GUANXI (Taiwan) — Guanxi Township is easy to miss. A lot of people pass it on the way to the nearby Leofoo Village Theme Park, famous around Taiwan for its zoo and rides, or to the Window on China theme park of miniature-scale Chinese landmarks.

The town of about 30,000 people lacks a railway station, which would make visiting it easier; long-distance buses run erratically; there are no chain hotels; and there is little parking for tour buses.

As a result, it has received fewer than 700,000 visitors in the past five years, whereas the nearby historic town of Neiwan, which is served by rail and is more commercial, gets more than two million a year.

Visitors who do reach the town, in the hills of Hsinchu County southwest of the island’s capital city, Taipei, will find quiet, rural scenery, unique local food, unusual types of tea and a museum tour they’d be hard pressed to get anywhere else.

Guanxi Township is also notable for its predominantly Hakka population; the Hakka were a nomadic people who settled widely around southern China and Taiwan, and are known for their courtyard homes. The first Hakka reached Taiwan in the 1600s.

Travellers can stay overnight in guest rooms carved out of a traditional courtyard home. There’s a bookshop where you pay for books with other books, or make a small donation.

“The most important thing is to slow down,” says Mr Lu Wen-jun, founder of the five-year-old Shih Dianzi bookstore on the town’s signature Guanxi Old Street, where his neighbours sell coffee and desserts from houses concealed behind brick archways. “At work there’s a lot of pressure. Here you do not need to do anything.

“You can sleep in every day and then come out to walk around or read. After a few days you’ve recharged the batteries and you can go back to work.”

Guanxi boomed in the 1930s because of its tea trade. It is at an elevation below a lot of tea-growing regions of Taiwan and is upriver from Taipei. The town’s farmers used to ship leaves by boat to the capital and exported as far afield as Europe.

But the river was dammed, transport infrastructure elsewhere improved, and Taiwan’s industrialisation prompted younger people to leave town for jobs. Guanxi had gone quiet by the 1960s, say locals, and it’s stayed that way since.

As a testament to the tea trade that was its lifeblood, the century-old Formosa Black Tea Co. gives daily tours of its cavernous tea processing plant that doubles as a history museum. Visitors see processing equipment and posters advertising the tea in Japanese.

The tours end with a tasting of its teas – oolongs and the lighter silvery-tip pekoe. About 5,000 people visit annually.

The book exchange occupies one of several dozen 100-year-old town houses on Guanxi Old Street, a section of Zhongzheng Road. Many of its 3,000 books, spread over a main hall and a loft, are surplus stock from public libraries.

A few doors down, Ms Chen Hsing-chun’s vine-covered shop opens into a dark, wood-panelled room where she sells tea leaves that make a dark orange brew so low on caffeine she says it’s OK to drink before bedtime. She brews tea in pots, made by her husband, for customers to sample.

“We grow the tea ourselves; we use no pesticides, just rely on higher powers to make it grow,” quips Ms Chen as five people gather for an afternoon tasting at Yeh Cha Forty-Nine Tea Room.

The street’s occupants also include dance and theatre groups, which have moved in to take advantage of the artsy atmosphere. About 20 guest rooms are spread among the shops and houses, some going for as little as NT$700 (S$31) per night.

Tourists heading to Leofoo Village from Taiwan’s west coast sometimes stop in Guanxi on their way. Others come from Hong Kong and South-east Asia. Ms Chuang Yin-cheng and her family of four from Taichung visited as part of an island-wide tour of bookstores.

“We checked online since we wanted to go around the island seeing old bookstores, and we found an introduction to this one,” Ms Chuang says as she browses the volumes in the Shih Dianzi bookstore with a bag of books to trade in.

Central Guanxi has a number of restaurants that serve Hakka dishes. The best known restaurant, Qing Xiang, has operated since 1934. It’s earned enough of a name that Taiwan’s president, Ms Tsai Ing-wen, stopped by and took photos with the owners.

The 100-seat restaurant, now operated by the third and fourth generation of the same family, specialises in unprocessed food. The owners say this means locally grown, and organically grown, vegetables such as sweet potato greens, and pork obtained straight from the seller with no processing.

The menu includes items such as chive and goose soup, bitter melon with salted egg, and a unique stir fry whose main ingredient is bite-sized tofu chunks.

Beyond the old part of Guanxi, Hakka residents can be seen drying vegetables under the sun. Most people in Guanxi speak the Hakka dialect as well as Mandarin Chinese.

In Guanxi, most Hakka families have hung on to ancestral properties rather than selling up to developers, which has kept the old town intact instead of it turning into a mishmash of old and new buildings.

Turn down some of the lanes leading off Guanxi Old Street and you find newer blocks, including buildings from the era of Taiwan’s Japanese occupation between 1895 and 1945. One is a former police station, another the old hospital. These structures reflect the Japanese penchant for copying classical European architecture.

A good place to finish a tour of Guanxi is the Dong An Bridge, on an extension of Zhongshan Road, which the Japanese built across the Niulan River in 1933. A riverside park with walking and biking paths passes under the bridge, allowing a close-up view of its signature arched stone pilings. SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST