Beitou Hot Spring Street: From 1697 Sulfur Mining to the 2026 Hot Spring Museum, One Mountain Spring and Four Generations of Residents

30-second overview: In 1697 (the 36th year of the Kangxi reign), Fuzhou native Yu Yonghe crossed the sea to Beitou to mine sulfur, exchanging cloth with the Ketagalan people for sulfur-bearing soil¹; the local people had originally called this smoking mountain Patauw, meaning “witch”². In 1894-96, Osaka merchant Hirata Gengo found the hot springs and built Taiwan’s first hot-spring inn, Tengu-an, at today’s No. 234 Guangming Road³. On June 17, 1913, a two-story red-brick public bathhouse supervised by Moriyama Matsunosuke of the Government-General’s Building and Repairs Section opened⁴. In 1916, the Xinbeitou Branch Line opened; it was Taiwan’s first railway built purely for tourism⁵. On April 25, 1923, Crown Prince Hirohito came to bathe once, and the bathhouse’s second floor added a more than 30-ping “imperial rest room” especially for him⁶. After the war, hostess restaurants, nakashi itinerant singers, and U.S. military R&R made Beitou the busiest pleasure quarter in Taiwan; in 1967, a Time magazine report enraged Chiang Kai-shek⁷. On February 5, 1979, during Lee Teng-hui’s term as mayor, the Taipei City Council abolished the hostess system in Beitou District, and the hostess restaurants went dark one after another⁸. In 1994, several teachers at Beitou Elementary School were preparing local-studies lessons and unexpectedly rediscovered the abandoned red-brick bathhouse; in 1998, it became the Beitou Hot Spring Museum⁹. The same mountain spring was discovered by outsiders three times and adapted to by four generations of residents.

Six in the Morning, Steam over Beitou Park

Exterior of the Beitou Hot Spring Museum, originally the Beitou Public Hot Spring Bathhouse completed in 1913. Photo: Wikimedia Commons contributor. License via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

If you ask an 18-year-old Taipei teenager “Where are you going this weekend,” he will say Ximen. If you ask a 70-year-old grandmother “Where are you going for a walk this morning,” she will say Xinbeitou.

At six in the morning, MRT Xinbeitou Station has not opened yet, but the breakfast shops on Guangming Road are already preparing ingredients. Walk north from Exit 1, follow Zhongshan Road for five minutes, and you reach Beitou Park. The circular fountain left from 1913 is still turning water in the park¹⁰, and beside it the shallow Beitou Creek, steaming white, flows down from the mountain.

The water temperature approaches 100 degrees Celsius, and the spring is green sulfur water¹¹. In 1697 (the 36th year of Kangxi), when Fuzhou native Yu Yonghe came to these mountains to mine sulfur, he recorded that the water of this creek “boiled cauldrons and melted copper, utterly unlike boiling soup.” He meant that the creek water was not like the water you boil at home; it came up from underground¹.

Walk farther uphill, and a two-story red-brick building in the style of an English country villa stands on the slope. This is the Beitou Hot Spring Museum, originally the “Beitou Public Hot Spring Bathhouse,” built in 1913 by order of Taipei Prefecture head Imura Daikichi and supervised by Moriyama Matsunosuke, chief of the Government-General’s Building and Repairs Section⁴⁹.

At the foot of the steps in front of the museum, you will encounter a group of elderly people practicing tai chi. Walk another hundred meters south and you reach the outdoor public pool “Millennium Hot Spring,” opened in December 1999, the 88th year of the Republic of China¹². On weekdays a ticket costs NT$40; wear a swimsuit and swim cap, and you can go in to soak. Older women come early in the morning carrying towels and plastic bags with changes of clothes.

This scene, a walking route the 18-year-old would not choose and a ritual the 70-year-old grandmother performs three times a week, stands on the same mountain path Yu Yonghe walked 329 years ago.

