Gold Leaf | Hualien Cultural Park Building 24 — The Head Office That Has Been Taken Down

Riguang's Taipei head office was never in Taipei. It was here, in a former Shaoxing wine works on the edge of Hualien city, inside a warehouse numbered 24. The executive office, the tea-appraisal room with its curved glass wall prefabricated off-site and assembled in place, the goods-receiving floor downstairs — all of it was built into this shell. This is the room where Zhang Yi-hsin stops being somebody's daughter and starts being management.

Be clear about what you will find. The sets are gone. They stood as a public exhibition from November 2021 to February 2022 and were then dismantled. You can walk into the correct building and stand on the correct floor, and there is nothing of Riguang left in it.

What remains is older and stranger. The complex opened in 1913 as a Hualien Port distillery, went into the colonial alcohol monopoly in 1922, and was bombed by American aircraft in 1944 — a raid that destroyed roughly two thirds of it and erased the timber buildings entirely. There are still bullet marks on the water-tank roof. Production moved out in 1988, which is why the render across the whole site is so thoroughly blistered; nothing was maintained for fourteen years before the heritage designation came in 2002.

The campus reads as a collision: Japanese-era timber and lime render standing against blunt post-war concrete, one long brick chimney, iron door latches still in their original plates. Entry is free, outdoor areas are open around the clock, and the weekend market fills the yard.

Find the water tank and look up at the roof line. Those holes were made in 1944 by people trying to end a war, and a television crew built a tea company's boardroom forty metres away. Both facts are true about the same address.

Location data: Hualien Cultural and Creative Industries Park and Taiwan Tourism Administration.