Taipei

Han settlers from Fujian reached the Taipei basin in the 18th century, farming land held by the Ketagalan people and building river ports on the Danshui. Mengjia, today's Wanhua, grew around Longshan Temple, founded in 1738, and traded rice, camphor and coal downstream. After silting and feuding weakened it, the tea merchants of Dadaocheng took over in the 1860s, when Tamsui was opened to foreign trade and Taiwanese oolong began to reach New York and London.

The Qing built a walled city between the two settlements in the 1880s, and Taipei became the seat of the new province of Taiwan in 1887, formally its capital in 1894. Japanese rule from 1895 remade it: the walls came down, leaving the boulevards that still ring the old centre, and a grid of brick public buildings went up, among them the Governor-General's office of 1919, the museum in what is now 228 Peace Memorial Park, and the railway that ran the length of the island. Beitou was developed as a hot-spring resort in the same period.

After 1945 the city passed to the Republic of China, and the 228 Incident began on its streets in February 1947, leading to a violent crackdown and decades of martial law. From 1949 Taipei served as the seat of the Republic of China government, and its population swelled with arrivals from the mainland who settled in military dependants' villages across the basin. Industry and then finance drove rapid growth; the metro opened in 1996, direct presidential elections were held that same year, and Taipei 101 was completed in 2004 on the site of a former army district that is now Xinyi.

Taipei is Taiwan's centre of government, media, publishing and popular music, and the most cosmopolitan part of the island. Mandarin is the everyday language, with Taiwanese Hokkien common among older residents in Wanhua and Datong and taught again in schools. The city is also the heart of Taiwan's liberal politics: its Pride parade is the largest in East Asia, and same-sex marriage became legal nationwide in 2019.

Temple life runs beneath the modern surface. Longshan, Bao'an and Xingtian temples draw steady streams of worshippers who cast divination blocks, burn incense and leave offerings, and folk religion, Buddhism and Taoism blend without much concern for boundaries. Ghost Month in the seventh lunar month brings offerings outside shops and homes; Lunar New Year empties the city's offices and fills Dihua Street.

Politeness is quiet rather than formal: queues, low voices on the metro, food handed over with two hands. The city has a strong reading and café culture, with long-hours bookshops, and a deep enthusiasm for baseball, basketball and cycling along the riverside paths. Live music, independent cinema and a large network of small galleries and creative parks — Huashan and Songshan, both converted from Japanese-era factories — carry much of the contemporary arts scene.

About 2.5 million people live in the city proper and about 7 million in the wider Taipei–Keelung metropolitan area, which takes in New Taipei wrapping around it, so the working day involves a large inward commute by metro, bus and scooter. Households are small, flats are expensive, and housing costs are the single most constant public argument, along with a low birth rate and an ageing population.

The economy is built on government, finance, technology headquarters, media, health care and universities rather than factories, which sit in Taoyuan, Hsinchu and New Taipei. The day starts early at breakfast shops selling soy milk, egg crêpes and rice rolls, runs long in the office, and ends at night markets, gyms, riverside parks or a hillside trail; convenience stores handle everything from parcels to bill payments at any hour.

Neighbourhood life is lived in lanes behind the main roads, where morning markets, laundries, temple courtyards and noodle shops sit under blocks of flats. Beitou, Shilin and Wenshan are greener and quieter; Da'an is the sought-after central district; Wanhua is the oldest and poorest, with an ageing population and a visible homeless community around the temple. Earthquake drills, typhoon days and air-quality warnings in winter are ordinary parts of the calendar.

Taipei gathers the food of the whole island and adds the mainland cooking that arrived after 1949. Beef noodle soup, niu rou mian, is the emblematic dish, its braised version simmered with soy sauce, spices and chilli bean paste; the city holds an annual competition to rank the bowls. Xiaolongbao, soup dumplings folded with pleats and steamed in bamboo baskets, are the other signature, made famous worldwide by Din Tai Fung, which began here.

Night markets are where most eating happens. Raohe is known for hujiao bing, peppery pork buns baked against the wall of a clay oven; Ningxia for oyster omelettes, ozai jian, and taro balls; Shilin for fried chicken cutlets, sweet potato balls and grilled squid. Braised snacks, lu wei, are picked from trays and simmered to order, and stinky tofu, chou doufu, fermented and then fried or stewed, announces itself long before it appears. Breakfast shops sell warm or cold soy milk, doujiang, with fried dough sticks, turnip cakes and egg crêpes, dan bing.

Tea is central. Baozhong from Pinglin and Tieguanyin from the Maokong hills are served in the teahouses above the city, while bubble tea, zhenzhu naicha, black tapioca pearls in sweetened milk tea, is drunk everywhere from counter shops. Shaved ice piled with mango, taro or red beans is the summer standard, and pineapple cakes, fenglisu, are the city's usual gift to take home.