Seqalu: Formosa 1867 | Julius Mannich Merchant House — The Firm That Wanted a Safe Coast

The Rover affair happened because foreign traders wanted a coast that no government would guarantee. Seqalu films part of that world in Anping, in the house a German firm built to work it. Julius Mannich and Company put this up in the 1880s, one of the merchant houses that clustered at Anping after the treaty ports opened Taiwan to foreign trade. The form is the standard colonial answer to a subtropical port: a low arcaded verandah on all sides for shade and air, thick walls, a raised base against damp, brick and lime plaster. Camphor, tea and sugar went out through here; opium and manufactured goods came in. That trade is the engine underneath the whole series. Foreign firms wanted access, foreign consuls wanted somebody accountable when a ship went down and its crew was killed, and the Qing administration in the prefecture city kept explaining that the southern cape lay outside its jurisdiction. Le Gendre's frustration in the drama is a merchant's frustration first. Buildings like this one are where the pressure came from. Set expectations honestly. The building is the reason to come, not the contents. It has been through several uses and currently runs as a café and cultural space with a small admission; visitors expecting a German trading museum have been disappointed. What is genuinely good is the fabric and the setting — old banyans shading the whole frontage, a little quay to sit on, swallows working the air at dusk. There is a wet-plate photography studio on site if that appeals. Open daily, late morning to early evening, in the middle of Anping's other Qing and Dutch remains. Sit under the banyans and look at the verandah. That shade is not decoration. It is a nineteenth-century European firm admitting the tropics won, and building around it — the same concession every foreign character in Seqalu has to make about this island, usually much later than they should. Cover photo: Allervous, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.