Chiayi City: Named Chiayi by an Emperor, Yet Now the Provincial City Most Easily Passed Over

30-second overview: In 1787, the Qing Qianlong emperor issued an edict renaming “Zhuluo” as “Chiayi,” meaning “to commend the loyalty and righteousness of those who defended the city to the death.” It is the only city in Taiwan personally named by an emperor. In 1908, in a rice field 3.3 kilometers southwest of this city, the Japanese erected the world’s first Tropic of Cancer marker tower. In 1931, Chiayi Agriculture and Forestry’s mixed team of Han, Indigenous, and Japanese players reached the Koshien final and finished runner-up. On March 25, 1947, the painter Chen Cheng-po was tied up and executed by firing squad in front of the railway station; his body was left in the street for three days. Today Chiayi City has 260,000 people, 60 square kilometers, and no high-speed rail station. It is a specimen of Taiwan’s mid-sized cities. Four national-level stories all took place within these 60 square kilometers.

Four Hundred Years at the Central Fountain

If you arrive in Chiayi by train, walk one hundred meters out of the station and you will see it. The Central Colorful Fountain sits where Wenhua Road, Zhongshan Road, Gongming Road, and Guanghua Road intersect to form a traffic circle. Built in the 1970s during Mayor Hsu Shih-hsien’s tenure, the fountain changes lights every few minutes, and its highest jet reaches 20 meters.¹

Its liveliest moment comes on the night before an election. Each candidate brings supporters to campaign around this circle, with drum troupes, campaign trucks, and microphones drowning one another out. In other cities, election rallies are usually held in stadiums or plazas. Chiayi people choose a traffic circle because this circle has been the center of their city for three hundred years.

During the Qing period, this site was called “Tao-a-bue,” the end of the Chiayi city wall. In 1704, the 43rd year of the Kangxi reign, county magistrate Song Yongqing built Zhuluo City here with wooden palisades and set up east, west, south, and north gates. It was “the earliest city palisade built among the one prefecture and three counties at the time.”² During Japanese rule, the 1906 earthquake nearly destroyed the old city. The following year, the Japanese carried out urban improvement: they straightened streets, created right-angled intersections, and planned a circular plaza. Today’s Central Fountain stands at the center of that former circular plaza.³

Beneath the fountain’s jets lie three layers of history: the walls of Han immigrants, the Japanese urban improvement project, and the postwar Taiwanese civic plaza. Chiayi people do not often speak of these layers. But every time they walk around this traffic circle, they are stepping over these three hundred years.

A Two-Month Siege in Exchange for a Name

What truly made this city remembered in history was the siege of 1786.

In November of that year, the 51st year of the Qing Qianlong reign, Lin Shuangwen rose in rebellion, and forces from north and south joined to besiege Zhuluo City. The population inside the city, once a small settlement mixed with immigrants from Zhangzhou and Quanzhou, became a fortress defended by several thousand people together. During the siege, food ran out. Lian Yatang’s General History of Taiwan described the hardship of defending the city: “Zhuluo was besieged ever more tightly, with no food to be found; they dug up tree roots and boiled bean cake to stave off hunger, yet their resolve to defend the city only grew firmer.”⁴

Two months later, Qing reinforcements lifted the siege. Qianlong felt the city had held out with extraordinary stubbornness and, in an unprecedented act, issued an edict granting it a new name. The Chiayi City Government’s historical overview cites the edict’s original wording: “The Qing state, following the intent of ‘commending their loyalty and righteousness in defending the city to the death,’ issued an edict on the third day of the eleventh month the following year, changing the name from ‘Zhuluo’ to ‘Chiayi.’”⁵

This is the only county seat in Taiwan personally named by an emperor. The four characters “to commend their loyalty and righteousness” defined a city. The names of other counties and cities mostly come from Indigenous transliterations, geographic features, or administrative naming. Keelung means “a prosperous base”; Changhua means “to manifest imperial transformation.” Chiayi alone has a name that is itself a compressed piece of political history.

