Before viceroy Shen Baozhen renamed it, the settlement was called Longkiau — a word borrowed from the Paiwan people who had lived on this peninsula long before any colonial power arrived. The Dutch knew it as Lonkjouw; American sailors knew it as a place of danger after the Rover Incident of the 1860s, when shipwrecked men were killed by local tribes. That incident, and the subsequent 1871 Mudan Incident in which Ryukyuan sailors met a similar fate, brought enough foreign pressure on the Qing Empire that Shen Baozhen was dispatched to bring order and build institutions. He came, he observed, he renamed. The new county seat he ordered built around a Paiwan village south of old Longkiau would be called Hengchun, and it would be fortified properly — walls, gates, and all.

Construction of the walled town began in 1875, the first year of the Guangxu Era, and was completed in 1879. Four gates faced the cardinal directions — north, east, south, and west — and a moat ringed the outer walls for a total circumference of about 2,550 meters, confirmed by an official survey in 1988. Today Hengchun Old Town is one of the best-preserved walled settlements in Taiwan. About half of the original wall still stands, and all four gates remain intact. Walking through the south gate in the late afternoon, when the stonework catches the low sun and the air smells faintly of the sea, it is easy to forget that the town behind you fills with tour buses on weekends. A magnitude 7.0–7.2 earthquake struck about 30 kilometers southwest of Hengchun on December 26, 2006 — the strongest in a century — and damaged fifteen of the historic buildings in the center. The walls held.

Hengchun is the entry point to Kenting National Park, the southernmost national park in Taiwan, and the commercial pulse of the Hengchun Peninsula. On weekday mornings the old town has a quiet, lived-in quality: vegetable stalls near the gates, schoolchildren on bicycles, elderly residents doing tai chi in the shade of the old wall. By Friday evening the picture changes completely. Kenting's main strip, a few kilometers to the south, transforms into a sprawling night market, and the roads through Hengchun back up with cars from Taipei and Kaohsiung. Tourism here runs hot from April through October, when the beaches are warm and clear. In winter the peninsula stays mild enough to draw people escaping the grey north — Hengchun in January is warmer at night than Pingtung City during the day.

Hengchun gained an unexpected kind of fame in 2008 when the film Cape No. 7 opened across Taiwan. The movie, set largely in and around the town, became the highest-grossing Taiwanese film in the country's cinema history at the time of its release. The story — a young musician, old love letters, a cross-cultural village band — made Hengchun feel like more than a stopover on the way to the beach. The film's protagonist, Aga, lives in a house that became a pilgrimage site for fans. Hengchun already had the gates and the tropical air. After Cape No. 7, it had a kind of cinematic identity that other Taiwanese beach towns lacked.

The climate that gave Hengchun its name is real. Average monthly temperatures range from 21 to 28 degrees Celsius, with ocean breezes that keep the daytime highs from getting as brutal as they would inland. The peninsula sits at the convergence of the Taiwan Strait and the Philippine Sea, and the result is a place where palm trees grow at the roadside and tropical rainforest covers the hills. Strong katabatic winds can sweep down from the mountains, particularly in winter, rattling shop signs and sending plastic chairs skidding across restaurant terraces. But the cold fronts that chill the rest of Taiwan lose their edge here, and the sun usually reappears within hours. Temperatures drop below 15 degrees Celsius roughly once every three years, an event that locals apparently still talk about afterward.