Where to Stay in Taoyuan, Taiwan

What is Taoyuan known for?

Taoyuan is the airport municipality of northwestern Taiwan, a terrace of red laterite punched through with irrigation ponds. Farmers dug those ponds across the Taoyuan Tableland because the streams run too short and too steep to hold water, and the result is a landscape of small bright squares seen from every descending aircraft. Daxi keeps the old shopfronts.

Hakka towns fill the southern districts, Cihu holds the mausoleum and its field of bronze statues, and Shimen Reservoir backs the Dahan River up into the hills behind them.

What are the main landmarks in Taoyuan?

Taoyuan's landmarks are industrial, martial and Hakka rather than imperial. Daxi old street is the set piece, a row of ornate merchant facades above the Dahan River, and Cihu adds the mausoleum and the park where hundreds of discarded bronze statues stand in ranks. The museums are unusually specific.

Taoyuan runs a Coca-Cola Museum in a working bottling plant, a Chinese Furniture Museum, the Taoyuan Tudigong Culture Museum for the earth-god shrines that stand on every field corner, and the Taoyuan Military Village Museum in the old dependants' quarters.

What is the history of Taoyuan?

Taoyuan means peach garden. Han settlers who came up onto the tableland in the eighteenth century named it for the trees they planted, and found ground that would not hold water, being porous laterite cut by streams too short to irrigate anything. So they dug ponds.

Thousands of small reservoirs were cut into the terrace over the following two centuries, each feeding a few fields, and the Japanese administration finally tied them together with a canal that brought Dahan River water up onto the plateau in the nineteen-twenties. The twentieth century came in waves. Hakka families had already filled the southern towns, and after 1949 the army settled its households in rows of low quarters across the district, the dependants' villages that the Taoyuan Military Village Museum records.

Chiang Kai-shek kept a residence up the valley at Cihu and was laid there in 1975. Factories followed the ponds. Export plants spread over the terrace from the sixties, the airport opened at Dayuan at the end of the seventies and pulled the whole island's traffic through the district, and in 2014 the county was raised to a special municipality.

Where is Taoyuan?

Taoyuan occupies a tableland in northwestern Taiwan, tilted from the mountains of Fuxing District in the southeast down to the Taiwan Strait. The Dahan River cuts the eastern edge, held back at Shimen Reservoir before it turns north for the Taipei basin, and the flat land between carries the ponds, the runways and most of the factories. New Taipei lies northeast.

Hsinchu County closes the southwest, and Lalashan and the cypress ridges of the interior rise steeply behind Fuxing District, where the Atayal villages sit in the cloud line.

What is the climate of Taoyuan?

Taoyuan takes the northeast monsoon full on from October, which drags grey wet weeks across the tableland while the mountains behind Fuxing District wring the last of the rain out of it. Summer is hot and wet. Typhoons come up the Taiwan Strait between July and September and fill the ponds in a night, and the short pleasant windows are April and late autumn.

The tableland rarely freezes.

How do you get to Taoyuan?

Taoyuan is where most visitors to Taiwan land, since Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport sits in Dayuan on the western side of the municipality. An airport line runs east to Taipei Main Station in about forty minutes and south to Zhongli, and the western trunk railway calls at Taoyuan Station and Zhongli Station on the way down the island. High-speed trains stop further out.

Buses climb the Northern Cross-Island Highway from Daxi to Fuxing District and Lalashan, and the same road carries the traffic for Shimen Reservoir and Cihu.