The Summer Temple Fair | Yuan Ze University — The Life He Was Living Before Daxi Called

Before the summer that the series is about, Hsia Chih-hsun has an ordinary student life somewhere else, with Chen Nuan-nuan a year below him in the art department. That life was filmed at Yuan Ze, in Zhongli, standing in for a Taipei university.

There is not much documented about the scenes here, and I am not going to pretend otherwise — no episode is recorded, and it appears in the production's location list as, simply, their school. What it gives you is the other half of the drama's geometry. Ten episodes are about a boy being pulled back into a town, a temple, a procession and a father. This is the place he was being pulled away from.

The campus was founded in 1989 by the Far Eastern Group, and its buildings are numbered rather than named — Hall One through Hall Seven — which tells you most of what you need to know about the atmosphere. Late-eighties and nineties institutional concrete and tile. Three large colour-blocked letters spelling the university's initials on the front of Hall Five. It sits in the Yuandong Road corridor among Taoyuan's old irrigation ponds.

None of that is beautiful and none of it needs to be. A campus like this is the anonymous, frictionless, slightly boring somewhere-else that a nineteen-year-old moves to in order to stop being from a small town. The drama needed that, and this delivered it exactly.

It is a working private university. The grounds are generally walkable; the buildings are not yours.

Walk the campus and then drive the forty minutes to Daxi. The contrast is the plot.

Location data: Yuan Ze University, Zhongli District, Taoyuan. Scene listed in the production's location record without episode detail.