Qualla: Huwei, Yunlin

Huwei, Yunlin: Introduction

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit S099001, CC BY-SA 4.0. Before the Dutch arrived, before the Qing dynasty administrators gave the place a Chinese name, before the Japanese colonial government renamed it Kobi — this corner of the Yunlin plain was Favorolang, one of the largest and most powerful indigenous villages on the island of Taiwan. The Babuza people who built it were Plains Aborigines, a Formosan indigenous group, and their settlement was substantial enough that 17th-century Dutch colonizers documented it carefully. Favorolang's river, the Chinese later called How-boe-khe. The settlement itself, the Qing eventually renamed Go-keng-chhu. By 1920, Japanese administration had reshaped it into Kobi Town. Today it is Huwei — a name that has outlasted every colonial regime that tried to overwrite it.

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Image: S099001 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Huwei, Yunlin: A Name Worn Through History

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 邰秉宥 from Changhua, Taiwan, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Taiwanese place name Huwei carries the echoes of Favorolang — rendered in the various Dutch spellings of the 17th century as Favorlang, Favorlangh, and Vovorollang — but the phonetic connection takes some linguistic archaeology to trace. The name Favorolang itself is believed...

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Image: 邰秉宥 from Changhua, Taiwan | CC BY-SA 2.0

Huwei, Yunlin: Sugar, Industry, and the Iron Bridge

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit S099001, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the early twentieth century, under Japanese colonial administration, Huwei became a center of the sugar industry that shaped so much of lowland Taiwan's economic landscape. The Huwei Sugar Factory was established during this era, and the infrastructure built to service it — in...

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Image: S099001 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Huwei, Yunlin: The World of Budaixi

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pbdragonwang, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ask what Huwei is known for among Taiwanese, and you'll often hear one word: puppets. Specifically, budaixi — glove-puppet theater, a performance tradition brought to Taiwan from Fujian Province in China and developed over centuries into something distinctly Taiwanese. Budaixi pe...

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Image: Pbdragonwang | CC BY-SA 3.0

Huwei, Yunlin: Living in the Present Tense

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fcuk1203, CC BY-SA 4.0. Huwei today functions as Yunlin County's main urban center, the commercial and administrative hub for the county seat area. Its round traffic circle — the 圓環, still visible in photographs of downtown Huwei — reflects urban planning decisions made during the Japanese period, when ...

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Image: Fcuk1203 | CC BY-SA 4.0