Seqalu: Formosa 1867 | Anei Film Base — The Prefecture City Built on a Dead Sugar Mill

Taiwan Prefecture City — the walled Qing capital where officials argue about a coastline they do not control — did not survive into the present. So Seqalu built it, on the site of a dead sugar refinery in Yanshui.

The Anei works stopped making sugar and sat empty for years. In 2018 Tainan City and the central government began converting the site into Taiwan's first purpose-built period backlot, and Seqalu was the first production through the gate. Its Qing Han street and the prefecture city gate took over a year to construct under Golden Bell art director Hsu Ying-kuang, with the design checked against National Cheng Kung University's architecture department. Central and city funding covered around forty million NT dollars for the build alone.

What is unusual is how far the detail runs past what the camera needed. The notices pasted to the boards along the street are reproductions of real Qing documents. The shop signs and cloth banners get swapped depending on which production is shooting. A guide will point out that the pawnshop claims to take anything, and then explain that a Qing pawnshop would never accept a coffin or grave clothes.

The harbour Seqalu used has since been filled in and levelled. The site has kept growing instead: a Japanese-era Sakaemachi streetscape now stands alongside the Qing one, and productions queue for slots — one crew often waiting while another finishes. A Green Island set built here for another series was destroyed by Typhoon Danas.

Read the access rules before you plan anything. This is a working film base first and a visitor attraction a distant second. Entry is by advance application, historically in booked group slots rather than walk-ins, and the schedule bends around whoever is shooting. Check by phone before you drive out.

Stand at the prefecture gate and look back down the street. Everything Seqalu argues about — treaties, jurisdiction, who counts as a subject — was decided by men inside a wall like this one, about a coast none of them had seen.

Cover photo: 台南市政府 (Tainan City Government), Attribution licence, via Wikimedia Commons.