From this point onward, Chiayi acquired a double identity. It was a city the Qing court was willing to remember through an imperial edict. Yet its historical peak also stopped here.

Curator’s Note: Open the history of almost any county or city, and behind the name is usually a geographic or political label. But the name “Chiayi” is an edict, the Qing court’s retrospective commendation of a group of people who defended a city. The problem is that a city praised by an emperor is not necessarily remembered by history afterward. More than two hundred years after Qianlong renamed it, when Taiwanese people hear “Chiayi,” their first association is often turkey rice, the entrance to Alishan, or “my brother brings back two boxes of square crackers when he returns from Taipei.” The four characters “commending their loyalty and righteousness” have long been worn smooth by time, but the city has never taken them down. The name bestowed by the emperor is still hanging above the door; only the people inside have changed, generation after generation.

The Tropic of Cancer Rose Out of a Rice Field

In April 1908, the 41st year of Meiji, the Japanese erected a large stone tower in a rice field 3.3 kilometers southwest of Chiayi City to celebrate the full opening of Taiwan’s north-south trunk railway. The National Cultural Memory Bank entry states it directly: “It was the first-generation Tropic of Cancer landmark, and also the world’s first Tropic of Cancer marker tower.”⁶

This fact has two layers of meaning. The first: the Tropic of Cancer is a physical coordinate produced by the 23.5-degree tilt of Earth’s axis of revolution. It exists at every longitude, but before 1908 no country had considered this invisible line worth commemorating with a monument. That the Japanese chose to do this at the commemoration of Taiwan’s railway opening made “modern geographical science” a marker of colonial modernization. The second: Chiayi thereby became “the starting point of southern Taiwan.” South of the Tropic of Cancer is the tropics; north of it is the subtropics. Chiayi is the closest city to this boundary.

The sixth-generation Tropic of Cancer marker tower, 2016-01. Photo: B2322858, Public Domain via Wikimedia.

This marker tower has spent more than a century in Chiayi people’s hands. The first generation was destroyed by a typhoon in 1912. The second was provisionally rebuilt with bamboo and timber in 1915. The third was completed in 1926, after Crown Prince Hirohito passed through Shuishang during his 1923 visit to Taiwan, saw the crude bamboo-and-timber tower, and immediately instructed that it be rebuilt.⁷ The fourth generation was rebuilt around the mid-1930s and later destroyed in the 1941 Caoling earthquake. The fifth was completed in 1942 and renovated by the Chiayi Air Force into a small park in 1968. The sixth was completed in 1995 and later renovated into today’s Tropic of Cancer Solar Exploration Center.⁸

Chiayi people have a distinctive attitude toward this tower. It is outside the city and, strictly speaking, belongs to Shuishang Township in Chiayi County. Yet every generation of Chiayi residents has taken friends from elsewhere to see it. The tower’s form has kept changing, from stone tower to steel frame to modern building, but the position it occupies has not moved for a century. If a typhoon blows it down, it can be rebuilt; if an earthquake destroys it, it can be rebuilt again. The point is that this line at 23 degrees 27 minutes north latitude continues to pass through Taiwan, and the city that first commemorated this fact in the world is here.

Alishan Made This City a Timber Capital

What made Chiayi truly prosper in the twentieth century was Alishan timber.

In 1899, the Japanese discovered Alishan’s rich old-growth cypress forests and began planning a railway. Construction by the private Fujita-gumi began in 1906, and the project was nationalized in 1910. In December 1912, the forest railway from Chiayi to Erwanping opened, with a total length of 66.6 kilometers; in 1914 it was extended to Alishan.⁹ That same year, 1914, the Chiayi Sawmill began operation. It was the largest government-run timber industrial park by area under the Japanese government during the Japanese colonial period. It “adopted the most advanced equipment from Europe and the United States, had an almost fully automated production process, and enjoyed the reputation of being the ‘No. 1 sawmill in the East.’”¹⁰

