Mr. Brown Avenue was once a quiet road through rice paddy country in Taiwan—it’s now considered one of the most gorgeous places in the country.
What’s so remarkable about the road stretching out ahead of me is that it’s totally unremarkable: it’s a standard two-way country road stretching towards the distant hills. Tucked in a quiet corner of Taiwan‘s rural township of Chishang in Taitung County, Kam Sun Road 3 is the type of place that most people would only end up on if they made a wrong turn.
But decades ago, a location scout for the East Asian nation’s most popular canned coffee, Mr. Brown Coffee spotted its effortless beauty. Rice paddies flank the asphalt road, and rich green grass dances in the breeze as the sun’s rays bathe the valley with a warm glow. Taiwan has no shortage of rice fields, but this place is unique in that the views here are unobstructed. There are no street lamps or utility poles—just a sea of shimmering grass.
Naturally, this made for a great commercial filming location for the ready-to-drink coffee company—but something unexpected also happened. Now known as Mr. Brown Avenue, travelers began to seek out the idyllic 1.4-mile stretch of road. Today, you can now find a statue of the jolly Mr. Brown mascot giving a thumbs-up as people pass by.
And Mr. Brown Avenue has attracted other companies to film in the area as well. Years later, when Taiwan-based carrier EVA Air joined Star Alliance in 2013, the airline tapped singer and actor Takeshi Kaneshiro for a commercial campaign called “I See You Change the Way You See the World,” that started in Paris and traveled through Asia, before ending in Taiwan. The commercial featured Kaneshiro riding a bike along the road, with his white shirt billowing perfectly in the wind as he stopped for a cup of tea under a lone Java Cedar tree and called the scenery “paradise.”
Before long, the tree became known as “Takeshi Kaneshiro Tree” and travelers began lining up to take their own photos in “paradise.” By the following year, 2,000 visitors descended upon the town of about 8,000 daily, and then-mayor Lin Wen-tang dubbed the new landmark “an ambassador of tourism,” according to the Taipei Times.
A year later, the 23-foot tree toppled during Typhoon Matmo. But local officials—as well as EVA Air’s executive—promised they wouldn’t let it go to the chopping block. In 2015, the beloved tree was officially brought back to life by Japanese tree doctor, Tokuo Yamashita.
So, I decided to see this magical road for myself during a trip to nearby Taitung, Taiwan, with my dad and his friends. We hopped off at the Chisang Railway Station and rented an electric surrey, the most popular way visitors drive out to the famous roadway. Even though our visit was toward the end of the rice harvest season in November, the avenue glowed with bucolic beauty, and it was even more breathtaking IRL.
As a huge Mr. Brown Coffee fan, I stopped off at a shop at the top of the avenue for a can, not realizing the move would attract so much attention. Throughout our drive around the fields, fellow travelers kept remarking on how fitting it was to enjoy a Mr. Brown Coffee on Mr. Brown Avenue. I smiled to myself—I had also taken many EVA Air flights to Taiwan during my childhood. It was a double dose of commercial travel set-jetting!
While Chishang is primarily known for its rice, the cozy township is filled with other delights. One of my favorite meals I’ve ever had in Taiwan was at the women-owned restaurant of Chishang’s Rice Leisure Farming Association, which specializes in rice sheets that you can watch being made in the front window. We also took in the local art at Chishang Barn Art Museum and drove around its backroads, stumbling upon Du Garden and the farming association’s grocery store, before catching our train back to Taipei, feeling rejuvenated.
After all, the magic of Mr. Brown Avenue is that “you can truly feel how borderless it is” and that it “can bring your mind away from the hustle,” Taitung’s tourism site says. “Come to experience such pure relief in person.”
