Formosa Chemicals & Fibre Company Yilan Plant

A former textile complex just south of Longtan Lake (龍潭湖) in Jiaoxi, Yilan. From the late 1960s the Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團) established three textile subsidiaries in Longtan Village: the Taili (台麗) garment factory and the Taixu (台旭) fabric mill, a joint venture with Japan’s Asahi Kasei (旭化成), both founded in 1968, followed by the integrated Formosa Chemicals & Fibre Yilan Plant (台化宜蘭廠) in 1973. At its height in the 1970s and 1980s the complex employed close to 4,000 workers, most of them women working three rotating shifts, and turned the village into a textile town with its own shops and even a movie theater. As labour-intensive manufacturing moved offshore the operation wound down; Taixu closed in 1998, Taili merged into the Yilan Plant the same year, and the last batch of yarn shipped in 2009. The women’s dormitory was demolished in 2018 and redeveloped as a lakeside park, and Formosa Plastics has since proposed clearing the remaining buildings for an 18-hectare whisky distillery slated to open as early as 2026.