Pingtung County Park

This award-winning park, opened in 2021, takes a large chunk out of the urban build-up on the south edge of the city. It is Taiwan’s first-ever park created on a repurposed industrial site. This was formerly home of a derelict paper mill, opened in 1977 and abandoned in the early 1990s. Sugar production was long a key Taiwan industry, with Pingtung a major sugarcane grower, and the pulp generated locally as a byproduct was used in the paper mill. During its production days the adjacent Pingtung Sugar Factory, today also a tourism-oriented destination, was one of Taiwan’s three main sugar-manufacturing plants.

The mill building has been cleverly redesigned, with sections transformed and now put to such uses as a trampoline, a whopping selfie mirror, and a landscape theater. Other elements retained and