Taipei: Temples, Night Markets & Taipei 101

Step through the main gate and let your eyes adjust. Directly ahead, behind a haze of incense smoke, sits the main shrine to Guanyin, the goddess of mercy — arguably the most beloved deity in the Chinese pantheon. She is flanked by hundreds of other gods on either side, representing virtually every domain of human concern: the moon goddess, the sea goddess, the god of war, the god of literature, the earth gods who protect specific streets and neighbourhoods. Longshan is emphatically not a single-faith institution. It is a living fusion of Buddhism and Taoism, a spiritual supermarket where worshippers come to light incense for whatever they need.

Watch the worshippers. They move with practiced ease, bowing before each altar, lifting incense sticks toward the sky, pressing palms together. Many carry fortune sticks — a cylinder of thin bamboo slats, each numbered. You shake the cylinder until a stick falls out, note the number, and receive a printed poem that the temple's interpreters will translate into advice for your life situation. It is one of the most ancient forms of divination still in daily use, and on weekday mornings, middle-aged women and elderly men will be consulting the sticks with complete seriousness.

The neighbourhood around you, Wanhua, is Taipei's oldest district. The name means 'ten thousand flowers' in Mandarin, but the old Taiwanese name, Manka, comes from a word in the indigenous Ketagalan language meaning a place to trade canoes. Before there was a Taipei, there was this riverbank, where indigenous people traded with Chinese settlers who arrived in the early eighteenth century. The district's snake alley market — just a few minutes' walk away — sold live snakes for their blood and bile, which traditional medicine considered powerfully restorative. The alley is now a night market, but you can still find snake wine if you look.

The temple comes most alive at night. Candles glow against the carved wooden screens. Pilgrims arrive from across the island, some having travelled hours to pray here. Old men play chess in the courtyard. The incense smoke spirals upward into the dark. In a city that never really sleeps, Longshan Temple is the place that never really stops praying.

When you are ready, head north toward Ximending, roughly fifteen minutes on foot. You are walking into a completely different Taipei.

The Red House, properly called the Ximen Red House, is the neighbourhood's anchor. Built in nineteen oh eight, it was Taiwan's first public market building, an octagonal structure in red brick with a cross-shaped main hall. The Japanese modelled it on European market architecture, and it has outlasted empire to become something entirely its own. Today the octagonal building houses independent designers and artists selling handmade jewellery, clothing, and art. The plaza around it is where Taipei's LGBTQ community gathers, and on weekend evenings it becomes an outdoor social club of remarkable warmth and visibility. Taipei is consistently ranked as one of the most LGBTQ-friendly cities in Asia, and Ximending is the epicentre of that culture. Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage in two thousand and nineteen, and this neighbourhood was where much of that journey began.

Wander the pedestrian lanes around you. Street performers work the crowd — acrobats, musicians, dancers rehearsing choreography from whatever K-pop act is currently dominating. Bubble tea shops offer permutations of flavour and texture that would take a week to fully explore. The movie theatres here have been the premier film destination for Taipei's young people since the nineteen sixties, and the walls are plastered with concert announcements, art show flyers, and the handwritten endorsements of fans who have made pilgrimages from all over Taiwan.

You will notice the fashion. Ximending is where Taipei's youth express whatever they are: punk, kawaii, streetwear purist, hypebeast, goth. The streets function as a runway where nobody is watching the show but everybody is in it. Come back on a Friday or Saturday night and the energy triples. For now, absorb the daytime version, and then continue northeast toward the green calm of 228 Peace Memorial Park.

In February nineteen forty-seven, Taiwan had been under the control of the Kuomintang, the KMT, the Chinese Nationalist government, for less than two years. Japan had governed Taiwan from eighteen ninety-five, and when the Second World War ended, the island was placed under KMT authority. The transition was brutal. The mainland government was corrupt, incompetent in its early administration of the island, and deeply contemptuous of the Taiwanese people who had lived under Japanese rule and in many ways been more modernised than their new administrators.

The spark came on February twenty-seventh. Agents of the Taiwan Monopoly Bureau beat a widow they accused of selling untaxed cigarettes and then fired into a crowd that gathered to protest, killing a bystander. The next day, the twenty-eighth, Taipei erupted. An uprising spread rapidly across the entire island. The KMT government's initial response was to negotiate. Its real response was to summon mainland troops.

