Black & White | Love Pier — The Location That Was Rebuilt Out From Under the Film

Love Pier is where the assassins corner Wu Ying-hsiung and take Chen Lin, and it is the one stop on this trail where you should expect not to recognise anything. In 2009 this was working harbour edge that the city had begun opening to the public: a white sail-shaped tower, open concrete, water, and enough empty ground for a stunt team. That is what the camera saw. It is not what you will see. Everything from Pier 11 to Pier 15 — Love Pier, Glory Pier and the old Lingyaliao rail yard — was folded into the Asia New Bay Area redevelopment. The Kaohsiung Music Center opened across nearly twelve hectares of it in 2021: a run of faceted towers along the water, a whale-back concert hall, a dolphin walkway, an outdoor plaza and a footbridge across the river mouth. A light rail line now runs to a stop named after the pier. The night light shows over Love River Bay are a fixture. The fight in the drama happens on ground that is now, quite literally, a stage. The film version's police station made this worse and then vanished too. Kaohsiung spent tens of millions building the South District Precinct set here for the 2012 feature and kept it as a ticketed exhibition, complete with a squad car, a rocket launcher and an animatronic Wu Ying-hsiung that answered a telephone every ten minutes. It ran for a season and was taken down. People still arrive looking for it. So come for the honest version of pilgrimage. The pier is open at all hours, free, on the light rail, and the walk from here through Pier-2 to the harbour is one of the best in the city. Bring the scene in your head rather than expecting to match it. A note on sourcing: the scene attribution comes from fan-compiled guides, not the production or the city. The redevelopment, by contrast, is thoroughly documented. Stand at the water and look at the towers. In fifteen years a location can be rebuilt so completely that the only surviving evidence of the shoot is the footage — which is a real thing that happens to filming locations, and the reason this trail is worth writing down now. Cover photo: Suicasmo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The Kaohsiung Music Center, which now occupies the waterfront the drama filmed on.