Wuqi

We only found Wuqi because our Taichung Airbnb host, when asked where she personally buys seafood, drew us a rough map on the back of a receipt instead of naming a restaurant. “Go to the port,” she said. “Not the tourist one. The real one.” That distinction turned out to matter.

The Port Before the Tourists Wake Up

Wuqi sits on Taichung’s coast, a genuine working harbor where trawlers come in loaded before dawn and the auction houses along the wharf start moving crates of mackerel, squid, and shrimp while most of the city is still asleep. We arrived a little after 6am on Lia’s insistence and found ourselves standing at the edge of an actual fish auction, fast, loud, entirely in a dialect neither of us understood, buyers signaling bids with hand gestures I still can’t decode. Afterward we ate breakfast at a stall a hundred metres from the docks — a bowl of fish soup so fresh it barely needed seasoning, made from whatever had come off the boats an hour earlier.

A Chessboard Lighthouse and a Wall of Turbines

A short walk from the harbor stands Wuqi Lighthouse, painted in a black-and-white checkerboard pattern that makes it look almost cartoonish against the flat coastal light — a design choice, apparently, meant to make it more visible against the grey Taiwan Strait haze. From the breakwater nearby, the view out to sea has changed dramatically in the last decade: dozens of offshore wind turbines now line the horizon, part of Taiwan’s push into offshore wind, turning what used to be an empty seascape into something closer to a slow-moving industrial ballet. We sat on the concrete breakwater with coffee from a 7-Eleven and watched the blades turn in near-unison for longer than was strictly necessary.

When to go: Arrive before 7am if you want to see the fish auction — it winds down by mid-morning. Autumn and winter bring the clearest air and best visibility of the turbines offshore, though the coastal wind can be sharp; bring a windbreaker regardless of season.