Japan took control of Taiwan in 1895 following the First Sino-Japanese War, and the colonial administration quickly identified sugar as one of the island's most exploitable agricultural products. By 1913, the facility now known as the Hualien Sugar Factory was established under the name Hualien Manufacturing Plant Dahe Factory — a designation that was functional rather than poetic, naming the enterprise by its purpose and location. Sugar production in this era required significant land clearing, water management, and labor mobilization. The Huatung Valley, with its fertile alluvial floor and relatively accessible river water, was suited to the crop. Cane fields spread across the valley; workers from indigenous communities and migrant Han populations both contributed to the industry that the factory organized and processed.

During World War II, as Allied forces worked to sever Japan's supply chains across the Pacific theater, industrial facilities throughout Taiwan became targets. The Hualien Sugar Factory did not escape. United States Air Force bombing heavily damaged the plant during the war years — the machinery wrecked, the buildings struck, the production capacity eliminated. When Japan surrendered in 1945 and Taiwan's governance transferred to the Republic of China, officials inherited a landscape pocked with similar industrial casualties across the island. An assessment determined that the Hualien factory should be restored rather than abandoned. The decision was neither obvious nor inevitable — it reflected a judgment about the continuing economic value of sugar in a postwar economy that was still finding its footing.

After the handover of Taiwan in 1945, the factory was renamed the Hualien Sugar Factory under the newly formed Taiwan Sugar Corporation — a state-owned enterprise that consolidated much of the island's sugar industry. Restoration work proceeded, and by 1948 sugar production had restarted. The next five decades were the factory's steady years: the cane grew, the machinery ran, the workers came and went through generations. Taiwan Sugar Corporation mills like this one became fixtures in the communities they anchored, providing stable employment in agricultural areas where alternatives were limited. Guangfu grew partly around the factory's rhythms — the harvests, the crushing seasons, the quiet months in between. The railway station nearby made the factory accessible; the valley floor made it viable.

Taiwan's sugar industry had been declining for decades before the Hualien factory finally stopped. Global sugar prices, changing land use, and the economics of modernized production had gradually made small regional operations like this one difficult to sustain. In 2002, the factory ceased operations — the end of nearly nine decades of continuous industrial purpose, interrupted only by wartime damage. The cessation was not dramatic; it was the kind of quiet ending that industrial closures often are, a last batch processed, the machinery stilled, the gates left but the activity gone. For Guangfu Township, it marked the end of an era that had shaped the community's economy and daily life since before living memory.

Closed factories face a familiar choice: demolition or reinvention. The Hualien Sugar Factory chose reinvention. Today the site operates as a heritage attraction under the stewardship of the Hualien County Cultural Affairs Bureau, with the buildings preserved as a record of colonial-era industrial architecture and post-war Taiwanese economic history. The structures — built to process sugar on an industrial scale — now house exhibitions, cultural programming, and visitor services. Walking the grounds, you move through different eras simultaneously: the Japanese-era construction in the original walls, the ROC-era restoration in the restored machinery, and the contemporary repurposing in the signage and exhibits. The factory is a short walk south of Guangfu Station, which still operates on the Taiwan Railway's Taitung line.