The quality of Alishan cypress was so high that its influence extended beyond Taiwan: “these premium building materials were used to build the great torii gate of Meiji Shrine and to restore the Buddhist hall of the national treasure Horyu-ji.”¹¹ Every Taiwan red cypress log brought down from Alishan was first sent to the Chiayi Sawmill for cutting, then loaded onto ships and transported to Japan. Chiayi became the distribution hub for timber from the Alishan forest. In 1935, in this city of 70,000 people, “one-tenth of the population worked in the timber industry, and it was then Taiwan’s fifth most populous and prosperous city.”¹¹

Beimen Station, 2021-12. Photo: Honmingjun, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia.

Beimen Station, the starting point of the Alishan Railway, was in an area that “was once the largest timber trading market in all Taiwan.”¹² Walk into Beimen Station today, and the wooden station still looks as it did in 1912. Although a fire in 1998 burned down half the building, the Chiayi Forest District Office restored it that same year. The station body was built from Alishan’s own red cypress, wood that may be more than one thousand years old. Using thousand-year-old trees to build a station, then using that station to transport more thousand-year-old trees down the mountain: this was the cycle of Alishan forestry during Japanese rule.

Song of the Forest, 2020-10-11. Photo: Mearchan, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia.

The era of the timber capital began with the opening of the Alishan Sawmill in 1914 and ended when the government fully halted large-scale logging in the Alishan forest in 1963: exactly 50 years.¹¹ After the late 1960s, Alishan forestry gradually declined. Loggers, sawmill workers, and transport workers around the forest successively changed trades. But timber did not entirely leave Chiayi; it became the city’s material heritage. Smile Taiwan records that Chiayi City today “still preserves more than 6,000 wooden houses, the highest density in the country.”¹¹ Each one is a material trace of the “timber capital era.” The city government’s recent “Timber Capital Revival” branding is built upon these 6,000 old wooden houses.

✦ “These premium building materials were used to build the great torii gate of Meiji Shrine and to restore the Buddhist hall of the national treasure Horyu-ji.” (Smile Taiwan, “Chiayi Timber Capital” series)¹¹

Alishan timber built the great torii gate in Tokyo and repaired Horyu-ji in Nara. Chiayi people rarely mention this, but when you pass the commemorative stone beside Beimen Station marking the sister-railway relationship between the Alishan Forest Railway and Japan’s Kurobe Gorge Railway, one sentence will remind you: this city was once a key node in the Japanese empire’s timber supply chain.

The Mixed Team at Koshien

In the summer of 1931, Chiayi produced a baseball team.

Chiayi Agriculture and Forestry School, known as KANO, represented Taiwan for the first time at Japan’s National High School Baseball Championship, the summer Koshien tournament. The most unusual thing was the team’s composition: a mix of Japanese, Han, and Taiwanese Indigenous players. This was the first case of its kind under the convention that baseball teams in Taiwan were then dominated by Japanese players from the north. Coach Kondo Hyotaro came from Ehime Prefectural Matsuyama Commercial School, a Koshien powerhouse. The Taiwan Baseball Wiki records that after he arrived at KANO, the team “began to show its promise.”¹³

On the final day, August 21, KANO pitcher Wu Ming-chieh, who had pitched four consecutive games, was already exhausted. The Taiwan Baseball Wiki preserves a written account of the game: “In the final on August 21, KANO pitcher Wu Ming-chieh, who had pitched four consecutive games... in the end, the team lost 0-4 to Chukyo Commercial School from Aichi Prefecture and finished runner-up.”¹³

Its opponent, Chukyo Commercial, later became the only school in Koshien history to win three consecutive championships, from 1931 to 1933, and remains the high school with the most Koshien victories. That summer, KANO lost by four runs to the school that would become the strongest in Koshien history.

