Nanliao Fish-Scale Steps

Hsinchu’s standard sunset is at Nanliao harbor, and since 2018 the place to sit for it has been the Fish-Scale Steps: a seawall of pale stone blocks laid in tiers, built to replace a line of concrete tetrapods, that reads as scales from the kite lawn behind it. It faces west-northwest onto the strait, the sun goes into the sea, and the people sitting on the steps become the silhouettes in everyone’s photo. The 2019 extensions, called the wings, took it past 300 meters.

Water reaches the lower steps only near high tide, so a tide table decides whether you get waves at your feet or a stretch of wet sand. Weekends are very crowded; a weekday evening is calmer. It is the start of Hsinchu’s 17-kilometer coastal cycleway, which runs south to the Xiangshan Wetlands (see writeup here), and the blue-and-white Nanliao Visitor Center with its observation deck is next door.