With this month marking 10 years since the release of the box office hit Cape No. 7 (海角七號), the owner of the house that became home to the main character said the filming locations in Pingtung County’s Hengchun Township (恆春) no longer attract the crowds they once did.
The Hengchun Peninsula (恆春半島) experienced a spike in tourists following the release of Cape No. 7, which holds the record as the highest-grossing Taiwanese film.
Before 2008, the peninsula drew about 4 million visitors per year, statistics released by the Kenting National Park Headquarters showed.
Photo: Tsai Tsung-hsien, Taipei Times
The Dec. 25, 2007, premiere of a television series — Wayward Kenting (我在墾丁天氣晴) — set in Hengchun; the release of Cape No. 7 on Aug. 22, 2008; and the opening of Taiwan to Chinese tour groups in July 2008 and independent Chinese travelers in June 2011 caused visitor numbers on the peninsula to exceed 6.5 million in 2010 and 8.37 million in 2014, the statistics showed.
However, the number of visitors to the peninsula last year decreased to 4.37 million due to economic woes and a drop in Chinese tourists, the statistics showed. In the first six months of this year, the agency recorded only 1.76 million visitors.
Estimates predict visitor numbers might return to their previous annual average of about 4 million.
Photo: Tsai Tsung-hsien, Taipei Times
Crowd levels today are about 60 percent less than they were at their peak, said Chang Yung-yuan (張永源), the owner of the house that became a home to A-ga, the main character in Cape No. 7.
Few tourists know that they could go to the second floor of his house to visit A-ga’s room, and most have long forgotten about the post office where A-ga worked or the West Gate (西門) that the bus in the movie could not pass through, said Chang, who still sells souvenirs at the filming location.
Travel and consumption behaviors on the peninsula have not changed all that much over the past 10 years, he said, adding that although people no longer crowd the movie locations, tourism is now several times what it used to be.
Chang said he believes that only by building on the town’s distinctive traits, as highlighted by director Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖) in Cape No. 7, can Hengchun’s residents develop a new pathway for tourism in the post-Cape No. 7 era.
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