File:台南億載金城.jpg

English: The Eternal Golden Castle. The fortress was the brainchild of Shen Baozhen, a Ching Dynasty official. He commissioned a French architect to design a modern-era fortress to protect against the growing threat of the Japanese.

These men were pioneers, adventurers, explorers, and exploiters. They were also seekers of wealth, fortune, and power and the aim of the Eternal Golden Castle was to protect that colonial expansion and those new found riches from others seeking to do the same. The Japanese sold the cannons and the Eternal Golden Castle became a castle without weaponry. It was abandoned and left to weeds and the ever encroaching, encircling roots of the banyan trees. Where the Japanese never got a foothold, the banyans infiltrated silently, inexorably and live there to this day.

Let’s walk up the steps to the defensive walls. It’s an odd feeling to think that in 1876 this was the site of the most modern defensive fort in Taiwan – equipped with British-made “Armstrong” cannons, 5 eighty-ton, 4 forty-ton, and 4 twenty-pound guns.