Shanhua

Shànhuà (善化) was originally known as Bakaloan (目加溜灣), one of the four major settlements of Siraya Indigenous people along the margins of Taijiang Lagoon (台江內海). The settlement was conquered by the Dutch in 1635, with a church built in 1636 and the first Sabbath service held by Pastor Louis Junius in 1637, establishing it as an early center of Christianity in Taiwan. The Dutch incentivized sugarcane cultivation here because the commodity fetched good prices in Japan, laying the foundation for the region’s sugar industry. The Shanhua Sugar Factory, established in 1904 as Wanli Sugar Factory (灣裡製糖所), remains one of only two operational TaiSugar facilities in Taiwan as of the 2020s, having consolidated the remains of several other vanished sugar factories across the region.