Great South Gate Audio Guide

Great South Gate: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Tainan Great South Gate

   Welcome to Tainan Great South Gate, known locally as 台南大南門 and also called Ningnan Gate. You are standing in Nanmen Park in Tainan's Zhongxi District, at the spot where the southern wall of the old walled city of Taiwan Prefecture once ran. It is one of the very few pieces of that great wall that still stands. Here is the setting. The gate sits directly south of the Confucius Temple, right in the middle of the old city's southern wall. If you walked out through it and kept heading south, you would eventually reach the Five Concubines Temple on the hill called Kuidoushan. In its day this was the grand front door to the south, and today it is a quiet gate tower with a park around it. Over the next few minutes we will look at how the walled city came to be, how this gate was rebuilt and reshaped, and how the Japanese era, a typhoon, and a school next door all left marks on it. The gate you see today is a story of survival and repeated rebuilding.

2. 02

   A City That Waited for Its Walls at Tainan Great South Gate

   When the Qing empire took Taiwan in 1684, you might expect a walled capital to follow quickly. It did not. Officials proposed walls again and again, but the Kangxi emperor was afraid that a walled town would simply become a fortress for rebels, and he refused every request. For decades the plans stayed stuck in the approval stage. The breakthrough came in 1725, the third year of the Yongzheng reign. The censor Chanjir reported, and the Taiwan county magistrate Zhou Zhongxuan proposed, that the city be enclosed with a wooden palisade, paid for by contributions from officials and local gentry. The Yongzheng emperor approved, and that humble wooden fence was the beginning of the walled city of Taiwan Prefecture. The gate here was set in front of the Confucius Temple, and the earliest version used earthen walls and wooden doors. Over the following century the city gained more gates, eventually counting 14 in all. It was a long road from a forbidden idea to a fortified prefectural capital, and this gate was part of it from the start.

3. 03

   From Earth and Wood to a Double-Roofed Tower at Tainan Great South Gate

   Look up at the tower and imagine how modest the first gate was. In 1736, the first year of the Qianlong reign, the Great South Gate was changed from a wooden gate into a brick and stone gateway. That was the first big upgrade. The next came after a period of unrest. In 1786 the Lin Shuangwen rebellion broke out in Taiwan, and once it was put down, the authorities decided that the city's defenses needed strengthening. In 1788 the earthen and palisade walls were rebuilt in sanhetu, a tough mix of lime, sand and clay. Gate platforms were raised, and towers were built on top of them. The wet spring and summer climate had also made plain earthen walls hard to maintain, so a sturdier material made practical sense. The tower here became a two-story building, in a style similar to that of the Great East Gate, with a double-eaved hip-and-gable roof. Its purpose in the Qing dynasty was defense, and it was part of the reason Tainan's gates were built to look as imposing as they did.

4. 04

   Fall, Rescue and Rebirth at Tainan Great South Gate

   The gate's defensive role ended in 1895. When the Japanese advanced on Tainan from three sides, their troops entered the city through the Small South Gate on October 22. After that, the city walls began to be torn down, and the gates decayed from neglect. The outer barbican gate here collapsed. By 1917 the walls had almost entirely disappeared, and only four gates survive in Tainan today: the Yuedui Gate, the Great East Gate, the Great South Gate and the Small West Gate. The gate itself was repaired in 1927, partly using materials from the demolished East Guo Gate, and two years later the area became Nanmen Park. In 1935, for the Taiwan Exposition, 45 old steles were gathered and displayed here, including nine from the shrine of Fukang'an, which is why a stele forest stands in the park today. That same year the gate was designated a historic site under the name Tainan Castle. Back in 1925, plans to build a park and relocate nearby graves had met strong protests from local gentry and intellectuals. Then came nature. On the morning of July 18, 1963, Typhoon Wendy brought the tower down at 6:40, injuring two people. By 1967 only the gate passage was left. The city rebuilt the tower in 1975, and in 1977, as part of a plan to restore historic sites for the Tainan tourism year, the gate was rebuilt in its original form. It is now the largest surviving city gate tower in Taiwan. Because it stands right beside Jianxing Junior High School, graduating students walk out through the gate after their ceremony, a symbolic step into the next stage of life.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off from Tainan Great South Gate

   Before you wander on, take a slow look at what this one gate has been through. It has been a wooden fence opening, a brick and stone passage, a double-roofed fortress tower, a ruin after a typhoon, and a rebuilt landmark that schoolchildren walk through. Try noticing how the gate sits among the park paths, and where the stele forest stands in relation to it. Think about how the Confucius Temple lies directly to the north and how the road to the Five Concubines Temple runs south. Those lines are the same ones the old city was laid out along. The other surviving gates, the Great East Gate, the Small West Gate and the Yuedui Gate, are each worth a visit. Seeing them together shows how a once-walled capital was pieced back together from just a few survivors. Which one will you look for next?