What followed in March was a massacre. Estimates of the number killed range from ten thousand to thirty thousand — the true number may never be known. The KMT systematically eliminated much of Taiwan's educated and professional class: doctors, lawyers, teachers, community leaders. The event was then buried under nearly four decades of martial law and official silence. Discussing it was dangerous. Even acknowledging it happened was a risk.

The silence broke in the nineteen eighties as Taiwan democratised, and in nineteen ninety-five President Lee Teng-hui offered an official apology. The park was renamed in commemoration that same year. The memorial museum here documents the events with painful clarity — photographs, testimony, the careful accounting of the dead. If you have time, it is worth visiting.

The silence broke in the nineteen eighties as Taiwan democratised, and in nineteen ninety-five President Lee Teng-hui offered an official apology. The park was renamed in commemoration that same year. The memorial museum here documents the events with painful clarity — photographs, testimony, the careful accounting of the dead. If you have time, it is worth visiting. The exhibition is sober and necessary, the kind of historical reckoning that only becomes possible after the people responsible for the suppression are gone or out of power.

Look for the old radio station building near the park's centre. From its broadcasting booth on February twenty-eighth, nineteen forty-seven, protestors transmitted an appeal for help across the island — a signal that the uprising was already beyond Taipei. History broadcasts from the strangest places. And the trees here, the old banyans with their curtains of aerial roots, were here for all of it.

They were here until nineteen forty-five. When the Second World War ended, the building passed to the Kuomintang government, which used it as its own administrative centre, and eventually it became what it is today: the office of the democratically elected President of the Republic of China, which is the official name of Taiwan.

The building is the focal point of Taiwan's National Day celebrations each October tenth — Double Ten, as Taiwanese people call it, marking the date of the revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in mainland China in nineteen eleven. The plaza in front fills with crowds watching military parades and presidential speeches, and the building is draped in the red, blue, and white of the ROC flag.

The democratic significance of this building is impossible to overstate. Taiwan was under KMT authoritarian rule for nearly four decades, from nineteen forty-nine, when Chiang Kai-shek's government retreated here from the mainland, until the period of liberalisation that culminated in nineteen ninety-six — the year Taiwan held its first direct presidential election, becoming a democracy in one of the most consequential transitions in modern Asian history. The president who stood in this building that year was the first chosen by the people of Taiwan rather than by a party committee. From the window of the world, it was a remarkable moment.

The building is open to the public on weekends, and the interior is worth seeing if you are here at the right time. The grand central hall, the portrait galleries of past presidents, the manicured gardens — they carry the full weight of the island's extraordinary modern history.

A few architectural details before you move on. Notice the central tower — it rises above the main structure and was designed to serve as a watchtower, giving a clear line of sight to the surrounding streets in every direction. The building measures one hundred and twenty metres on its east-west axis, making it one of the largest government buildings constructed in East Asia under Japanese colonial administration. When you stand at the main gate and look toward the building, you are standing where generations of Taipei residents have stood, watching history make itself in this plaza.

And now for the complicated part. Chiang Kai-shek's legacy is one of the most contested in modern Asian history. He led the Nationalist government that fought and lost the Chinese Civil War to Mao Zedong's Communists, retreating with approximately two million soldiers, officials, and civilians to Taiwan in nineteen forty-nine. Under his rule, Taiwan developed rapidly economically. He also imposed decades of authoritarian rule, including the martial law period from nineteen forty-nine to nineteen eighty-seven, which remains the longest sustained period of martial law in modern history. Thousands of people were imprisoned, tortured, or executed under the White Terror, as the political repression is known.

Taiwan has been grappling publicly with this legacy for years. There have been calls to remove Chiang's statues from public spaces, and the government has relocated hundreds of them from military bases. The Memorial Hall itself has been renamed and renamed again in various political directions depending on which party controls the government. The plaza outside was the scene of student protests in two thousand and six and again in subsequent years, each time repurposing the dictator's monument as a stage for democratic expression. The building contains its contradiction openly, which is perhaps the most honest thing about it.

