Tour Audio a Tainan

The Dutch East India Company built Fort Zeelandia on a tidal sandbar off southwestern Taiwan in 1624, and that moment marks the beginning of Tainan -- and indeed of Taiwan's recorded history. The fort, now partially preserved in the Anping district, sits in what used to be the sea; three centuries of land reclamation have left it several kilometers inland. Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong), the Ming loyalist general, expelled the Dutch in 1662 after a nine-month siege and made Tainan the capital of his kingdom. It remained Taiwan's capital for 263 years before losing the designation to Taipei in 1887.

The density of religious architecture in Tainan is extraordinary: the city counts more than 1,600 registered temples, ranging from enormous national shrines to neighborhood earth-god altars tucked between buildings.

The Confucian Temple, built in 1665 by Koxinga's son as the first educational institution in Taiwan, is the oldest and most formally significant. The temple network functions as genuine civic infrastructure -- most are independently funded and serve as community anchors rather than tourist sites, and the ritual calendar means there is almost always something happening somewhere in the city.