📝 Curator’s note: General introductions often frame Beitou as a “Japanese-style hot-spring town,” an “old hostess-bar dream,” or a “hipster walking secret.” All three framings miss the same thing. From 1697 to 2026, people have always lived here, come here, and left here; there has never been such a thing as a “golden age.” Before the Japanese came to build bathhouses, the Ketagalan people had lived here for centuries; during the 1960s and 1970s, when postwar hostess restaurants flourished, Japanese-era buildings were at the same time being converted into Kuomintang public service offices⁹; after the abolition of prostitution, the 1980s and 1990s look like decline, but that was also when a group of Beitou Elementary School teachers slowly rescued the public bathhouse. This street in Beitou has never stopped living; only the form of being “alive” has changed from era to era.

A Place Called Patauw

To understand Beitou, one must first return to the time before the two Chinese characters “Beitou.”

Before Qing rule, this place was not called Beitou. On the 1654 Map of Tamsui and Its Surrounding Villages compiled by the Dutch East India Company, the village was written as Kipatauw¹³. When the Spanish briefly occupied northern Taiwan from 1632 to 1642, their documents also wrote Kipatauw or Quipatauw².

In 1899, the early Japanese-period scholar Inō Kanori conducted fieldwork in Beitou Village and discussed the place name with elders. The elders told him: patauw means witch². Like other Plains Indigenous groups, the Ketagalan people had a matrilineal society, and female shamans responsible for ritual, healing, blessing, and funerary rites held the highest status². Beitou’s Thermal Valley emits white steam year-round; it looked as if a witch were casting spells there².

Modern oral accounts from Ketagalan elders of Beitou Village point out that Kipatauw should in fact be a verb, meaning “the act of performing magic”; Inō Kanori recorded it as the noun “witch,” and because his documentation at the time was incomplete, that version has been used ever since². After Han Chinese heard Patauw, they transcribed it in Hokkien pronunciation as “Beitou,” “Batou,” “Batou,” and “Beitou”; only during the Japanese period was the written form “北投” fixed².

In the mid-17th century, Kipatauw probably had more than 30 households and over 100 people¹⁴. In 1709 (the 48th year of Kangxi), after the Chen-Lai-Zhang reclamation partnership petitioned the Qing court for rights to reclaim a large tract of land “east to Leixia Xiulang, west to beyond the Bali branch at Gandou, south to the foot of Xingzhi Mountain, and north to Dalang Gonggou,” Han reclamation forces entered greater Taipei¹⁵. The Ketagalan people of Beitou Village lost land rights and their language declined. Some households remained into the early 20th century; today they are concentrated mainly in the Fanzaicuo settlement of Beitou District, and the “Fanzai Prince” and “Pingpu Village” Earth God images worshiped at Baode Temple are among the few surviving material traces¹⁴.

The Qing court paid no particular attention to this smoking mountain, but one Fuzhou man came. In 1696 (the 35th year of Kangxi), a fire broke out in a Fuzhou gunpowder depot, Fujian was short of sulfur, and Yu Yonghe volunteered to cross the sea to Taiwan to mine sulfur¹. In April 1697 he landed in Tainan, traveled north to Beitou, set up work sheds at Dahuangzui (today’s Liuhuang Valley and Longfeng Valley area), and exchanged cloth with the Ketagalan people for sulfur-bearing soil¹.

In Small Sea Diaries, Yu Yonghe wrote of this creek: “It twists through deep, elegant scenery, with mountains circling the ridges for perhaps six or seven li” and “Looking toward the middle slope of the mountain ahead, white vapors rise in wisps, like mountain clouds suddenly exhaled... entering the sulfur cave, where the mountain stream breaks off”¹. He described this landscape with a literatus’s eye, but his purpose here was gunpowder material, not bathing. To him, this mountain was an industrial resource, not a tourist destination.

