Kaohsiung is Taiwan's second city and its main port, sitting at the southern end of the island where the climate is truly tropical. It spent most of the 20th century as a heavy industry hub — steel, shipbuilding, petrochemicals — and is still reinventing itself, but the transformation is well underway.
The Love River, once badly polluted, has been cleaned up and is now lined with cafes and walkways. The harbour front has been redeveloped into the Pier-2 Art Center, a cluster of former warehouses converted into galleries, studios and performance spaces that has become one of the more interesting cultural destinations in Taiwan. Next door, the old salt-port lanes of Yancheng are now full of independent cafes and craft beer bars, and the new whale-shaped Kaohsiung Music Center glows on the harbour's far shore. The nearby Cijin Island, reached by a short ferry ride, has a long beach on one side and a seafood street on the other.
The northern edge of the city is dominated by the Lotus Pond, a wide lake ringed by Taoist pagodas, dragon-and-tiger temples and giant deity statues — Kaohsiung's most photographed sight. Behind the centre rises Shoushan, or Monkey Mountain, a limestone hill with troops of macaques and a panoramic view over the harbour. The 19th-century British Consulate at Takao sits on the hill's southern flank.
Fo Guang Shan, about 30 km east of the city centre, is one of the largest Buddhist monastery complexes in Asia, with a 108-metre-tall golden Buddha visible from some distance. Worth the trip for the scale of the place alone.
Kaohsiung has its own MRT system and is the southern terminus of the High-Speed Rail. It is also a logical base for visiting Kenting National Park at the island's tip and the old capital Tainan to the north.