Taipei & Northern Taiwan

The north was home to Austronesian peoples — the Ketagalan in the Taipei basin and the Kavalan on the Yilan plain — long before Han settlement. Europeans arrived in the 1620s, when the Spanish built a fort at Keelung and another at Tamsui; the Dutch drove them out in 1642. Han farmers from Fujian spread through the Taipei basin in the 18th century, and river ports such as Mengjia, today's Wanhua, grew up around temples like Longshan, founded in 1738.

The Qing opened Tamsui and Keelung to foreign trade in the 1860s, and tea and camphor exports shifted wealth north. When Taiwan was made a province in the 1880s, Taipei became its capital. Gold was found near Jiufen in the 1890s. Under Japanese rule from 1895, Taipei became the colonial seat, with the Governor-General's office — now the Presidential Office — completed in 1919, and Beitou was developed as a hot-spring resort.

After 1949 Taipei served as the seat of the Republic of China government, and the 228 Incident of 1947 had begun on its streets. From the 1970s the north led Taiwan's industrial boom: Taoyuan filled with factories, and the Hsinchu Science Park, opened in 1980, became the base of TSMC and the island's semiconductor industry. The Taipei metro opened in 1996, and Taipei 101 was completed in 2004.

Taipei is the most Mandarin-speaking and cosmopolitan part of Taiwan, shaped by the mainland families who settled after 1949 and by decades as the seat of government, and it is also the centre of Taiwan's liberal politics: its Pride parade is the largest in East Asia, and same-sex marriage became legal nationwide in 2019. Hokkien is still heard in older districts such as Wanhua and Dadaocheng, whose Dihua Street shops sell dried goods and herbs ahead of Lunar New Year.

Hsinchu County and parts of Taoyuan are Hakka country, with towns such as Beipu and Guanxi preserving Hakka speech, tea culture and the Yimin festival for the "righteous" dead of 18th-century fighting. Yilan, cut off by mountains until the 2006 tunnel, has its own traditions of Beiguan music, Taiwanese opera, which is said to have originated there, and a summer children's folklore festival.

Temple life is intense across the region: Longshan Temple in Taipei, the carved Zushi Temple at Sanxia, and the City God temple in Hsinchu. Keelung's Ghost Festival in the seventh lunar month, with its release of water lanterns into the sea, is one of the most elaborate in Taiwan.

More than 10 million people, over two-fifths of Taiwan's population, live in the seven counties and cities of the north. New Taipei, which wraps around the capital, has about 4 million; Taipei itself about 2.5 million; Taoyuan over 2.2 million; Hsinchu City about 450,000, Yilan County a similar number, and Keelung about 360,000.

The economy spans government, finance and services in Taipei, logistics and manufacturing around Taoyuan's airport, the port of Keelung, and the chip design and fabrication plants of Hsinchu and neighbouring Zhubei, where engineers' salaries have pushed house prices sharply up. Yilan remains agricultural and a weekend escape for the capital.

Days start with soy milk and egg pancakes from a breakfast shop, commutes run through crowded metro lines and scooter-filled streets, and working hours are long. Evenings end at night markets, gyms, riverside cycle paths or a hike on the hills that rise at the edge of the city. Housing costs, air quality in winter and the pressures on young families are the constant talking points.

Taipei collects the whole island's food and adds the mainland cuisines of 1949: beef noodle soup, niu rou mian, in dozens of styles; soup dumplings, xiaolongbao; and night-market staples such as pepper buns, hujiao bing, baked against the walls of a clay oven. Raohe and Shilin markets are the famous stages, while Ningxia market is known for oyster omelettes.

Keelung's Miaokou market is strongest on seafood and on tianbula, Japanese-style fried fish cake, and ding bian cuo, a rice-batter noodle soup scraped from the side of the wok. Jiufen is known for yuyuan, chewy taro and sweet-potato balls in syrup or shaved ice. Hsinchu makes thin rice vermicelli, mifen, dried in its famous wind, and gongwan, springy pork meatballs, and Daxi in Taoyuan is famous for dried tofu, dougan.

Hakka towns serve lei cha, a pounded tea of leaves, sesame, nuts and grains, and the Hsinchu hills grow Oriental Beauty oolong. Pinglin in New Taipei produces Wenshan Baozhong tea, and Maokong's farms grow Tieguanyin. Yilan contributes Sanxing spring onions, niu she bing, a flat "ox-tongue" pastry, and Kavalan whisky, distilled near Yuanshan.

Taipei packs a great deal into its basin: Taipei 101 and the Xinyi district, the National Palace Museum's imperial collections, Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, Longshan Temple and old Dadaocheng, the Shilin and Raohe night markets, the gondola to Maokong's teahouses, and the hot-spring valley of Beitou. Above the city, Yangmingshan National Park has steaming fumaroles at Xiaoyoukeng and grassy volcanic summits.

New Taipei and Keelung hold the north coast. Tamsui has the red-brick Fort San Domingo and a riverside for sunsets; Yehliu Geopark's sandstone mushrooms and the "Queen's Head" stand on a narrow cape; and Keelung's Miaokou night market fills the streets around the Dianji Temple. Inland from Ruifang, Jiufen's lantern-hung lanes and teahouses look over the sea, with the mining museum at Jinguashi nearby, while the Pingxi branch line leads to Shifen's waterfall and the sky lanterns released from the railway tracks.

To the west, Taoyuan offers the Baroque shopfronts of Daxi Old Street and Chiang Kai-shek's temporary resting place at Cihu; Hsinchu has its old city gate and temple and, in the county hills, the Hakka town of Beipu. Across the mountains, Yilan has the hot springs of Jiaoxi, the carbonated cold springs of Su'ao, surfing at Wai'ao and boat trips to Guishan Island off Toucheng.