Taiwan Outlying Islands Region Guide

Taiwan’s outlying islands are four quite separate worlds, and none of them resembles the main island.

Penghu, in the Taiwan Strait, is ninety low basalt islands with columnar cliffs, coral-stone walls built to shelter crops from the wind, and the oldest temple in Taiwan. It is the summer destination for Taiwanese, with beaches, kitesurfing and a double-heart fish weir built of stone in the sea.

Kinmen lies two kilometres off the Chinese coast and a hundred and eighty from Taiwan. Shelled for decades during the Cold War, it is now a place of tunnels, bunkers, Fujianese courtyard villages and knives forged from artillery shells.

Matsu, further north and closer still to China, has stone villages built like Mediterranean hill towns and blue tears — bioluminescent plankton lighting the water in spring.

And Green Island and Orchid Island off the east coast: one with a saltwater hot spring and a former political prison, the other the homeland of the Tao people.

Penghu

The columnar basalt cliffs at Daguoye and on the smaller islands, the Twin Hearts Stone Weir on Qimei — a fish trap built of stacked stone in the shape of two hearts — and Tianhou Temple at Magong, the oldest in Taiwan. Cross the great bridge to Xiyu, walk the Fengguei blowholes, and take a boat to the South Four Islands.

Kinmen

Cold War tunnels cut through granite at Zhaishan and Shishan, the beach defences still bristling with anti-landing spikes, and the Guningtou battlefield. Then the Fujianese villages — swallowtail-roofed courtyard houses at Shanhou and Zhushan, many restored as guesthouses — and the workshops forging kitchen knives from shell casings.

Matsu

Stone villages at Qinbi on Beigan, built up a hillside in granite with weighted tile roofs, the Beihai tunnel carved for gunboats, and blue tears in the water on a spring night.

Green Island

Zhaori saltwater hot spring, one of very few in the world, best at dawn; snorkelling and diving on healthy reef; and the White Terror Memorial Park at the former prison.

Orchid Island

The Tao villages, plank boats on the shore, goats on the road and a coastal loop of about forty kilometres.

Each island group has a culture of its own, and what they share is a sense of being somewhere apart from Taiwan.

Kinmen and Matsu look to Fujian

Geographically and culturally these islands belong to the Chinese mainland coast, two kilometres away rather than two hundred. The architecture is Fujianese, the dialect on Matsu is Fuzhou rather than Taiwanese Hokkien, and the family and clan networks run across the strait. They came under Taipei’s control by the accident of the civil war and remained on the front line for decades.

The military decades

Kinmen and Matsu were under military administration until 1992, longer than Taiwan itself was under martial law. Whole populations lived with conscription, curfews, blackout rules and shelling, and the tunnels and bunkers are not museum pieces to the people who dug them.

Penghu’s wind and stone

Penghu culture is shaped by wind: coral-stone windbreaks around every field, low houses, a fishing economy and an emigration history — many Penghu families have been in Kaohsiung for generations.

The Tao

Orchid Island’s people are Austronesian and culturally closer to the Batanes islands of the Philippines than to Taiwan, with a calendar built around the flying fish and a society organised without chiefs.

Green Island’s memory

The prison held political detainees for four decades, and former inmates return.

These are small islands with limited water, limited waste processing and short intense seasons, and the pressure shows.

Penghu receives most of its visitors in July and August, and its beaches and reefs suffer accordingly. Use reef-safe sunscreen, do not walk on the coral, and note that collecting shells, coral or the basalt is prohibited.

Orchid Island deserves particular care. It is the home of the Tao people, not a resort. Do not photograph the plank boats or their owners without permission — the boats are individually owned and ritually significant — do not enter underground houses uninvited, and be aware that parts of the flying-fish season are closed to outsiders. The island also hosts a nuclear waste store imposed on the community in the 1980s, which remains a serious grievance.

Take your rubbish back to Taiwan where you can; disposal here is minimal.

Kinmen and Matsu: unexploded ordnance is still found. Stay off closed beaches and out of fenced areas.

April to June and September to October are the best windows across the islands: warm, calmer seas and fewer people than the peak.

July and August are the Taiwanese holiday season, when Penghu and Green Island fill completely and ferries and flights book out weeks ahead. It is also typhoon season.

Penghu’s fireworks festival runs from April to June, and the Matsu blue tears — bioluminescent plankton — appear from roughly April to August, best on moonless nights.

November to March is the season to avoid on Penghu and Matsu: the north-east monsoon brings ferocious wind, ferries are cancelled for days at a time, and much of the tourism infrastructure closes. Penghu’s winter wind is legendary and genuinely unpleasant.

Orchid Island’s flying fish season runs March to June, which is also when the sea is calmest enough to reach it reliably.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Relative cost across the region

The flights are the main cost, and they are short. Kinmen is unusually cheap because duty-free status keeps prices down.