Baisha Bay
"The sand here is made of ground-up coral, and it is somehow the softest thing I've stood on in Taiwan."
A crescent of powder-white coral sand on the Hengchun Peninsula, famous as a film location and quietly one of Taiwan's best swimming beaches.
Baisha means “white sand,” which is about as literal a name as Taiwan gets, and for once the name undersells the place. We arrived expecting a nice beach and found something closer to a postcard — a tight crescent bay where the sand is genuinely bone-white, made of finely pulverized coral rather than the usual volcanic grey that colors most of Taiwan’s coastline.
A Beach That Became a Film Set
Part of Baisha’s local fame comes from Ang Lee shooting scenes of Life of Pi here, using the bay to stand in for a tropical Pacific shoreline that could have been almost anywhere. Standing on the sand, it’s easy to see why the location scouts picked it: the water goes through three or four distinct shades of blue before it hits the horizon, and the headlands on either side curve in just enough to block the wind, leaving the surface glassy on calm mornings. A few small shops near the parking area still lean on the movie connection a little, but the beach itself doesn’t need the reference to sell itself.
The Best Swimming on the Peninsula
What I didn’t expect was how good the actual swimming is. Kenting’s main beaches can get choppy and crowded with jet ski traffic; Baisha’s cove geography keeps the water calm and shallow for a long stretch out, which made it the one beach where Lia — a nervous swimmer at the best of times — actually relaxed and floated on her back for twenty straight minutes without complaint. There’s decent snorkeling near the rocks at the northern edge too, small reef fish moving through water clear enough that you can watch your own shadow on the sand below.
We spent an entire lazy afternoon here, which is not something either of us does often, and left slightly sunburned and completely unbothered about it.
When to go: Weekday mornings, before the tour buses from Kenting arrive around midday. October to May avoids both the harshest sun and the peak domestic crowds.