Take a moment in the plaza. The National Theatre and National Concert Hall flank it symmetrically, both in matching traditional Chinese palace style. The whole complex is a set piece, and Taipei uses it well.

Then there is Din Tai Fung. The original flagship of what is now a global restaurant empire is just steps from here, on Xinyi Road. Din Tai Fung started in nineteen fifty-eight as a cooking oil retailer and pivoted to selling xiaolongbao — soup dumplings — in the nineteen seventies. The dumplings themselves are engineering marvels: eighteen pleats per dumpling, skin thin enough to see the soup trapped inside, a precise ratio of pork to gelatin that melts into broth with the heat of the steam. The New York Times named it one of the world's top ten restaurants in nineteen ninety-three. There are now branches across Asia, in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom. But the original is here, and the queue is always there to prove it.

Further along Yongkang Street, the mango shaved ice deserves its own paragraph. Taiwanese shaved ice is not what you might imagine from the words shaved and ice. The texture is closer to snow — each shaving so thin it dissolves on the tongue before you have time to chew. Layered with fresh Tainan mango (the finest variety, harvested in summer) and sweetened condensed milk, it is one of those things that is impossible to explain adequately in prose and must be experienced. Ice Monster on Yongkang Street is the most famous purveyor. The queue tells you everything.

This neighbourhood — the Da'an district generally — is Taipei's equivalent of a leafy university neighbourhood: good bookshops, independent cafés, young professionals pushing strollers past older residents playing mahjong. The food is the main event, but the street life is worth absorbing slowly. Da'an has more independently owned restaurants per block than almost any comparable district in Asia, and the locals will tell you, with complete sincerity, that the best beef noodle soup debate is nowhere near settled. Feel free to continue the research.

On weekday mornings, the park belongs to the elderly. Tai chi practitioners move through their forms in the open plazas. Groups of older women walk brisk circuits of the main path, visors on, arms swinging, talking at full volume without breaking stride. An outdoor gym near the south entrance sees serious use from regulars who have been coming since the park opened. There is something deeply comforting about a city that makes space for its older residents to move and gather in the sun.

On weekends, Da'an transforms. Weekend farmers markets set up near the main gates, selling organic vegetables, handmade preserves, and local produce from farms within a few hours of the city. Outdoor performance spaces host everything from student theatre productions to amateur concert bands to the kind of impromptu jam sessions that seem to materialise spontaneously wherever enough musicians encounter a flat surface. The park's amphitheatre has hosted rallies, concerts, and political gatherings.

Students from the nearby universities — National Taiwan University is just to the south, and several other campuses are within cycling distance — use the park as an extension of campus. You will see people reading, couples having conversations that look important, individuals staring at nothing in particular in the way that only happens when someone is thinking very hard.

Sit on a bench for a moment if you can. Taipei is a beautiful but intense city, and this park is where it breathes. The trees here — some of them planted from the park's founding, now genuinely substantial — filter the air in a way that you can feel after fifteen minutes. Take it in before you continue north toward Dadaocheng.

There is a pond at the park's centre where herons stand in the shallows with the patience of seasoned fishermen. Dragonflies patrol the surface. It is easy to spend an hour here doing almost nothing, and in a city schedule as packed as a Taipei itinerary tends to get, that hour may be the most valuable thing on the list.

Dihua Street was the main commercial artery. The buildings that line it today are remarkable survivors: baroque shophouses in the Southern Fujian style, two and three storeys tall, with ornate facades of plaster moulding — geometric patterns, floral garlands, Chinese characters in relief — that represent a hybrid aesthetic unique to this city and this period. Walk slowly and look up. The facades tell you which era each building was renovated in, which merchant family owned it, what that family wanted to say about themselves to the world.

For most of the twentieth century, Dihua Street was where you came for dried goods and traditional medicine — shark fins, dried mushrooms, herbs for every ailment in the Chinese pharmacopoeia, bolts of fabric, preserved seafood packed in wooden crates. Many of those shops are still here, their sacks and baskets spilling across the pavement in the traditional way. But interspersed with them now are cocktail bars with craft Taiwanese spirits, coffee roasters, boutique hotels in renovated shophouses, and design studios that use the old architecture as a kind of exhibition case for new ideas.

