Anping

Everyone we met in Tainan proper told us the same thing: don’t skip Anping, it’s a different city inside the city. We took a scooter out along the canal road on our second afternoon and understood within ten minutes what they meant.

The Dutch Fort

Fort Zeelandia, now known as Anping Old Fort, was the seat of Dutch colonial power in Taiwan in the 1620s, and what remains is a strange collage — laterite brick foundations from the original Dutch construction, a Qing-era watchtower stacked on top, and a Japanese-era observation platform crowning the whole thing, each era simply building on the last rather than replacing it. I climbed the tower at golden hour and looked out over the harbor where Dutch, Ming loyalist, Qing, and Japanese ships all once anchored in turn, each convinced they’d secured the place for good.

The Tree That Ate a Warehouse

Nothing prepared me for the Anping Tree House. A nineteenth-century salt merchant’s warehouse, abandoned for decades, has been almost entirely consumed by a banyan tree — roots the thickness of human torsos running like veins through brick walls, holding up ceilings that would otherwise have collapsed, framing empty window openings in living wood. Lia walked through in near silence, which for her is rare. There’s a raised walkway built through the canopy so you can look down into the tangled interior, and the effect is somewhere between a ruin and a living organism that happens to have architectural features.

Old Street and Shrimp Rolls

Anping Old Street runs between the fort and the harbor, dense with shops selling shrimp rolls — deep-fried, stuffed with whole shrimp and pork, a Anping specialty — and dried tofu that locals swear by. We ate standing at a counter while a canal-side breeze carried the smell of low tide and fry oil in equal measure.

When to go: Late afternoon for the fort and tree house, when the light is soft and the day-trip crowds from Tainan have mostly thinned. October through December brings comfortable temperatures for walking the canal district.