The historical significance of this game does not lie in victory or defeat. It was one of the earliest concrete examples of three ethnic groups cooperating within the framework of “colonial modernity.” A baseball game showed the world that Han, Indigenous, and Japanese players could fight side by side on the same field, something official propaganda at the time could not have written into existence. In 2014, Wei Te-sheng’s film KANO brought this myth back into twenty-first-century Taiwan’s collective memory. But the story of KANO had always continued by word of mouth among Chiayi people. The school still exists today, having been upgraded into National Chiayi University, and the baseball field beside the original campus is now the KANO Park.

Three Days of Bodies on Chiayi’s Streets

In March 1947, Chiayi produced another story.

After the February 28 Incident broke out across Taiwan, dozens of young people heading south from Changhua and Taichung arrived in Chiayi on March 2 and “called on citizens between the railway station and the fountain”¹⁴, the Central Fountain from the opening of this article. Crowds attacked Mayor Sun Zhijun’s residence and the police station. On March 5, Chiayi City councilor and Youth Corps secretary Lu Bingqin went up to Alishan to ask Tsou youth to come down the mountain and help maintain order. Tsou township chief Gao Yisheng, whose Indigenous name was Uyongu Yatauyungana, sent Tang Shouren to lead Indigenous youth down the mountain and station themselves at Chiayi’s Falong Temple. That same day, militia forces attacked Shuishang Airport and the Hongmaopi arsenal, causing roughly more than 300 casualties.¹⁴

During the airport siege, the two sides negotiated several times. On March 8 and 9, the Chiayi side sent negotiators to the airport. The negotiators were detained; only three female committee members were released. On March 11, “one battalion of the 430th Regiment of the Army’s 21st Division reached the airport, and southern reinforcements arrived in Chiayi.”¹⁴ On the 18th of the same month, Chen Fuzhi, chair of the Chiayi branch of the February 28 Settlement Committee, was “paraded through the streets and then executed by firing squad in front of Chiayi Railway Station.”¹⁴

Seven days later, on March 25, four Chiayi City councilors were taken to the plaza in front of the railway station: Chen Cheng-po, a painter and, in 1926, the first Taiwanese artist selected for Japan’s Imperial Art Exhibition with a Western-style painting; Pan Muzhi, a physician educated in Japan; Ke Lin, owner of the Qingsheng Theater; and Lu Bingqin, a dentist. The Reporter’s “Chiayi 228 Photo Feature” records: “On March 25, Chen Cheng-po, Pan Muzhi, Ke Lin, and Lu Bingqin were executed by firing squad.”¹⁴

Chen Cheng-po was 52 when he died, based on his actual age: born February 2, 1895, executed March 25, 1947. The Chen Cheng-po Cultural Foundation chronology records that he “died at the age of 53,” using nominal age reckoning.¹⁵ An English report in Taiwan Gazette notes one detail: “The Kuomintang forbade families from collecting the corpses immediately, so Chen's remains were left to decompose on the street for three days.”¹⁶ The Kuomintang prohibited families from collecting the bodies immediately, and Chen Cheng-po’s remains lay on the streets of Chiayi for three days.

In front of the same plaza of a station completed in 1933 as “the first steel-frame reinforced-concrete station on the north-south trunk line” and called “the most modern reinforced-concrete railway station on the island”¹⁷, the bodies of native Taiwanese elites were left for three days in 1947. A city’s modernization and its political violence were compressed into the same plaza.

Chiayi Railway Station, 2006-08-24. Photo: Bigmorr, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia.

The fate of the Chiayi School of Painting is bound to Chen Cheng-po’s death. Since the middle of Japanese rule, Chiayi had been known as the “City of Painting.” In the first Taiwan Government-General Art Exhibition in 1938, “Chiayi painters accounted for 20 percent of those selected,” and Taiwan Nichinichi Shimpo ran the headline “Chiayi Is the City of Painting; Its Selected Artists Account for 20 Percent.”¹⁸ Lin Yushan (1907-2004), originally named Yinggui and born on Meijie in Chiayi City, was selected for the first Taiwan Art Exhibition in 1927 with Water Buffalo and Great South Gate. Together with Chen Jin and Kuo Hsueh-hu, he was known as one of the “Three Young Artists of the Taiwan Art Exhibition.”¹⁸ The Chiayi School of Painting grew from the Chunmeng Painting Society in 1928, the Chiayi Calligraphy and Painting Self-Encouragement Association in 1931, and the Moyang Society in 1934, until Chiayi became the city with the highest selection rate in the Imperial Art Exhibition in Taiwan.

