Tainan's most mesmerising sites are in the old river port area known as Five Channels Harbour. The canals leading to Anping Harbour were developed by the Qing authorities to facilitate sea trade with Fujian. They spawned homes, businesses and places of worship, and became Tainan's most prosperous area.
Geographically, the five artificial canals were sprawled like the fingers of a hand from north to south. The waterways are long gone — urbanisation under the Japanese wiped out the last traces of them.
But some of the commercial activities and the institutions they produced remain. The cornerstone of the Five Channels zone is the year-old Shennong Street , built parallel to the canal. Now an attractive art village, it was a bustling working-class neighbourhood where goods were transferred, stored and traded. Shennong Street is flanked by shophouses shaped like modern-day containers — long with narrow facades.
In the past, boats would go right up to the back doors of the houses, where workers would offload the goods and haul them by rope and pulley to the spacious upper floor for storage. You can still see small gates on the upper-floor facades of some houses. The ground floor was the shop and living quarters. Go into any cafe, gallery or boutique on Shennong Street to check out the structure. Sometimes several shops would share the same cross-beam as they were built concurrently.
This means that anyone wishing to tear down their shop would need the approval of the other owners — a reason why Shennong Street has managed to retain a rather impressive number of old houses. Boats carrying Qing court officials would steer through the canal to its doorsteps.