📝 Curator’s note: The common Beitou story says “the Japanese discovered Beitou’s hot springs.” But there are two problems with this claim. First, the Ketagalan people had lived here for centuries, and the place name Patauw directly referred to the “smoking mountain”; their familiarity with the mountain springs predated the Japanese by three hundred years². They simply did not make “soaking for therapy” into a way of life. Second, Yu Yonghe came here in 1697 to mine sulfur, and he knew the water could scald people¹, but he also did not treat this mountain as a “hot-spring site.” The true meaning of “discovering the hot spring” lies in a change of frame: turning hot water into a therapeutic and recreational object for which fees could be charged. That was a design introduced by the Japanese in 1894-96, and it had nothing to do with the physical properties of the water itself.

1896, Hirata Gengo’s Thatched Hut

If the “second discovery” of Beitou’s mountains by outsiders has a specific date, it was March 1896.

Hirata Gengo was born in Japan in 1845 (Kōka 2). In 1885 (Meiji 18), he began mining work for the Sumitomo family in Osaka and was later posted to the copper mines of Sakuragō in Chōshū¹⁶. After Japan took Taiwan in 1895, he came to Taiwan.

In December 1895, Hirata was already 50 years old and needed to recuperate from a fall injury. Introduced by friends, he traveled north from Taipei to Beitou Village. He stayed by Beitou Creek for 10 days, and his injury did indeed improve. He discovered something: the water in these mountains had therapeutic effects. But he had been poorly prepared for that 1895 trip, so he first returned to Taipei¹⁶.

In March 1896 (Meiji 29), Hirata returned to Beitou and purchased a thatched hut as a dwelling. The address was then “No. 73, Beitou Village, Zhilan Second Fort, Taipei Prefecture”³. He became the first private Japanese person to acquire property in Beitou.

Between 1896 and 1900, he converted this thatched hut into the inn “Tengu-an,” Taiwan’s first hot-spring hotel³. Today the site is No. 234 Guangming Road, Beitou District, Taipei. Since 2010, it has been the site of the Radium Kagaya International Hotel, which still preserves the “Tengu-an Historic Park” inside the hotel to commemorate this origin story¹⁷.

Besides opening the inn, Hirata did two things. First, in 1905 he petitioned the Railway Department of the Taiwan Government-General, hoping for an image of Guanyin to protect the locality. The Railway Department funded the carving of a wooden Guanyin image about 60 centimeters tall, named “Greatly Compassionate Beitou Yumori Guanyin Bodhisattva”¹⁸, meaning a Guanyin who guarded the hot-spring waters.

Second, in the same year, 1905, Railway Department employees funded the construction of a Shingon Buddhist temple in Beitou. Because it commemorated railway workers who died while building the Xinbeitou Line, it was named Tesshin-in; another account says the name commemorated the posthumous title “Tesshin” of Murakami Shōichi, head of the Railway Department’s Transportation Section¹⁸. The main hall was built of Taiwanese cypress, making it a rare purely Japanese Shingon temple in Taiwan at the time. After the war it was renamed Puji Temple, and the hot-spring guardian Guanyin was also enshrined there¹⁸.

Also in 1905, the Japanese mineralogist Okamoto Yōhachirō collected from Beitou Creek a special mineral containing a high dose of radioactive radium. He brought the stone back to his laboratory for analysis and named it Hokutolite, or Beitou stone: among the world’s thousands of minerals, the only one named after a Taiwan place name¹¹. To this day, Hokutolite exists in only two places worldwide: Beitou in Taiwan and Tamagawa Onsen in Akita Prefecture, Japan¹¹.

Hirata Gengo lived at Tengu-an until his death on July 7, 1919 (Taishō 8)¹⁶. He lived to 74 and spent his final 23 years in Taiwan. By the end of his life, Beitou had already become something else.

