Taiwan Huandao 2013: Zhubei to Hsinchu

September 9th, 2013

The second day of my round-the-island tour of Taiwan was relatively uneventful. I had slept poorly after first day on the road and did not fully awaken until after noon. Since I was in no particular hurry I decided to take a day to ride around Zhubei and Hsinchu City before setting out for Taichung the following day.

Much of Zhubei is still under construction.

Zhubei has the feel of a city built overnight, almost like one of China’s infamous “ghost cities”, with many modern apartment blocks and commercial towers standing empty or still under construction. Much of the eastern side of the city has grown around the new high-speed rail station, and I am reminded of playing Sim City while browsing the area on Google Maps. The streets in this part of Zhubei are a mosaic of empty plots and shiny new condominiums with the occasional fledgling business. I’m guessing there simply aren’t enough people living here to support much commerce in the area. Perhaps it just needs a few more years to fill up.

At least some effort has been undertaken to preserve some of the traditional structures that must have once constituted village life in the area. While weaving around the grid of streets between development projects I noticed an old-fashioned gate and went to investigate. Inside the walls I found a variety of traditional-looking buildings, gardens, a small rice paddy, and even some mud brick ruins¹.

An imitation cinema named after the park: Xinwawu Theater (新瓦屋大戲院).

A rice paddy in the heart of the new city.

In other places it looks like hold-outs haven’t sold to developers, recalling the nail houses of mainland China. It was really jarring to find an ancestral hall amidst all the shiny new high rises. Imagine waking up one day to see all this steel and concrete reaching into the sky where there was once nothing more than fields and dusty back-country roads².

Traditional architecture amidst the towering developments of Zhubei.

I headed west under the blistering sun and made my way across a long bridge into Hsinchu City proper. On the other side of the river I returned to the cluttered and hectic Taiwan that I had become more familiar with, leaving Zhubei’s artifice behind. Hsinchu immediately reminded me of other cities I have visited in my travels, though it had slightly more of a Japanese colonial era feel in its historic core. I roamed around a while but wasn’t really in the mood to continue cycling in the oppressive heat of the late afternoon.

Writing about Hsinchu provides an excuse to discuss romanization, the process by which the Chinese languages (and other languages with their own script) are written in the characters of the Latin alphabet. There are many competing methodologies of which hanyu pinyin is presently the most widely recognized. Taiwan officially adopted this system for romanization in 2009 but the implementation of this policy has been far from universal or consistent. While Taipei has already swapped out most of its signs other administrations have proceeded at their own pace for historical, cultural, or political reasons. Some of the more internationally recognizable place names in Taiwan, many of which follow Wade-Giles romanization, are also unlikely to be changed. Hsinchu is one such example; it would be romanized as “Xinzhu” in hanyu pinyin and is pronounced something like “shin-ju”. Knowing this, Zhubei’s name makes sense: it is a combination of the “zhu” (竹) from Hsinchu and “bei” (北), or north.

Iffy coffee. No, I did not stop there for a cup.

I brought my laptop in addition to my camera precisely so that I could get some work done at some point. I also had it in mind to do some shopping. I’ve been in search of proper clothing for this trip—some kind of wicking, quick-dry shirt to keep me cool under the sun. All the stuff I found in Taipei was either cheap or plastered with ugly logos. In Hsinchu I found more of the same and soon tired of playing the role of consumerist drone. I parked myself in an air conditioned coffee shop, ordered a passable cappuccino, and got down to business processing photos and drafting up material for this series of posts.

The stately Hsinchu Prefecture Hall (新竹州廳), now the center of city governance.

After nightfall I made a brief stop at the famous Hsinchu Chenghuang Temple (新竹城隍廟), a temple completely surrounded by night market vendors. To enter the temple from the front it is necessary to pass through a labyrinth of food stalls and open air restaurants. It is quite a vibrant merger of commerce and spirituality.

A temple immersed in street food vendors.

A peek inside the Hsinchu Chenghuang Temple (新竹都城隍).

Stepping inside the old temple I turned to the heavens and was awestruck by the beauty of the woodwork on the caisson ceiling. With a quick flick of the wrist I pointed my camera upward and shot what is undoubtedly the most beautiful photograph I have captured on this trip thus far.

Beautiful caisson woodwork just inside the front hall (廟前殿藻井).

People in Taiwan generally work late hours and, as such, rush hour usually takes place after nightfall. I emerged from the temple complex, hopped on my bike, and jumped into the seething flow of motorbikes, delivery trucks, and automobiles plying the streets of Hsinchu. Riding in the organized chaos of busy traffic under the ubiquitous neon lights was an experience I won’t soon forget.

Slinking through a shuttered market after dark.

Cycling the streets of Hsinchu at night.

I prefer not to take the same route I have taken before if I can help it. And so I brashly headed east from downtown Hsinchu, intending to take a bridge across to Zhubei further up the river (and closer to my final destination). After a harrowing ride through a motorbike tunnel under the rail line I emerged in the eastern part of Hsinchu to the sight of a fairy-tale castle at the next roundabout³.

I kept going. The land began to rise underneath me and my muscles powered my climb. Bicycle lanes fell away, the road widened, and soon I found myself on what amounted to the highway leading out of town. The intersection leading to the big bridge into Zhubei was a confusing jumble; I ended up waiting for minutes to position myself in just the right way to make it to the appropriate side to begin my approach. With green lights and engines roaring all around me I forced the pedals down and sailed ahead of the motorbikes, flying down the gentle gradient to the bridge beyond.

Unfortunately I took the wrong turn leading onto the bridge and soon found myself lost in hazy industrial lands lit by the incandescence of dim orange bulbs. Where had I ended up? My phone was not particularly helpful; anytime roads are overlapped they appear as one on the screen. I doubled back and followed the pillars of the bridge onramp hoping to find an access point to return to the surface.

Getting lost in the dusty lands below the bridge on the wrong side of the river.

The silhouettes of enormous machinery loomed in the darkness as the road gave way to gravel and dirt. I coughed, breathing in the dust that had been kicked up by the last vehicle to come this way. Street lights had given way to darkness and again I found myself cut off from the world. Anything could happen out here.

Eventually I returned to the set of service roads beneath the bridge itself. From here the ascent was more or less predictable. I soon crossed the bridge into Zhubei, had dinner, and eventually got to sleep, though not before insomnia took its toll. I expected a challenging ride to Taichung the following day due to the number of different sites I planned to visit along the way.

This would be Xinwawu Hakka Cultural District (新瓦屋客家文化保存區), an area set aside to give modern life in Zhubei a sense of connection to its agrarian past. ↩
This turned out to be Fenyang Hall (竹北汾陽堂), a heritage site. I was not yet familiar with the distinction between a regular residence and ancestral hall back in 2013. ↩
This was actually the entrance to the Hsinchu Glass Museum (新竹市立玻璃工藝博物館), though I didn’t know it at the time. ↩

Map

Themes

Bicycle Touring in Taiwan (台灣自行車旅遊)

Regions

Zhubei (竹北)
Hsinchu City (新竹市)

Series: Taiwan Huandao 2013

An incomplete series of posts about my first bicycle tour around Taiwan in September and October 2013. The complete trip around the main island is known in Chinese as huándǎo (環島), literally “around the island”, and is typically conducted as a rite of passage for young people in Taiwan. It took me a full lunar month to complete, but I was not in any particular rush, and it can be done in under a week if you’re in a hurry.

Note: this series is far from complete and the quality of each entry varies as it was originally drafted in 2014. Since 2024 I have been revising each entry with and redoing all the photos.