The Babuza were a plains aboriginal people, part of what linguists now classify as the Formosan branch of the Austronesian language family. Their settlement at Poasoa occupied productive lowland territory near the Taiwan Strait coast. The Dutch East India Company, which controlled parts of Taiwan's west coast from the 1620s, administered the area through their larger regional hub at Favorlang — modern Huwei, in present-day Yunlin County to the south.

When Koxinga — the Ming loyalist commander Zheng Chenggong — laid siege to the Dutch fort at Zeelandia in 1661 and eventually drove the Dutch from Taiwan, the Changhua area became part of the contested transition zone. Han Chinese immigration accelerated through the late seventeenth century. By 1694, the settlement had consolidated enough to be formally recorded as Poasoa Village. In 1723, following the suppression of the Zhu Yigui rebellion, Changhua County was formally established — the administrative unit that gives the modern city its name and its identity.

When Japan took control of Taiwan in 1895 following the First Sino-Japanese War, the imperial administration set about reordering Taiwanese cities according to its own planning priorities. Changhua became the official county seat in 1897. The Japanese name Shōka came into use — the same characters, pronounced differently — alongside a confusing array of romanized Chinese spellings that appear in colonial-era documents: Changwha, Changhwa, Changhoa, Chanhue.

The Japanese period reshaped Changhua physically and institutionally. The railway arrived, anchoring the city's commercial geography around the station that still anchors it today. Schools were built; the education system that would produce the generation of 1947 took shape here. The city that is now recognized for its historic buildings — the Wude Hall, the Railway Hospital, the Confucian Temple — is substantially a product of this era's construction and the layers deposited before it. Changhua's nickname, Bamboo Town, recalls the bamboo fortress that earlier Han settlers had built against the aboriginal population they were displacing — a memory of violence worn smooth by time.

The landmark most associated with Changhua is the Great Buddha statue of Baguashan, which stands 26 meters tall on the summit of Bagua Mountain to the east of the city center. The statue looks out across Changhua and toward the Taiwan Strait, its scale visible from much of the urban area below. The walkway ascending to it is lined with figures from Buddhist iconography, making the approach itself a kind of narrative.

Bagua Mountain — named for the eight trigrams of Chinese cosmology — has its own historical weight. It was the site of the Battle of Baguashan in 1895, when Taiwanese resistance fighters engaged Japanese forces during the Japanese takeover of the island. A museum and monument park on the mountain now commemorate that resistance. The Buddha above and the martyrs below occupy the same hillside, two layers of memory on top of each other, as is common in Taiwanese landscape.

Changhua has one of Taiwan's oldest Confucian temples — a working example of the educational and civic culture that Chinese settlers brought to the island and maintained through successive administrations. The earliest school in the city dates to 1726, during the Qing dynasty, when formal Confucian education was the foundation of civic life.

Today Changhua City has 15 elementary schools, 7 junior high schools, 7 senior high schools, and 2 universities — including National Changhua University of Education, which trains teachers for the region. The city's economy shifted from agriculture to industry after the 1970s; a 1992 survey found that 43.2 percent of workers were in the service sector and 42.4 percent in industry, with agriculture down to 14.4 percent. The flat lands that made Changhua agriculturally rich are now divided between urban development and the remaining fields that push against the city's edges.

Changhua is now the most populous county-administered city in Taiwan and forms part of the greater Taichung-Changhua metropolitan area — the second-largest in the country. The city center clusters around the railway station, which is Changhua's only Taiwan Railway stop and the hub through which commuters flow to and from Taichung to the north.

The city's average annual temperature is 22.4°C, with July the hottest month and January the coolest; annual rainfall averages about 1,723 millimeters, concentrated in June and tapering off toward the drier coastline to the west. The coast, where the Changhua lowlands meet the Taiwan Strait, is a different world from the dense urban grid near the station — flat, agricultural, windswept, with fishponds and tidal flats stretching toward the water. Both belong to the same county, and the distance between them measures how much a place can contain.