After Chen Cheng-po’s death, the story of the City of Painting continued. In October 2020, the Chiayi Art Museum opened southeast of the Central Fountain. Its predecessor was the Chiayi branch of the Monopoly Bureau for tobacco and liquor, completed in 1936, a city-designated historic site designed by Japanese architect Umezawa Sutajiro.¹⁹ Architectural complexes from 1936, 1954, and 1980 were fused and reborn; its address serves as a memorial to the generation of painters including Lin Yushan, Chen Cheng-po, and Chang Lee Te-ho.

Chiayi Art Museum, 2020-08-12. Photo: Chiayi City Government, government open data attribution.

U.S. Aid Chickens and the High-Speed Rail Station That Is “Not in Chiayi City”

For outsiders, the quickest impression of Chiayi is turkey rice. But this dish actually appeared only after the war, and the first bite was not turkey.

The Chiayi tourism bureau’s website is very clear: “According to oral accounts from Chiayi elders, the earliest origin was in 1949, when Lin Tianshou, a veteran shop master at the ‘First Market,’ had a sudden idea: he took the chicken bought for religious offerings at the time, then broiler chicken, shredded it over white rice, and poured braised sauce over it to make chicken rice. Finding the texture distinctive, he began formally selling chicken rice on Zhongshan Road.”²⁰

When Lin Tianshou opened his shop in 1949, the meat on the plate was broiler chicken, not turkey. Turkey had to wait until the era of U.S. aid before it reached Chiayi. The same Chiayi tourism bureau record states: “Taiwan originally did not raise turkeys. After the end of World War II, many U.S. military personnel stationed in Taiwan brought large numbers of turkeys into Chiayi City and Shuishang Township in Chiayi County, opening the delicious origins of ‘turkey rice.’”²⁰ During the U.S. aid period from 1951 to 1965, Taiwan imported white-feather turkeys from the United States, replacing the original black-feather turkeys and driving improvements in both breeding volume and quality. Turkeys were large, cheaper than domestic chickens, and highly nutritious. In the postwar era of material scarcity, they gradually replaced the broiler chicken in Lin Tianshou’s shop and became Chiayi’s distinctive everyday protein.

The evolution from “shredded chicken rice” to “turkey rice” followed a curve of more than ten years. StoryStudio has summarized this history: “Turkey rice did not appear out of nowhere. Its predecessor was ‘shredded chicken rice.’ In the early postwar period, because of inflation and soaring prices, Taiwan’s material conditions were generally poor, and chicken was an ingredient many families could eat only during festivals and holidays.”²¹ Lin Tianshou’s “Fountain Chicken Rice,” which began with broiler chicken in 1949, stood beside the Central Fountain traffic circle on Zhongshan Road, taking its name from its location. It later became a representative old Chiayi chicken-rice shop and Taiwan’s earliest corporatized chain brand of chicken rice.

Visitors to Chiayi have two routes for eating turkey rice: Liuzhang Turkey Rice in the West District, Ah Hong Shi in the East District, and Simple Turkey Rice in the East District are the tourist queue shops. Chiayi locals each have their own stalls. The area around the Colorful Fountain usually has the highest density of tourists; locals often detour to small shops on Xinyi Road or along Wenhua Road near Beimen Station. The ratio among turkey, rice, braised sauce, and fried shallots is the judging standard. Each shop’s sauce formula, including the proportion of minced pork in the braised sauce and the method for frying shallots, forms its own fingerprint.²¹

After eating, visitors who want to take the high-speed rail back north discover another fact: Chiayi City has no high-speed rail station.