📝 Curator’s note: What makes Hirata Gengo interesting is not that he “opened the first hot-spring inn,” but that over 23 years he turned the entire material foundation of these mountains into a Japanese-style “therapeutic resort” frame. In 1896 he built Tengu-an; in 1905 he asked the Railway Department to fund Tesshin-in and enshrine the hot-spring guardian Guanyin; in 1905 Okamoto Yōhachirō named Hokutolite. These three things happened within 500 meters of the same Beitou Creek. In effect, they translated this smoking mountain from the Ketagalan Patauw, the place of witches, into Japan’s “sacred therapeutic resort.” The translation at the level of language depended on Inō Kanori; the translation at the level of objects depended on Hirata and Okamoto. After 1896, the mountain’s name was still “Beitou,” the Hokkien transcription of patauw, but the world of meaning it carried had changed.

1913, Moriyama Matsunosuke’s Red-Brick Bathhouse

Beitou Hot Spring Museum entrance, originally the 1913 public bathhouse. Photo: Wikimedia Commons contributor. License via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA).

After Tengu-an was built, Beitou became a therapeutic resort that Japanese visitors to Taiwan had to see. On June 17, 1913 (Taishō 2), Taipei Prefecture spent more than 56,000 yen in public-health funds to build and formally open a large public bathhouse⁴⁹.

The decision-maker behind this bathhouse was Taipei Prefecture head Imura Daikichi. Its designer and supervising architect was Moriyama Matsunosuke, an architect in the Government-General’s Building and Repairs Section. In Taiwan he left several representative colonial public buildings, including the Tainan Prefecture Hall, today’s National Museum of Taiwan Literature; the Taipei Prefecture Hall, today’s Control Yuan; and the Government-General Monopoly Bureau, today’s Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation⁹.

Moriyama Matsunosuke chose for the Beitou Public Bathhouse a design modeled on Izusan Onsen in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan. The whole building was a two-story imitation English brick structure occupying about 700 ping⁹. The most distinctive feature of the first floor was a Roman-style large bath enclosed by round-arched columns, built of Qilian stone, the same stone used in Longnice Hot Spring⁹. The corridor walls outside the bath were decorated with inlaid stained-glass window patterns; sunlight passed through the glass into the large bath, creating a bright and splendid bathing atmosphere⁹. The wooden rest area, recreation room, and large tatami hall on the second floor were social spaces where Japanese visitors changed into yukata⁹.

At the time, this was the largest public bathhouse in East Asia⁹.

On the same day the public bathhouse opened, Beitou Park also opened. The park was established according to the “Park Management Regulations” set by the Government-General in 1911, with a circular fountain, a wild-duck fountain, plantings, and benches¹⁰. Seen from this end of the park, the red-brick bathhouse, the lines of an English country villa, the blue roof tiles, and the smoke-shrouded Beitou Creek layered up the slope.

Three years later, on April 1, 1916 (Taishō 5), the Xinbeitou Branch Line opened. It was a branch of the Taiwan Railway Administration’s Tamsui Line, 1.2 kilometers long, branching off from Beitou Station and built purely to bring travelers into the hot-spring district⁵. In Taiwan railway history, it was the first railway built entirely for tourism⁵. Its promoter was Murakami Shōichi, head of the Transportation Section of the Government-General Transportation Bureau’s Railway Department⁵.

At the end of the line was the “Xinbeitou passenger halt,” later Xinbeitou Station, a wooden station building built mainly of Taiwanese hinoki cypress. After its 1937 expansion, it took on the form with four round dormer-window openings, a shape that remained until the line was abolished in 1988¹⁹.

📝 Curator’s note: You can think of the 1913 public bathhouse and the 1916 Xinbeitou Branch Line as two parts of the same system. The building designed by Moriyama Matsunosuke was essentially a colonial material publicity machine: it packaged a mountain spring that Japanese people had never heard of into a combined brand of “East Asia’s largest public bathhouse” + “Taiwan’s first tourist railway” + “20 minutes from Taipei” + “used by the imperial family” (which would happen later). The brand succeeded. It let travelers from Japan proper know that “in colonial Taiwan, there is a hot-spring resort called Beitou.” But this brand was not designed for the Ketagalan people or for the Han settlers left from the Qing period. It was designed for travelers of the Japanese empire. Once that red-brick bathhouse was built in 1913, this street became an imperial showroom.

