For most of the Qing period, the Hengchun Peninsula — Taiwan's remote southern tip — was governed theoretically and administered barely. It fell under Fengshan County, but enforcement at such distance from the administrative center was thin. The indigenous Paiwan people held effective sovereignty over the mountainous interior, and coastal areas existed in a grey zone between Qing claims and practical Paiwan control.

That ambiguity became dangerous for shipping. In 1867, American merchant sailors from the wrecked Rover were killed on the shore. In 1871, fifty-four Ryukyuan sailors suffered the same fate. The Rover incident triggered a failed American military expedition. The Ryukyuan deaths triggered something more consequential: the Taiwan Expedition of 1874, in which Japanese forces landed on the peninsula and fought the Paiwan directly. The Qing, alarmed by Japanese military action on territory they claimed, sent Shen Baozhen to assess the situation. Shen's recommendation was a walled city, and the name he chose — Hengchun — was a deliberate statement of intended permanence.

The fort Liu Ao designed followed the conventions of Chinese walled cities, scaled for a southern frontier town. Four gates faced the four cardinal directions — roughly; the west gate actually faced northwest. Each had a gatehouse and cannons. The walls enclosed the entire civilian settlement, with residential areas concentrated near the south and west gates and a military barracks occupying the northern half of the town. Outside the walls ran a moat.

The southern gate received a name: Mingdu Gate (明都門). The other three were left unnamed, which tells you something about how bureaucratic attention was distributed at the edge of empire. The south was the face the town showed to arrivals; the rest was simply functional perimeter.

Civilians and soldiers lived in proximity inside an enclosure that was simultaneously defensive fortification and organized township. For travelers approaching from the north, the gates marked the boundary between the frontier and something more established — a worked, named, administered place on the map.

The walls had barely settled before the weather started in on them. A typhoon in 1908 damaged the wooden gatehouses severely. World War Two brought further structural losses, and the 1959 Hengchun earthquake — a significant seismic event in southern Taiwan — took more of the fabric. The growing town also simply needed roads, and parts of the wall were removed to accommodate them.

By the late twentieth century, only portions of the wall survived near the north and east gates. The south gate, which once marked the main entrance to the city, now sits marooned in the middle of a roundabout on Hengchun's main street — preserved but islanded by traffic.

The national government designated the site a protected historical monument in 1979. Repair work on the south gate began that same year; the east gate followed in 1986. Replica gatehouses were built above both. But termites found the east gatehouse, and it collapsed again. Persistence is required when preserving structures this close to the tropical ground.

What is remarkable about Hengchun is that all four original gates remain. Typhoons, earthquakes, war, and road construction have stripped away most of the connecting wall, but the gates themselves — the carved stone archways that once marked the official entries to the city — have survived. Hengchun is the only place in Taiwan where the full original set of four city gates from a walled town still stands. That distinction requires a moment to sit with: across an island with centuries of walled towns, temples, and forts, this remote southern settlement at the edge of the empire preserved what others lost.

Walking through one of the gates today, you pass under stone that was quarried and laid while the memory of the Rover incident was still fresh, while the Paiwan still controlled the hills above the town, while the question of who owned this peninsula remained genuinely open. The walls did not settle that question, but they are still here.