活的檔案

Daxi sits on a river terrace carved by the Dahan River, its old street built along the edge of a slope rising several dozen meters above the riverbed. This terrain shaped the town's distinct layout: the main street follows the natural contour of the hillside, while narrow lanes drop steeply toward the old landing docks. Porters and merchants once carried tea, camphor, and timber down these slopes to waterfront wharves, where oceangoing junks carried goods downriver and across the Taiwan Strait.

The Dahan River was navigable this far inland for over a century, making Daxi one of Taiwan's most interior port towns — until siltation and the rise of rail and road transport during the Japanese colonial era gradually ended the river trade.

In the early twentieth century, the Japanese colonial government's street-facade improvement program required Daxi's shophouse owners to rebuild their storefronts to a unified standard. The result is the town's signature streetscape: baroque-ornamented gables layered over Minnan-style covered walkways, each facade stamped with auspicious motifs, shop names, and family crests that still trace the fortunes built on river trade.

Alongside these merchant facades, the colonial era left another architectural layer — Japanese-style structures such as Bushido Hall, police dormitories, and public halls, as well as industrial buildings like the Daxi Old Tea Factory, built for the mechanized export tea trade. Together they form a townscape where commerce and colonial governance are woven into the same streets.

Daxi is also woven into Taiwan's modern political history. On the town's outskirts, Cihu — chosen for its resemblance to Chiang Kai-shek's home region — served as his retreat and later became the site of his mausoleum, where his coffin has remained above ground for decades, awaiting an intended return to his native soil that never came.

During the martial law era, the hills around Cihu were a restricted military zone closed to the public, which inadvertently preserved the surrounding forest — including the area around the Datieliao Historical Trail — in an unusually intact state until the restrictions lifted in the late 1990s. Cihu remains a significant site of postwar historical memory in Taiwan, drawing visitors who come to reckon with a past that is still being reinterpreted.

Today, Daxi's identity as a commercial hub has given way to something more like a cultural community. Century-old tofu shops, herbal medicine pharmacies, and craft studios along the old street are still largely family-run, and in recent years a growing number of returning locals — many of them women — have begun reinterpreting these traditions in their own way: reimagining dried tofu for new tastes, converting old homes into gathering spaces for seniors, or leading tours in English so more visitors can understand the town.

This resident-led continuity is what gives Daxi, even after decades of economic transformation, a sense of everyday warmth that is difficult to replicate elsewhere.