From markets to family kitchens, taste offers a way to read Chiayi, revealing the city’s evolution through what people eat and how they eat it.
BY LI CHIA-FANG
In December 2025, Chiayi celebrated its 321st founding anniversary with the 320+1 Chiayi City Expo. The event approached the city as a living archive, formed through cycles of migration, rebuilding, and adaptation. Rather than presenting history as a straight line, the Expo invited visitors to notice how the past surfaces in everyday practices. Food culture, accumulated over centuries, reflects these intersections of geography, memory, and lived experience.
Chiayi is one of Taiwan’s oldest cities, with a history no less layered than that of former capital Tainan. Yet its trajectory has rarely been linear. Time and again, moments of prosperity were followed by abrupt descents — earthquakes, fires, war — each forcing the city to reconstruct itself beyond the physical wreckage. Each reconstruction acted as a kind of reset: established habits were disrupted and reassembled, leaving a city that looks familiar at first glance but differs in detail.
Food reflects this process more clearly than anything else. Chiayi’s culinary landscape draws from multiple eras and places, with influences settling into ordinary, often overlooked settings.
Migration and the first tastes
More than three centuries ago, the Beigang River cut across the plains, forming what would later become the boundary between Yunlin and Chiayi counties. Where river met sea, the port of Beigang, historically known as Bengang, emerged as an early crossing point. Migrants arriving by water entered the plains here. By 1704, Chiayi, then known as Zhuluoshan, had already built a wooden stockade, making it one of Taiwan’s earliest fortified cities.
The culinary customs brought by settlers from Zhangzhou and Quanzhou in China’s Fujian Province laid the foundations of the local food culture. Dishes built around sweet potato starch — crystal dumplings, meatballs, oyster omelets, and thickened sauces — became everyday staples. Seasonal practices, including the hand-made spring rolls prepared in Dong Market during the Qingming Festival, trace their origins to southern Chinese traditions that took root in Chiayi’s kitchens.
Echoes of the colonial era
During the Japanese colonial period from 1895 to 1945, Chiayi entered a new phase of transformation. As nearby Alishan mountain became one of the island’s three major state-run forestry zones, Chiayi flourished as a logistical and administrative hub. Japanese engineers, merchants, and officials passed through in large numbers, leaving a clear imprint on local dining habits.
The mayonnaise commonly paired with cold noodles and other chilled dishes in Chiayi — still documented in historical records from Baixue Foods, now known as Jiameizhen — traces its origins to Japan’s adaptation of the condiment. In traditional meatball and eel noodle shops, the accompanying soup is often not a pork-bone broth but a light, clear stock made with dried bonito flakes, long regarded as the essence of Japanese dashi.
Urban life during this period also introduced new forms of leisure dining. In districts such as Rongmachi, Beimen, and Ximen — commercial centers of colonial-era Chiayi — Western-style cafés staffed by waitresses became part of an emerging modern lifestyle. The circular roundabout created through Japanese urban planning, now known as Central Fountain Circle, developed into the city’s commercial hub.
Japanese confectioners also introduced wagashi culture — traditional Japanese sweets often served with tea and valued as much for their seasonal symbolism as for their flavor — traces of which remain in shops such as Guang Sheng Tang, originally a herbal pharmacy that produced sweet medicinal jellies, and New Taiwan Bakery. Over time, these influences blended with local customs, producing distinctly Chiayi variations: daifuku, soft mochi confections filled with sweet bean paste, shaped like Taiwanese longevity peaches; red bean sweets resembling inaka manju, a rustic Japanese bun made from wheat flour and filled with coarse red bean paste; and other pastries that bridge two culinary traditions.
After World War II, another wave of transformation followed. Military dependents relocating to Taiwan were housed in repurposed Japanese-era residences, forming new military villages across Chiayi. The city’s proximity to Chiayi Air Base in Shuishang Township led to the establishment of several army and air force communities, bringing with them the regional cuisines of China.
These influences extended beyond home cooking. Restaurants specializing in elaborate Chinese banquet dishes began to appear, most notably Ming Palace Restaurant, once located above what is now New Taiwan Bakery near Fountain Circle, the commercial heart of Chiayi. Although many military villages have since disappeared, their flavors remain embedded in the city’s foodscape: breakfast shops serving clay-oven flatbreads, long-standing dessert stalls offering sweet, fermented rice soup, and snacks still known by names that echo their military origins.
It is not uncommon these days to see sausages and cured meats hanging outside neighborhood homes — a subtle reminder that memory often survives longest at the dining table.
Cooking with the land
Geographically, Chiayi sits at the heart of the fertile Jianan Plain, drawing on resources from the mountains, agricultural fields, and nearby coast. This abundance has long shaped the city’s cuisine. Traditional sweet drinks made from aiyu (愛玉) jelly — extracted from the seeds of the jelly fig, known locally as tsí-á or tsháu-á-tsí in Taiwanese Hokkien — remain popular year-round, reflecting Chiayi’s connection to the Alishan foothills.
Seafood tells another part of the story. At night markets and late-night stir-fry shops, fish and shellfish are laid over crushed ice: milkfish, mullet, and white shrimp from coastal farms, oysters from Dongshi, and even seafood shipped from Penghu. These ingredients fuel Chiayi’s nocturnal dining culture, where freshness is expected and fiercely compared.
Neighboring Yunlin County is Taiwan’s primary turkey-producing region, directly shaping Chiayi’s most iconic dish. Turkey farming expanded rapidly from the 1920s onward, and over time, Chiayi developed an unparalleled density of turkey rice shops. Available nearly around the clock, turkey rice became not just a meal, but a constant, earning its place as the Chiayi’s most widely recognized flavor.
Yet the plains offer more than turkey. Frogs, snails, soft-shell turtles, eel, and grass carp, once commonly harvested from fields and waterways, gave rise to rustic dishes long associated with restoring vitality. From stir-fried eel to the so-called “Three Immortals Soup,” these preparations may unsettle some urban diners, but in Chiayi they remain familiar and close at hand.
Chiayi residents may not defend food traditions with the rigidity found elsewhere in Taiwan, but beneath the city’s understated exterior lies a web of unspoken rules — such as pairing soy milk with tofu pudding to intensify the bean aroma. These practices, known instinctively by locals, set Chiayi’s food culture apart from the broader “central-southern Taiwan” label often applied from a distance.
Shaped by multiple influences, Chiayi’s cuisine has developed through successive periods of change and migration. Together, these influences form an enduring pattern, with familiar elements rearranged over time.
Li Chia-fang is a columnist for THSR Monthly and a contributing editor for CommonWealth Magazine — Smile Taiwan. Drawn to overlooked local beauty, she documents stories from cities and small towns through her project ESPRES:SO Such Expression. Her published works include Island Playthings and The Soul of Taiwanese Noodles.
