TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – The first 38 of 108 M1A2T Abrams tanks procured from the United States have arrived in Taiwan, reports said Friday.

While the tanks will be based in the north, they arrived in Kaohsiung because the port there provides better protection from curious onlookers, the Liberty Times reported. A container ship was seen near Kaohsiung Friday morning and was expected to start offloading its cargo during the day.

The area where the tanks are expected to be unloaded is remote and difficult to access, while photographers and camera crews will also find it hard to record the activities in the sector, the report said. Once offloaded, the tanks would be trucked on a 350-kilometer journey to the Army’s Armor Training Command in Hukou, Hsinchu County.

The freighter carrying the tanks had been rerouted to include a direct trip from Tacoma in Washington state to Kaohsiung. A stop in Malaysia had been canceled, and docking in Vietnam had been moved until after Kaohsiung, indicating the tanks might have been loaded in Tacoma, and the ship wanted to avoid stopping in third countries with its sensitive cargo, the report said.

The US approved the sale of the Abrams tanks, manufactured by General Dynamics Land Systems, in 2019. Taiwan set aside a budget of more than NT$40.5 billion (US$1.24 billion) to buy the tanks and related equipment.