — captures not only the rise of Taiwan's three great trading ports, but a historical movement of the island's center of gravity from south to north between the eighteenth century and the Tongzhi era.

The throne of this port saga belongs without question to "Fu" — Tainan prefectural city. As Taiwan's earliest political and cultural center, Tainan's Wutiaogang (Five-Channel Harbor) district entered its golden era in the eighteenth century. The Tainan coast then was an immense lagoon called the Taijiang Inland Sea, and five hand-like channels extended from outside the city's western gate into its waters: Fotou Harbor, Nanshi Harbor, Nanhe Harbor, Xingangqian Harbor, and Anhai Harbor.

Each dawn, when the tides rose into the five harbors, hundreds of "ganmou" sailboats and "big-eye chicken" junks that had crossed the Black Ditch from Xiamen glided up the channels, their patched canvas sails creaking in the morning light. On the wharves, shirtless dock coolies — the Luohanjiao, their skin burned dark by the sun — hauled heavy sacks of Taiwanese sugar and rice across oily, swaying wooden planks. The air mingled sweat, seawater, and the resin of Fuzhou cedar with the dry-grass scent of imported silks, fabrics, and herbal medicines.

In the alleys of Wutiaogang, the merchant princes who held the city's economic life sat in the tea-scented back chambers of their trading houses, turning the pages of thick ledgers. They were called the "jiaoshang" — Taiwan's cross-strait trade monopolists. Those trading with Xiamen formed the "Xiajiao"; those dealing with Quanzhou, the "Quanjiao." These tycoons were richer than nations, and on this frontier they organized their own guilds, the "jiaohang" — funding temples, paving roads, dredging rivers, and even raising militias to defend the region. At their peak, Tainan's "Three Jiao" (the North Jiao, South Jiao, and Sugar Jiao) were so powerful that even local prefects greeted their heads with deference. Wine houses and song halls rang day and night with merchant gatherings, embodying the most opulent chapter of Qing Taiwan: the "splendor of Fucheng."

But as time passed and southern arable land grew scarce, migrants' footprints extended northward along the coast — giving rise to the second golden port: "second Lu," Lugang in Zhanghua.

Mid-eighteenth-century Lugang was a wild reed-grown coast where herds of deer still roamed. Yet it held one unmatched geographic advantage: it was the closest port on Taiwan to Hanjiang Port in Quanzhou, Fujian. In 1784 (the forty-ninth year of the Qianlong reign), the Qing court formally opened Lugang and Hanjiang for "designated crossing." Overnight, this unremarkable fishing village was swept up in a storm of wealth.

Lugang's rise was an all-out "Quanzhou migrant carnival." Countless merchants from Quanzhou's "Three Counties" (Jinjiang, Nan'an, and Hui'an) flooded in, and along the narrow streets they built the unique "Sky-Hidden Street" — to shield against ocean winds and burning sun, shopkeepers roofed over the entire street, lining both sides with long Xiajiao trading houses, shop in front, warehouse behind. Lugang's jiaoshang shipped the finest rice and timber from the Zhanghua plains and the Nantou mountains to Quanzhou, returning with porcelain and Fuzhou cedar.

"Lugang's Flying Sails" became a famed sight of the age. At dusk, looking out from Lugang's river mouth, one saw countless white sails veiling the sea against the sinking sun in a magnificent tableau. Lugang's commercial might began to rival Tainan. Yet its prosperity carried an inborn fragility. The Zhuoshui River and surrounding streams carried enormous sediment loads year after year, silting up Lugang's harbor at frightening speed. By the mid-nineteenth century, the harbor that had once moored massive merchant ships had become a mudflat. Large vessels could only anchor far offshore and transfer cargo by sampans. The once-bustling "second Lu," swallowed by silt, slowly relinquished its golden port crown and passed the historical baton to a darker horse further north.

That dark horse was "third Bangka" — today's Wanhua in Taipei.

While southern and central Taiwan languished in long cycles of development and infighting through the mid-Qing, the Taipei Basin in the north remained a wild frontier where Pingpu Ketagalan indigenous peoples still paddled their "mangka" dugout canoes. Han migrants pushed up the Tamsui River into the basin, finding fertile soil and a deep river channel running directly to the sea — a magnificent natural harbor. At the wharf where the Dahan and Xindian rivers converged, a riverside settlement named for the gathering of indigenous canoes was quietly born: Bangka.

In the early nineteenth century, large numbers of Tong'an migrants from Quanzhou settled in Bangka. They built wharves along the river, raised the Longshan Temple, and developed northern trade routes to ports like Yantai and Tianjin in China's north — forming the powerful "Beijiao." Bangka stood at the peak of its golden port age. The Tamsui River was thick with merchant masts; camphor, tea, and sugar from local mills piled high on its banks.

But Bangka's prosperity came hand-in-hand with the fiercest dark violence of Qing-era Taiwan. In 1853, Bangka erupted in the cruelest ancestral feud in its history — the "Dingxia Jiaopin." The Quanzhou Three-County faction (the Dingjiao), long monopolizing Bangka's port, feared losing their entrenched interests and launched a coordinated attack on their Quanzhou Tong'an neighbors (the Xiajiao) living in Xiakan. In the bloodbath, the Tong'an village was burned, and a great mass of refugees, led by Lin Youzao, fled north along the Tamsui carrying the image of their patron deity, Xiahai Chenghuang.

Yet this brutal expulsion accidentally opened a more brilliant era. Driven from Bangka, the Tong'an migrants settled a few kilometers north on what was then a barren riverbank — a place called Dadaocheng. Lin Youzao and the Tong'an merchants regrouped there, built broader wharves, and seized their chance. After the Second Opium War of 1860 forced Taiwan's ports open to international trade, foreign trading houses established themselves in Tamsui. The British merchant John Dodd discovered that northern Taiwan's hills were ideally suited for tea cultivation. He partnered with the Dadaocheng tycoon Li Chunsheng, brought in Anxi tea cuttings, processed "Formosa Oolong" in Dadaocheng, and shipped it directly to New York.

Overnight, Dadaocheng's "tea gold" legend exploded onto the global market. As Dadaocheng made astronomical sums in foreign silver from tea exports and became Taiwan's richest, most cosmopolitan modern city, once-proud Bangka withered. Silt choked the Tamsui, and the conservative refusal to admit foreign trading houses finally shut down its port economy entirely.

The rise and fall of "first Fu, second Lu, third Bangka" looks on the surface like a story of wealth and harbors, but beneath it is a fate-script woven from natural forces and the ancestral rivalries of human society. Wutiaogang's Taijiang Inland Sea was always destined to silt into land; Lugang's Hanjiang crossing always destined to be swallowed by sediment; and Bangka's Tong'an exiles destined to find in Dadaocheng their stage for revenge. The rise and fall of these three golden ports was an invisible hand that pushed Taiwan's economic and political center of gravity, in just over a century, from Tainan in the south to the Taipei Basin in the north — laying the foundation of Taiwan's modern urban geography.

Today, when we walk the old Wutiaogang district's Heping Street in Tainan, look at the red brick of Lugang's Nine Turns Lane, or stroll beneath the Baroque facades of Dadaocheng's Dihua Street, the lingering tea and herb scents in the air are the warmest historical afterglow that "first Fu, second Lu, third Bangka" left to this island.