The most important city you've never heard of
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Hsinchu is probably not a familiar name to you. It’s not much of a travel destination either, even within Taiwan — my friends are perplexed that I plan to visit, especially as I won’t get to try the local meatballs. But I’m unperturbed: I can’t seriously say I write about Taiwan without at least having been to the city at least once. With TSMC and much of the global advanced chip industry based in its science park, the city is one of the world’s most economically significant.
Arriving in the city, you’d be forgiven for scepticism. The area around the train station is a sea of grey and mud-brown, punctuated only by blue scaffolding. Homeless people lie on pieces of cardboard, sheltered from the drizzle under the train station roof, squinting at newspapers or trying to sleep. The buses are infrequent compared to Taipei and this one stalls on the slightest of inclines. The streets are dominated by small, cheap restaurants that are sometimes just an old lady’s kitchen.
There are, though, a few clues that isn’t your average provincial city. First, it is comparatively diverse; nobody looks twice at the black and brown men who get on the bus as we head out of the centre. Then there are the signs of wealth. We pass a few brand-new luxury apartment blocks, and as the bus packs with teenagers heading out for lunch, hoodies over their blue and white polo shirts, I start to notice the roads, clogged with up-market white estates and silver SUVs.
Google Maps directs me to get off at the next stop. Glancing through the window at the lively but otherwise nondescript area, I’m doubtful, but step off into the rain on the side of a busy road. Soon, I turn right off the street, and head along a main road up a hill, umbrella facing into the wind. Quickly, the city starts to change. I pass an expensive hotel, a few luxury apartments, an enormous two-floor Starbucks, and finally the modestly-named “World Senior High School”. Over the crest of the hill, the roads are lined with trees. I cross a two-lane intersection and am suddenly in Hsinchu Science Park.
It’s lunchtime, and I stop in a 7/11 on the corner to buy a snack and charge my phone. I weave my way through a group of middle-aged men in orange lanyards chatting in the aisles and head upstairs, where a large seating area overlooks the car park through windows on three sides. I sit munching crisps and glancing around at the men in grey T-shirts, staring at their phones in silence. One guy in the corner stares intently at a video call, earphones in. “Kao bei!” he suddenly exclaims, swearing in Taiwanese Hokkien before grinning and adding a comment in Mandarin. Of the perhaps 20 people sitting eating, there is only one woman.
The TSMC Museum of Innovation is the main tourist attraction in the science park, and when I arrive there is a coach parked outside the Morris Chang building where it is located, presumably waiting for the Korean tour group taking photos at the entrance. Technically, I should have booked in advance – something I discover on the train that morning – but I look sufficiently confused and disappointed when told this that I am let in anyway. For the first half hour, there is no one else in the museum, save the four female members of staff. Different displays tell me about the importance of semiconductors, Morris Chang’s founding of TSMC, and the company’s supposed green credentials. At the end, I strap into a large gamer chair, pull a headset on over my glasses, and am treated to a VR flight tour of a surreal, futuristic world that makes me feel a little sick.
I head away from the museum and further into the science park, picking a loop that takes me between two TSMC fabs. A security guard eyes me from one entrance gate as I stop to stare at the huge white buildings, but he smiles politely as I say nihao and walk straight past. I don’t what I was expecting the fabs to look like from the outside, but they are disappointingly nondescript factory buildings, with large containers of liquid nitrogen and dark smoke rising from the top and disappearing into the grey sky. Other than the occasional lorry or motorbike driving past, its fumes lingering in the air, the only sound is a distant motorway. A builder squats under a tree by the road, smoking a cigarette and observing me curiously as I stroll along the wide pavement, back over the crest of the hill, and towards the bus stop.
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