The High Speed Rail Chiayi Station is in Taibao City, Chiayi County, not in the Chiayi urban area. This is an uncommon structure in Taiwan’s administrative geography: Chiayi City is completely surrounded by Chiayi County. After Chiayi City separated from Chiayi County in 1982 and was upgraded to a provincial city, the Chiayi County Council voted in 1982 to move the county seat to Dongshiliao Farm in Taibao Township. “Coastal-line councilors temporarily proposed adding Taibao Township as a new motion,” and it passed with 27 votes, more than half the council.²² In 1991, the Chiayi County Government formally moved to the Xianghe New Village county administration district in Taibao; Taibao Township was reorganized as Taibao City.²²

Tu De-qi, then Chiayi County magistrate, made one comment on the outcome of the county-city separation: “It was originally a modestly well-off household; now it has become two poor households.”²² When Chiayi City was upgraded, its population was 250,000. By 2026 it was 260,000, and “its population and industrial scale can be said to have remained unchanged for decades, with no obvious transformation.”²² Over those 30 years, the city’s population peaked at 274,212 in April 2009, then declined to 261,626 in April 2026, a decrease of about 12,600 people over 17 years.²²

When the high-speed rail opened in 2007, Chiayi Station was built in Taibao. It is about 10 kilometers in a straight line from downtown Chiayi, with no rail system, Taiwan Railway or metro, connecting it to the city. Travelers must transfer to BRT or take a taxi for about 15 minutes to reach downtown Chiayi. Seventeen years later, by 2026, this still had not improved. This is a case of the “nearest provincial capital” being absent from the most important transportation node within its own county territory. Between the city named by an emperor and the most advanced transportation system of the twenty-first century lies a single BRT route.

Peach City’s Traffic Circle, the Same Place for Three Hundred Years

Return to the Central Fountain at the opening.

During the Qing period, it was the end of the city wall at Tao-a-bue. During Japanese rule, it was the circular plaza of the urban improvement project. In the 1970s, it became the Colorful Fountain under Mayor Hsu Shih-hsien. Every decade or so it changes form, but the location of the circle has never moved. Looking north from this circle, one sees Chiayi Railway Station, designed by Ushiki Takeo in 1933, and the plaza where Chen Cheng-po was executed in 1947. Looking east, one sees the Monopoly Bureau building from 1936 and the Chiayi Art Museum opened in 2020. Looking south, one sees the entrance to Wenhua Road Night Market. Looking west, one sees the urban fabric that grew along the Alishan Forest Railway after it opened in 1912.

Four directions, four stretches of history, all taking this traffic circle as their origin point.

Chiayi people do not emphasize this very much. They know Taipei cannot see Chiayi. Whenever Taipei people mention Chiayi, they think of a transfer stop, the high-speed rail station they pass without getting off. But Chiayi people do not especially need Taipei to see them. They have the moment when the Tropic of Cancer rose out of a rice field; they have Alishan’s thousand-year-old red cypress turned into the great torii gate of Tokyo’s Meiji Shrine; they have the mixed team of three ethnic groups that reached Koshien in 1931; they have the plaza where no one could collect bodies for three days in 1947; they have the plate of rice that evolved from broiler chicken to turkey in 1949; they have 6,000 old wooden houses still standing.

These things do not need the frame of “the provincial city most easily passed over” as contrast. Nor do they need validation from Taipei.

Curator’s Note: Chiayi’s position is distinctive. It sits slightly south of the center of Taiwan’s island, at 23 degrees 27 minutes north latitude, and the world’s first Tropic of Cancer marker tower stands 3.3 kilometers outside the city. Geographically, it is the physical coordinate of Taiwan’s “north-south divide”: north of the Tropic of Cancer is subtropical, south of it is tropical. But Chiayi people’s identity has never been “south” or “north.” They are “Peach City people.” During the Qing period, Zhuluo City was shaped like a peach, and this nickname has continued to the present. When outsiders debate whether Chiayi counts as southern or central Taiwan, Chiayi people answer: “Peach City.” The imperial name “Chiayi” is official memory. “Peach City” is citizens’ everyday life. Behind a city’s name there are actually two layers: the layer shown to history is called Chiayi; the layer shown to itself is called Peach City.

