Kinmen Old Town

Kinmen sits close enough to the Chinese mainland that on a clear day you can see the skyline of Xiamen from its beaches, which makes the island’s old villages — full of red-brick Fujianese swallowtail roofs and diaspora mansions — feel like a hinge point between two very different Chinas, one that stayed and one that scattered to Southeast Asia and came home rich.

Shuitou Village

Shuitou is the best-preserved of Kinmen’s old settlements, a compact cluster of traditional Fujian-style courtyard houses interspersed with Western-style mansions built in the 1920s and 30s by Kinmen families who’d made fortunes in Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines and sent money home to build monuments to their success. Walking the lanes, you pass an ornate colonnaded facade with Baroque flourishes standing directly next to a red-brick swallowtail-roofed courtyard house that could be four hundred years old, and nobody seems to find the juxtaposition strange. I certainly did, in the best way.

Deyue Tower and the Bandit Watch

At the edge of Shuitou stands Deyue Lou, a defensive tower built in 1931 by a wealthy overseas Kinmen merchant specifically to watch for pirates and bandits — a reminder that overseas wealth here always came with a defensive posture attached. I climbed the narrow spiral stairs to the top with a Kinmen-born guesthouse owner who pointed out gun slits built into the walls and told me, almost offhand, that his own grandfather had sheltered in a tower just like it during a raid in the 1940s. History on Kinmen isn’t distant. It’s a grandparent’s memory.

Sorghum, Not Rice

Kinmen’s soil doesn’t suit rice paddies the way Taiwan proper’s does, so the island grows sorghum instead, and that sorghum becomes kaoliang liquor — Kinmen’s signature export, fierce and clear and sold in bottles at every shop on the island. Lia and I did a distillery tour near the old town almost by accident, ducking in out of a sudden downpour, and ended up doing a shot of 58-proof kaoliang with the tour guide at eleven in the morning because refusing seemed ruder than accepting.

When to go: March through May and October through November, when the humidity drops and the old brick facades photograph best in low-angle light. Avoid the peak of summer, when Kinmen gets genuinely brutal heat with little coastal breeze to offset it.