1923, the Crown Prince Came to Bathe Once

Archival photograph of Crown Prince Hirohito visiting the Beitou Public Bathhouse in 1923. Photo: Public domain (prewar document, 1923). Wikimedia Commons.

In April 1923 (Taishō 12), Crown Prince Hirohito, later the Shōwa emperor, visited Taiwan for 12 days in his capacity as regent on behalf of Emperor Taishō⁶. This was the first visit by Japan’s imperial family to colonial Taiwan.

On April 25, Hirohito’s itinerary took him to Caoshan, today’s Yangmingshan, and Beitou. To welcome him, Taipei Prefecture had begun renovations the previous year: the second floor of the Beitou Public Hot Spring Bathhouse added an imperial rest room of more than 30 ping, an exclusive resting space for the crown prince. It is today the audiovisual room on the museum’s second floor⁶.

That day, Hirohito first toured the public bathhouse, then walked to Beitou Creek to see Hokutolite, the mineral Okamoto Yōhachirō had discovered 18 years earlier and which had already become an academic pride of the Japanese empire¹¹. To allow the crown prince to walk on Beitou Creek and observe Hokutolite, the site specially laid pieces of tobiishi, stepping stones, above the Second Waterfall²⁰.

In 1934, 11 years later, local people commemorated that day by erecting a “Monument to His Imperial Highness the Crown Prince’s Crossing” beside Beitou Creek’s Second Waterfall²⁰. After the war, this stone marker nearly disappeared, but fortunately it was preserved; today it remains in the garden of Longnice Hot Spring bathhouse²⁰.

After Hirohito soaked in the hot spring that once, Beitou’s reputation for “imperial certification” spread throughout Japan. Through the 1920s and 1930s, more hotels gradually appeared in Beitou. Kazan Hotel, built in 1921, was then the highest-sited and most expensive pure wooden two-story Japanese-style building in the Xinbeitou area, and it is one of the very few surviving buildings of its type in Taiwan. After the war it became the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Kazan Guest House; in 1983, Zhang Chunming of San Fu Chemical took it over and turned it into the Taiwan Folk Arts and Antique House, today’s Beitou Museum²¹. Longnice Hot Spring, built in 1907, continued to operate public baths; after the war it kept operating under a changed Chinese name, underwent its first major renovation in 2016, and reopened in 2017²². Puji Temple continued to keep incense burning before the hot-spring guardian Guanyin.

What was Beitou like in that period? Wealthy people from Japan proper came for honeymoons; trading companies held banquets; military officers came to recuperate; Taiwanese salaried workers were occasionally invited to keep company. After the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, Beitou’s hotels began receiving Japanese soldiers, and Kazan Hotel was at one point requisitioned by the military as a “Japanese officers’ club”²¹. At the end of the war, kamikaze pilots were sent to Beitou to make merry in the week before deployment, according to oral accounts by Beitou elders²¹.

Japan surrendered in August 1945. All Japanese returned to their home country, leaving behind an empty hot-spring street and a group of Taiwanese people who did not know what would come next.

The First Twenty Postwar Years: Nakashi, Hostess Restaurants, and U.S. Soldiers

In the early postwar period, the public bathhouse sat idle and decayed. The Kuomintang government converted this red-brick building into the Yangmingshan Public Service Office⁹. A building originally designed as a Japanese public health and entertainment facility became a local base for the ruling party.

But the street’s identity as a “hot-spring resort” did not disappear with the change of regime. In the 1950s and 1960s, a new group of workers entered to fill the vacancy.

