Qualla: Toufen

Toufen: Introduction

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nine in ten residents of Toufen speak Hakka as a mother tongue, which makes this city something rare in modern Taiwan: a place where a minority language is, in practice, the majority language. Called Thèu-fun in Hakka and Thâu-hūn in Hokkien, Toufen sits at the seam between Miaoli and Hsinchu counties, on the gentle hills above the Zhonggang River valley. It is not a city that announces itself dramatically. It earns attention through accumulation — through the persistence of a culture that survived migration, colonial rule, and rapid industrialization without losing its particular sound.

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Toufen: The Hakka Majority

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Roughly 90 percent of Toufen's approximately 107,000 residents are of Hakka ethnicity, making it the most Hakka city in Miaoli County — itself one of the most Hakka counties in Taiwan. The Hakka people are a Han Chinese subgroup with their own dialects, cuisine, and cultural trad...

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Toufen: Foothill Geography

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Toufen covers 53.3 square kilometers in the northern part of Miaoli County, wedged between Hsinchu County to the north and east, Zhunan Township to the west, and Zaoqiao Township across the Nangang River to the south. The city lies in the midstream valley of the Zhonggang River, ...

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Toufen: Revitalization and Remembrance

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2007, a project funded jointly by Taiwan's Council of Cultural Affairs and private donors transformed a cluster of old community houses in the city into a museum documenting daily life in the 1950s and 1960s — the decades when Toufen was a small township rather than a city. Th...

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Toufen: Elevated to City

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 5 October 2015, Toufen was officially upgraded from an urban township to a county-administered city — a change with administrative and symbolic weight. The upgrade reflected population growth and the urban development that had made Toufen, by that point, the most populous admi...

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Toufen: Getting There, Getting Around

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Toufen does not have its own railway station on the main line — travelers arrive via Zhunan Station in the neighboring township, a short journey to the west. The Taiwan High Speed Rail passes directly through the city's center, though no HSR stop is planned, meaning that for all ...

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