Next time you go to Chiayi, do not rush to eat turkey rice and then get on the high-speed rail. Walk out of the railway station and first make one circuit around the Central Fountain. Watch the fountain jets shift between different colors. Count how many exits this circle has, four, and which stretch of history each exit leads to: the 1933 railway station, the 1936 art museum, Wenhua Road Night Market, and the Alishan Railway. Then you will remember one thing: Taiwan is not only north and south. In the middle of Taiwan stands a city personally named by an emperor, and it has stood beside this traffic circle for three hundred years.

Since Qianlong gave her the name “Chiayi,” she has never left her own place.

Further Reading

Chiayi local contexts:

• Chen Cheng-po — the painter who died in front of Chiayi Railway Station in 1947, and the first Taiwanese artist selected for Japan’s Imperial Art Exhibition with a Western-style painting in 1926
• Chiayi Turkey Rice — the complete food history of a dish that evolved from broiler chicken to turkey in 1949, from U.S.-aid white-feather turkeys to Chiayi’s distinctive everyday cuisine
• Alishan: The Empire’s Forest and Gao Yisheng’s Mountain — the mountain that made Chiayi a timber capital, and the Tsou community that came down the mountain in 1947 to help maintain order

Larger historical coordinates:

• February 28 Incident — the historical context of Taiwan’s island-wide political tragedy in 1947; Chiayi was one of the cities where conflict was most intense
• A Century of Change in Taiwanese Watercolor Painting — the position of the Chiayi School of Painting in Taiwanese art history, from the Imperial Art Exhibition to the Taiwan Government-General Art Exhibition
• Taiwan Baseball Culture — where KANO’s 1931 Koshien runner-up finish sits in Taiwan’s baseball history
• Taiwan Railway History — the larger context in which the 1908 opening of the north-south trunk railway gave rise to the Tropic of Cancer marker tower
• Taiwan Forest Development History — the broader scale of 50 years of Alishan forestry, 1914-1963
• Chiayi County — batch 2 of the 22 Counties and Cities Series; the county that completely surrounds this city, separated from it in 1950 and moved its county seat to Taibao in 1991, forming the other half of this article’s narrative
• Keelung City — the first article in the 22 Counties and Cities Series; another port city pressed down by the capital’s frame, useful for comparing the different fault lines of two mid-sized cities

Image Sources

This article uses five Wikimedia Commons images. The hero image in the frontmatter is Sixth Generation Tropic of Cancer in Chiayi, the sixth-generation Tropic of Cancer marker tower, completed in 1995 and located in Shuishang Township, Chiayi County. Photo: B2322858, Public Domain.

Two images appear in the section “Alishan Made This City a Timber Capital”: Beimen Railway Station 01, the Beimen Station starting point of the Alishan Forest Railway, opened in 1912. Photo: Honmingjun, CC BY-SA 4.0; and Song of Forest - Alishan Forestry Village, the “Song of the Forest” installation at Hinoki Village, formerly the official Alishan Forestry dormitory complex from 1914 to 1943. Photo: Mearchan, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Two images appear in the section “Three Days of Bodies on Chiayi’s Streets”: Chiayi Railway Station, the second-generation Chiayi Railway Station, designed by Ushiki Takeo in 1933. Photo: Bigmorr, CC BY-SA 3.0; and Chiayi Art Museum, Chiayi Art Museum, opened in October 2020 and formerly the 1936 Chiayi branch of the Monopoly Bureau for tobacco and liquor. Photo: Chiayi City Government, Government Website Open Data Declaration.

References