The revival is not gentrification in the usual sense — the old shops have not been pushed out, and the neighbourhood has not lost its original character. It is more like the two eras are coexisting in genuine conversation, which is a difficult thing to achieve and Taipei has managed it here with some grace. Come back on a weekend morning when the street market is running. During the Lunar New Year season, Dihua Street becomes the place all of Taipei comes to buy traditional goods for the holiday, and the crowds are spectacular.

At the northern end of the street, closer to the river, you begin to encounter the warehouse district where the tea and camphor merchants once stored their goods before loading them onto ships for the crossing to Fujian and beyond. Some of those warehouses are still standing, their timber bones intact beneath newer facades. Dadaocheng was once the most important port in northern Taiwan. Today it is something rarer: a place where the past is still present and still useful.

Let's talk about oyster vermicelli, because it is Ningxia's signature dish and one of the defining flavours of Taiwanese street food. Thin rice vermicelli noodles are cooked with oysters and spinach in a thick, slightly gelatinous sauce made from sweet potato starch, then finished with a sweet red sauce and a drizzle of sesame paste. The texture is unusual for Western palates — starchy, almost glutinous — but it is precisely that texture that makes it work, holding the heat and the flavour in a way that thinner broths do not. One bowl is never quite enough.

The pork rib soup at Ningxia deserves its own mention. Slow-braised spare ribs in a clear, gently sweetened broth with Chinese medicinal herbs — a dish of extreme simplicity and extreme depth. Order it alongside the vermicelli and you have a meal that costs less than a coffee in most Western cities and is considerably more satisfying.

Taro balls are the dessert, and you should not skip them. Chewy spheres of taro paste — purple, slightly earthy, not too sweet — served in a sweet ginger broth or over shaved ice, depending on the season. The taro for the best stalls comes from Dajia, a town south of Taipei known for producing the finest taro in Taiwan. Quality of ingredient is taken with absolute seriousness here.

What strikes visitors about Taiwanese night markets — once the initial sensory shock subsides — is the communal table culture. You sit down wherever there is space, often next to strangers. Conversation happens. Nobody hurries. The stall owner knows the regulars by name and by order, and the regulars have been coming for twenty or thirty years. This is not a food court. It is a dining room that belongs to the whole neighbourhood.

The architect C.Y. Lee drew on traditional Chinese aesthetics to create a tower that reads, from a distance, as a sequence of stacked sections — eight sections, since eight is the luckiest number in Chinese culture. Each section flares slightly outward at the top, referencing the shape of a bamboo stalk, which curves and sways under pressure rather than breaking. This was not merely decorative. Taipei sits in one of the most seismically active regions on Earth and is regularly struck by typhoons. The bamboo metaphor is an engineering philosophy: flexibility over rigidity. The building is designed to bend.

Inside, on the eighty-seventh floor, is one of the most extraordinary objects in any skyscraper anywhere: a tuned mass damper the size of a small house. It is a steel pendulum ball weighing six hundred and sixty tonnes, suspended between floors eighty-seven and ninety-two by cables and hydraulic shock absorbers. When the building sways in an earthquake or a typhoon, the damper swings in the opposite direction, counteracting the motion. During Typhoon Herb in two thousand and eight, it visibly oscillated more than a metre. It saved the building from structural damage. Engineers from all over the world come to see it. You can see it too from a viewing platform — it is illuminated in orange, enormous, and strangely hypnotic.

The observation deck on the eighty-ninth floor offers views across the entire Taipei basin, ringed by mountains on every side. On a clear day you can see all the way to the Taiwan Strait to the west. On an overcast evening, the city lights fill the basin like a constellation laid flat, and the building's own reflection glows back at you from the glass.

The Xinyi district that surrounds Taipei 101 is Taipei's newest and most polished neighbourhood — luxury malls, international restaurants, the Taipei World Trade Center, rooftop bars that would not look out of place in Shanghai or Singapore. It is the face that Taipei shows to the world of global commerce. From here, you can see the whole arc of the city you have walked today: from the incense smoke of Longshan Temple to the steel and glass of the twenty-first century. This is what Taipei is — all of it at once, and none of it willing to let go of the rest.