Tainan West Central

West Central District (中西區) is the historic heart of Tainan, containing an extraordinary concentration of more than a dozen national monuments and in excess of a hundred recognized heritage sites extending back to the Dutch colonial era. Chihkan Tower, established as Fort Provintia by the Dutch in 1653, is the site where the pirate-king Koxinga accepted the Dutch surrender in 1662. During the subsequent Ming-Zheng period, when Tainan served as the capital of the Kingdom of Tungning, the district saw the establishment of the Confucian Temple (1665), Taiwan’s first center of traditional Confucian scholarship; the Sacrificial Rites Martial Temple (1665), one of the earliest sites of worship of Lord Guan, the God of War; the Grand Mazu Temple (1683), originally the palace of the Prince of Ningjing (寧靖王); and the Taiwan Fu Chenghuang Temple (1669), all national monuments. The Japanese colonial period brought extensive development as exemplified by the Prefecture Hall, District Courthouse, Weather Observatory, and the Hayashi Department Store, built in the 1930s and recently redeveloped for tourism.