The first to appear were jiujia, hostess restaurants. On April 30, 1954, Beitou’s Female Hostess Lodging Household Association was established. This was a system that legalized “female hostesses,” women workers who accompanied guests in drinking, bathing, and lodging; visitors could “select hostesses to receive them for bathing”⁷⁸. The legal basis of this system was a local self-government ordinance, which designated Beitou and the only other such place in Taiwan, Shaochuantou in Kaohsiung, as legal “special business districts.”

Hostess-restaurant culture drove the rise of nakashi. The word nakashi is a transliteration of the Japanese nagashi, meaning itinerant singing²³. From the 1960s on, nakashi musicians ran like flowing water among the more than one hundred hot-spring hotels in Xinbeitou. At its peak, the hot-spring district had more than one hundred nakashi bands²³. Each hotel usually kept three to seven bands. Guests requested a band to come to their room and sing old Hokkien songs, Japanese songs, and Mandarin pop songs²³. The instruments evolved from early self-accompanied singing by individual musicians, to small groups with accordion, guitar, and drums, and then to electronic keyboards and electric guitars²³.

A third occupation also appeared: time-limited express delivery. Beitou has many slopes and narrow lanes, and taxis had difficulty entering. Hostesses needed to move quickly between different hotels, so transport firms used motorcycles to provide 24-hour, on-call pickup and drop-off services²⁴. By the late Japanese period, black three-wheeled vehicles were already running this route; after motorcycles were imported in the 1950s, they completely replaced the three-wheelers²⁴. At the peak, Beitou had more than 1,000 motorcycles providing time-limited express delivery service²⁴.

A fourth customer arrived: the U.S. military. In 1965, with the Vietnam War under way, the U.S. Department of Defense launched its Rest and Recreation program, or R&R. U.S. servicemen who had served three months were entitled to five days of leisure leave with free airfare and could choose any city in the Far East vacation circuit⁷. Beitou became a popular destination because it was 20 minutes from Taipei and had 75 hot-spring hotels⁷. Records from the National Development Council’s Archives Administration state that during the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1972, 210,000 U.S. servicemen came to Taiwan for R&R, spending a cumulative US$52.8 million over several years⁷.

On December 22, 1967, Time magazine in the United States reported on Taiwan under the headline “Beitou: Tenderness Town,” pairing the article with a photograph of a hostess from a Beitou jiujia⁷. This report enraged Chiang Kai-shek. For the “Republic of China’s anti-communist base for national recovery” to become, in the eyes of international media, a “U.S. military pleasure quarter” was politically embarrassing. In reality, however, hotel revenues in Beitou during that period were several times higher than in the 1950s, and the whole hot-spring district was like a city whose lights never went out⁷.

Chen Ming-chang was born in Beitou Township on July 4, 1956²⁵. As a child, he watched hostess restaurants line the streets, heard nakashi bands’ songs drift out from rooms, and saw taxis and time-limited delivery motorcycles shuttle through the lanes. In 1988, he collaborated with Greenray Theatre on the musical Goodbye, Beitou (directed by Wu Nien-jen, music by Chen Ming-chang, lyrics by Chen Ming-yu, performed by Pan Li-li), paying tribute in Hokkien to nakashi culture²⁵. The opening lyrics of the musical read: “Spring-night rain falls down, cold and frosty, dripping in this heartless dead-end lane; spring-night Beitou is liquor, is memory, is a fallen flower in the world of dust, is tenderness within three parts drunkenness.”²⁵

📝 Curator’s note: The story of Beitou’s twenty postwar years is easily written as a “dark age” or as “lost romance.” Both framings dehistoricize it. In reality, Beitou during this period was a partial projection of Taiwan’s postwar labor and gender structures. The legalization of female hostesses happened in 1954, part of the same society as military brothels, land reform, foreign-trade expansion, and the U.S. aid system. The songs of nakashi musicians, the engines of time-limited delivery drivers, the U.S. dollars in American soldiers’ pockets, and Time magazine’s camera: together these details describe the concrete form of livelihood-making on Cold War Taiwan’s periphery. When Chen Ming-chang wrote Goodbye, Beitou in 1988, he deliberately avoided nostalgic romance. He chose to record the workers of those days. The line “a fallen flower in the world of dust” is both lament and level gaze.

