Hsinchu City
— — the wind that dried the noodle and built the chip.
Not only on a wall.
“The wind town on Taiwan's northwest coast, where the strait funnels a steady draft inland for most of the year. Hsinchu is half eighteenth-century walled city, half twenty-first-century semiconductor capital. The East Gate still keeps watch over a roundabout downtown; a few kilometres south, the Science Park turns out the chips the rest of the world runs on. From the studio.
Hsinchu City, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Hsinchu City sits at the mouth of the Toucian and Keya rivers on Taiwan's northwest coast, separated by the Hsinchu Plain from the Hsuehshan Range to the east. Population is roughly 450,000. The city is locally called Fengcheng, the Wind City, after the northeasterly that blows down the Taiwan Strait between October and March. The older Hokkien name was Tek-tsham, meaning bamboo barrier, after the Taokas-era Plains Aboriginal settlement that stood here before Qing administration arrived in the early eighteenth century.
The East Gate, Yingxi Men, was completed in 1829 as the main entrance of the Hsinchu walled city, the first brick-walled city in Taiwan. The Qing-era stone arch stands in the centre of a six-road traffic circle, the moat reshaped into a sunken plaza beneath glass canopies. A few blocks north, the Hsinchu City God Temple, founded in 1748 and elevated by imperial decree in 1891, anchors the night market that runs every evening on Zhongshan Road, the spiritual centre of the old town.
The Hsinchu City God Temple night market is the easiest evening: rice-noodle soup, hand-beaten pork meatballs (gongwan), and oyster omelette under low lights. Hsinchu Science Park, founded in 1980 and home to TSMC's earliest fabs, sits ten minutes southeast at the foot of the hills. The 17-Kilometre Coastal Bikeway runs north from Nanliao Fishing Port along the strait, past the Xiangshan wetlands where black-faced spoonbills overwinter and red mangrove lines the tidal flats.