Taiwan Outlying Islands Culture & Language

The islands preserve things the main island lost, largely because they were isolated, poor or under military rule for so long.

Fujianese architecture on Kinmen

Kinmen has the best-preserved traditional Fujianese village architecture anywhere, including in Fujian itself — courtyard houses with swallowtail roof ridges curving up at the ends, red brick and granite, decorated gable walls. They survived because the island was frozen under military administration and too poor to redevelop, and many are now restored as guesthouses. Alongside them stand yanglou, western-style mansions built with money sent home from Southeast Asia in the early twentieth century.

Wind lions

Kinmen’s distinctive folk guardians: stone lion figures set up at village edges to subdue the wind, of which several dozen survive, each carved differently.

Shell-casing knives

Millions of shells landed on Kinmen, and a local industry forges them into kitchen knives that are genuinely good and are the island’s standard souvenir. The workshops will cut one in front of you.

Penghu’s stone

Coral-stone field walls, the stacked-stone fish weirs in the shallows, and temple decoration that is among the most elaborate in Taiwan.

Propaganda across the water

For decades the two sides broadcast at each other across the strait from vast loudspeaker arrays, the largest of which still stands at Beishan on Kinmen with its forty-eight horns pointed at the mainland. Shells carrying leaflets rather than explosives were fired on alternate days, and both sides floated balloons and bottles of goods across. The installations are now visitor attractions, which is its own comment on how quickly the situation changed.

Tao culture

Plank-built canoes assembled without nails and painted with eyes and geometric motifs, underground houses dug in against typhoons, silver helmets, and a ritual year set by the flying fish.

Mandarin is universal across all the islands, written in traditional characters.

Taiwanese Hokkien is the everyday language on Penghu and, in a Quanzhou-influenced variety, on Kinmen.

Matsu is the outlier: the local language is Fuzhou dialect — Eastern Min — which is not mutually intelligible with Taiwanese Hokkien at all, and is the only place under Taipei’s administration where it is spoken.

Tao is spoken on Orchid Island, an Austronesian language closely related to Ivatan in the Philippine Batanes rather than to the Formosan languages of Taiwan proper.

English is limited everywhere on these islands; a translation app is genuinely useful.

Useful Mandarin: ni hao, xie xie, duo shao qian for how much.