1979, the Year Lee Teng-hui Was Mayor

Xinbeitou’s hostess-restaurant culture lasted 25 years and broke in 1979.

On February 5 of that year, the Taipei City Council passed the abolition of the “Beitou District hostess system,” and all legal basis for the “female hostess” system legalized since 1954 disappeared overnight⁷⁸. Lee Teng-hui, mayor from 1978 to 1981, executed this decision⁸.

On November 1 of the same year, 1979, the city government went further: hotels were prohibited from summoning women to accompany guests in drinking, bathing, or lodging; bands were also prohibited from selling songs⁸. In other words, the three main sources of clients for hostess restaurants, nakashi bands, and time-limited express delivery were cut off at the same time.

The political background of this decision was as follows: in 1971, the Republic of China withdrew from the United Nations; in 1972, Tanaka Kakuei visited China; in 1978, the United States announced that it would establish diplomatic relations with Beijing; on January 1, 1979, the Republic of China severed diplomatic relations with the United States. At the same time, the Kuomintang in Taiwan faced pressure from the tangwai opposition movement, and the self-image of the “Republic of China’s anti-communist base for national recovery” urgently needed rebuilding. Beitou, the stain that Time magazine had written up as a “tenderness town,” was something the regime was eager to erase.

After the abolition of prostitution, Beitou’s hostess restaurants closed one after another⁷⁸. According to Beitou local gazetteers, by the early 1980s the hot-spring hotels’ customer base was less than 20 percent of what it had been in the 1970s; the number of nakashi bands fell from more than one hundred to single digits; hostess culture went underground and developed toward Linsen North Road and the East District²³⁷.

The time-limited delivery firms responded by adjusting their clientele. Since they could no longer transport hostesses, they began serving ordinary residents by buying groceries, picking up children, and delivering lunch boxes²⁴. After 1979, time-limited express delivery changed from a transport line for the sex industry into a household courier service for Beitou’s hill town. This transformation took about 10 years. Into the 1990s, the firms were still there, but their customers were completely different²⁴.

Chen Shui-bian’s September 4, 1997 abolition of the “Taipei City Regulations for the Management of Prostitutes” was another battle 18 years later, involving the citywide licensed-prostitution system and a self-help association formed by 128 licensed prostitutes²⁶. That is another street’s story, and it is separate from the abolition of prostitution on this Beitou street.

What was Beitou like in the 1980s? Chen Ming-chang wrote about it in the musical Goodbye, Beitou: the hotels emptied out, nakashi guitars gathered dust in corners, taxi drivers waiting in line had no business and could only chat, and motorcycles that once transported hostesses began delivering gas cylinders for residents²⁵.

But this street did not die. On July 15, 1988, the Taiwan Railways Beitou-Tamsui Line was converted for the MRT, and the Xinbeitou Branch Line was abolished with it. The 1916 station built of Taiwanese hinoki cypress was, through the mediation of architect Li Chung-yao, sold by the Taipei City Government to Shi Jinshan of Changhua’s Taiwan Folk Village for a “symbolic NT$1”¹⁹. The station was dismantled, moved to Changhua, and reassembled inside the folk village¹⁹.

That year, Xinbeitou lost its railway station for the first time.

1994, Several Teachers Rediscover a Bathhouse

In 1994, the 83rd year of the Republic of China, several teachers at Beitou Elementary School, Lü Hongwen, Huang Guiguan, Xie Shuling, and Xu Jiabao, were planning a “local studies” curriculum for the resource class in the 1994 academic year⁹.

When Lü Hongwen and Huang Guiguan took students to explore along Beitou Creek, they entered a red-brick building that looked like a ruin. At the time, the building was being used as a Taipei County Council guesthouse. It was usually locked, its exterior was mottled, and there was no explanatory sign nearby⁹.

