Penghu

Once the flood starts there is no time to walk back. Only at low water does a gravel path some three hundred metres long surface and let you cross to the islet of Chiyu, at an hour that moves daily and goes up at the visitor centre. Fix your turnaround first.

A tidal fish trap of stacked basalt, laid out as two overlapping hearts. At high water it submerges and only the outline shows, so the tide sets the visit; Cimei is ninety minutes from Magong by boat, or fifteen by plane.

The bridge joins Baisha to Xiyu and runs 2,494 metres. The current in the channel beneath is fast enough that from up here the water reads like a river. The kiosk at the far end serves as the landmark for the whole crossing.

A single banyan of more than three centuries has dropped dozens of aerial roots and covered the whole temple courtyard. Each root stands on its own prop, so one tree reads as a pavilion. Stalls have moved in under it with the village around them.

A stone recording how the Ming official Shen Yourong got a Dutch fleet to withdraw in 1604 was found at this temple and now stands inside it. The temple is in the middle of Magong's old lanes, so you reach it on foot.

The walls are coral stone and basalt, which gives the village its pale grey. Houses raised in the 1910s by brothers who had made their money away from the islands still stand and can be walked into. The apricot-kernel tea sold in the yards belongs to Erkan.

A sandbar runs over a kilometre out to sea from the southern tip of the island. Its length changes with the tide and much of it goes under at high water. The boat from Chikan harbour north of Magong takes twenty minutes. Winter thins the sailings.

A wall of hexagonal basalt columns. Soil covered them until harbour works dug it away. In the season when water pools in front, the columns come back doubled in it. That season follows the spring rain.

Seen from the side, this wave-cut arch in the basalt reads as a whale with its mouth open — the source of the name — with a boardwalk reaching it in five minutes.

One well with four openings cut into it, so that several people could draw water at the same time. It is capped now, with a board standing beside it. The lane in front counts among Magong's oldest, its shops open by day only.

A southern island whose beaches green sea turtles climb to lay eggs, with a turtle conservation centre by the harbour. Huazhai, a village of old houses behind coral-stone walls, is preserved though mostly empty. Boats touring the southern islands leave Magong.

A fine-sand beach at the south tip of the main island, about 20 minutes by car from Magong. Clear summer water brings swimmers, and the strong winter wind brings surfers and kitesurfers. A few cafes sit on the rise above it.

A gun battery the Qing built at the tip of Xiyu in 1887, once the war with France was over. Arched passages wind like a maze inside its earth-and-stone mound, and on top are the gun emplacements and the sea. Inside, the air is chilly in July.