Japan Aluminum Hualien Port Factory

The Japan Aluminum Hualien Port Factory (日本アルミニウム花蓮港工場) was a strategic wartime industrial facility established in Hualien (花蓮), on the east coast of Japanese-ruled Taiwan. It was built and operated by Nippon Aluminium Co., Ltd. (日本アルミニウム株式会社), which was founded in 1935 as part of Japan's national policy to develop domestic aluminum production capacity for military purposes.

Aluminum smelting is an extremely energy-intensive process, and the choice of Hualien as a factory site was driven by the availability of abundant hydroelectric power. Power came first from stations on the Mugua River (木瓜溪) system — the Qingshui No. 1 station began operating in 1939, and Nippon Aluminium obtained approval for further stations at Qingshui No. 2 and Tongmen — while the East Taiwan Electric Power Development Company (東臺灣電力興業) built the Liwu Power Station (立霧發電所) on the Liwu River (立霧溪) at the mouth of the Taroko Gorge, completed in April 1944. The Hualien factory, along with a companion plant in Kaohsiung (高雄), formed the core of Japan's aluminum production infrastructure in Taiwan.

The raw material — bauxite and alumina — was shipped from the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) and other Southeast Asian sources. As the war in the Pacific intensified, these supply lines came under increasing threat from Allied submarine warfare. By 1944, the situation had become critical, with most bauxite shipments from the south failing to arrive. This raw material shortage forced the industry to experiment with inferior domestic alternatives such as alunite (明礬石), which produced aluminum unsuitable for aircraft-grade applications.

In the final year of the war, the Hualien factory became a target of American strategic bombing. US air raids in 1945 wrecked the plant. The destruction of the factory, combined with the typhoon and flood damage of 1944 that knocked out the newly completed Liwu station in August and the Qingshui station, effectively ended aluminum production in Hualien before Japan's surrender.

After Japan's defeat in August 1945, the Republic of China's National Resources Commission took over Taiwan's industrial assets. Recognizing the strategic importance of aluminum production — China had never successfully established its own aluminum smelting capability — the commission closed the heavily damaged Hualien plant and consolidated operations at the Kaohsiung facility, establishing the Taiwan Aluminum Corporation (台灣鋁業公司) in 1946. Production at Kaohsiung did not resume until December 12, 1947, after extensive repairs. Taiwan Aluminum Corporation continued operations until 1987. Today, little remains of the original Hualien factory site.