Lieyu (Little Kinmen)
"Little Kinmen felt like the answer to a question I hadn't thought to ask about the big island."
A smaller, quieter island off Kinmen's coast, reachable by a five-minute ferry, where anti-landing spikes still line the beaches.
The car ferry from Kinmen’s Shueitou pier to Lieyu takes about five minutes — barely enough time to finish a sentence — and yet the island on the other side feels noticeably quieter, less visited, more raw around the edges than Kinmen proper. I went mostly out of curiosity about the name, “Little Kinmen,” and stayed longer than planned because the place kept giving me reasons to.
A Beach Built to Repel an Invasion
The first thing I saw stepping off the ferry ramp was a beach lined with rows of rusted steel anti-landing spikes, angled toward the water like a forest of broken teeth — installed during the Cold War to shred the hulls of any amphibious landing craft attempting to storm the beach. They’re still there, decades on, half-sunk in sand that families now use for picnics, kids sometimes climbing carefully over the lower ones while parents watch from beach chairs a few meters back.
Gugang Tunnel and Sacrifice
Inland, the Gugang Tunnel is a war memorial built into an actual former military tunnel, commemorating soldiers who died during construction of Kinmen’s defensive tunnel network. It’s a somber, low-lit space with a long corridor and a small shrine at the center, and I had it entirely to myself on a Tuesday afternoon — no other visitors, just the hum of the ventilation system and my own footsteps on damp concrete.
A Slower Kind of Island Life
Away from the military sites, Lieyu is mostly farmland — sorghum fields, small vegetable plots, a scattering of old stone houses — and the pace is noticeably slower even than Kinmen’s, which is already slow by Taiwan standards. Lia and I rented bikes at the ferry terminal and spent an afternoon riding the coastal loop road, stopping at a roadside stall for grilled corn and a bag of Kinmen’s ubiquitous sesame candy, the seller more interested in asking where we were from than in making a sale.
When to go: A single day trip from Kinmen works well any time between March and November. Check the car ferry schedule before you go — it runs on a fixed timetable, not on demand, and missing the last return sailing means an unplanned overnight.