Taiwan's fascinating population divide

Like many countries, Taiwan has a stark east/west divide

Photo by Thomas Tucker on Unsplash

I told you this was going to be a Taiwan-heavy week! Because not only am I traveling through the country, but I also got curious about its population. I’m a geographer, what else am I supposed to think about? As it turns out, though not really much to my surprise, Taiwan has one of the sharpest population divides I’ve ever seen!

Taiwan, home to about 24 million people, is an island about the same size as the U.S. state of Maryland. Of course, this is a lot more people than Maryland has! Now, despite its small size its population is far from evenly distributed. As far as I can tell, in 2025, nearly 90% of its people live along the west coast, leaving the central and eastern regions largely empty. Which is pretty crazy when you think about it. Few countries exhibit such population divides.

Side note: Mongolia has an even crazier population divide. I think something like 99% of their population live in Ulaanbaatar. But that’s for another article.

Now this might seem obvious, Taiwan is a mountainous island with the Central Mountain Range running north to south, forming a natural barrier between east and west. These mountains, among the tallest in East Asia, make large-scale urban development difficult. The terrain is steep, with narrow ridges and deep gorges, limiting infrastructure and settlement. In contrast, the western sliver of Taiwan is relatively flat, with fertile plains that have supported agriculture, urbanization, and transportation networks.

So bingo, there’s your answer, right? Yes! But it’s only part off the answer. I’ve got three more for you in fact!

Natural disasters further discourage large populations from growing in the east. You see, Taiwan sits on the boundary of the Philippine Sea Plate and the Eurasian Plate, making it highly seismically active. The eastern region, particularly around Hualien and Taitung, experiences frequent and powerful earthquakes. In 2024, a 7.4 magnitude quake devastated Hualien, highlighting the risks of living in this region. The east coast is also more vulnerable to typhoons, which routinely batter the island with extreme winds and heavy rainfall. Again, in 2024, three typhoons, including a record-breaking one, slammed into Taiwan’s east coast and while the entire island was under some form of typhoon-watch, the west coast is relatively shielded from the worst of it.

But also Taiwan’s west coast faces the Taiwan Strait, providing easy access to trade routes with China, its largest trading partner. This might seem odd, after all mainland China is often threatening Taiwan with an invasion, but it stands that trade between the two is very strong! Ports in cities like Kaohsiung, Taichung, and Keelung handle the majority of Taiwan’s imports and exports. The east coast, by contrast, faces the open Pacific, making trade and transportation less convenient. As a result, Taiwan’s industrial and commercial hubs have remained on the west coast, where infrastructure such as high-speed rail and expressways efficiently connect major cities.

Finally, one of the most interesting things I’ve learned about Taiwan is that it is, for all intents and purposes, a colonized country with its own indigenous population. Indigenous Austronesian-speaking peoples inhabited the island for thousands of years, primarily in the mountainous interior and along the coasts. When Chinese settlers began arriving hundreds of years ago, mostly from Fujian province, they concentrated on the western side, where the land was more hospitable for agriculture. The indigenous people at the time, however, were still more focused on living smaller, sometimes nomadic lives in the more rugged areas. Which means they very well could have prevented large scale settlements.

Taiwan’s population divide is fascinating because the country itself is fascinating! And we can learn so much about it based on where its people have chosen to coalesce. And none of this is to say that Taiwan ignores its east coast. Quite the contrary! The east coast has its own railway (albeit not a high speed one) and a beautiful highway with some of the most picturesque views I’ve ever seen in my life! But you’ll have to wait to see those views until later this week.