Roughly 90 percent of Toufen's approximately 107,000 residents are of Hakka ethnicity, making it the most Hakka city in Miaoli County — itself one of the most Hakka counties in Taiwan. The Hakka people are a Han Chinese subgroup with their own dialects, cuisine, and cultural traditions, and they settled in Miaoli's hill country in large numbers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, drawn by land that the lowland-preferring Hoklo settlers had largely bypassed. That historical choice of terrain — the foothills over the plains — shaped Toufen's geography and its cultural character in ways that persist today. The estimated ratio of Hakka to Hoklo residents is roughly 8:2.

Toufen covers 53.3 square kilometers in the northern part of Miaoli County, wedged between Hsinchu County to the north and east, Zhunan Township to the west, and Zaoqiao Township across the Nangang River to the south. The city lies in the midstream valley of the Zhonggang River, with terrain that shifts between the alluvial plains of the Zhunan lowlands and the rolling hills that define the Miaoli interior. From above, the transition is visible: the flat, dense urban sprawl of Zhunan blurs into Toufen's more undulating streetscape as the land begins to fold. Toufen's city center merges seamlessly with Zhunan, the two forming a single continuous urban area across the county line.

In 2007, a project funded jointly by Taiwan's Council of Cultural Affairs and private donors transformed a cluster of old community houses in the city into a museum documenting daily life in the 1950s and 1960s — the decades when Toufen was a small township rather than a city. The renovation was an act of memory as much as architecture: an effort to preserve the texture of mid-century Hakka life before it disappeared entirely into modernization. The Luzhunan Historical House is among the sites that came out of this impulse, offering visitors a glimpse of the built environment from which contemporary Toufen grew.

On 5 October 2015, Toufen was officially upgraded from an urban township to a county-administered city — a change with administrative and symbolic weight. The upgrade reflected population growth and the urban development that had made Toufen, by that point, the most populous administrative division in Miaoli County. It also signaled a broader shift in the county's self-perception: Toufen's Hakka heritage, its Jianguo Night Market, and its Backyard Garden complex had begun drawing visitors from outside the region, transforming a working inland city into a modest destination.

Toufen does not have its own railway station on the main line — travelers arrive via Zhunan Station in the neighboring township, a short journey to the west. The Taiwan High Speed Rail passes directly through the city's center, though no HSR stop is planned, meaning that for all the trains that rush beneath Toufen's streets, none of them stop. Road connections are abundant: Freeway 1 and Provincial Highways 1, 3, 13, and their variants all pass through or near the city. The Jianguo Night Market draws locals and visitors alike on weekends, and the Backyard Garden complex offers a quieter daytime alternative for those exploring Miaoli on a slower schedule.