The two teachers checked documents and were startled to discover that this building was the 1913 “Beitou Public Hot Spring Bathhouse”[^9]: the building supervised by Moriyama Matsunosuke, built by order of Imura Daikichi, visited by Crown Prince Hirohito, converted after the war into a Kuomintang public service office, then turned into a county council guesthouse, and now forgotten by everyone⁹.

The teachers began mobilizing. They contacted the media, local-history workers, Beitou neighborhood chiefs, and the Taipei City Government’s Department of Cultural Affairs⁹. In 1995 and 1996, local cultural groups joined in one after another, and the Beitou Public Hot Spring Bathhouse preservation movement took shape⁹.

In February 1997, the Ministry of the Interior formally designated the Beitou Public Hot Spring Bathhouse a Class III historic monument, later changed to a municipal historic monument⁹. In 1998, the Taipei City Government Department of Civil Affairs funded its renovation, and on October 31 of the same year, the Beitou Hot Spring Museum officially opened⁹.

From its completion in 1913 to its transformation into a museum in 1998, the red-brick bathhouse passed through 85 years. The first 32 were as a Japanese-period public bathhouse, from 1913 to 1945; the next 53 were as a postwar seized property: public service office → county council guesthouse → ruin → historic monument → museum.

In December 1999, the Beitou Park Outdoor Hot Spring Bathing Pool opened across from the museum. Because it coincided with the millennium, it was named the Millennium Hot Spring¹². This outdoor public pool occupies about 1,000 square meters. Its source water comes from Thermal Valley; it has six public pools, four hot and two cold, with water temperatures of 38-45 degrees Celsius, and is classified as green sulfur spring water¹². The weekday ticket price is NT$40, and visitors enter wearing swimsuits and swim caps¹². The older women of the neighborhood now had an outdoor pool where they could come early to soak.

In November 2002, the Ketagalan Culture Center opened at No. 3-1 Zhongshan Road, Beitou District. It is the nation’s first cultural, artistic, educational, and research center centered on Indigenous peoples²⁷. From 1899, when Inō Kanori collected in Beitou Village the oral account that patauw meant witch, to 2002, when a building on this Beitou street took “Ketagalan” as its name, 103 years passed. The Indigenous history of these mountains finally gained a material place.

📝 Curator’s note: The story of the four Beitou Elementary School teachers in 1994 is the most interesting turn on this street. They were not cultural-heritage experts, architects, or politicians. They were a group of teachers working on a local-studies assignment. But this act got one thing right: they brought students in front of that ruin and forced themselves to investigate “what this is.” Local studies in 1994 were a tiny slice of Taiwanese localization during Lee Teng-hui’s presidency in the 1990s. People began to ask: “What is this land under our feet?” Seen from this angle, the transformation of the Beitou Public Bathhouse into a museum has its historical context. It is one piece of material evidence for the reorganization of Taiwan’s self-understanding in the 1990s. The 1979 abolition of prostitution swept this street blank; the 1994 local-studies lesson filled it back in. Both were “politics,” but in opposite directions.

2017, the Station Comes Home

Current state of Xinbeitou Station reassembled in Qixing Park. Photo: Wikimedia Commons contributor. License via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA).

On July 15, 1988, the day the Xinbeitou Branch Line was abolished, the 1916 Taiwanese hinoki station building was dismantled, transported to Changhua, and reassembled inside Taiwan Folk Village¹⁹. It stayed in Changhua for 24 years. No one boarded a train at that station there. It became an exhibit in the folk village; tourists took photos, looked once, and walked past¹⁹.

In 1996, Beitou Village magazine published an article titled “Finding a Lost Family Member: Welcoming Xinbeitou Station Back,” igniting local discussion²⁸. From 2003 and 2004 on, civic groups began launching the “Bring Xinbeitou Station Home” campaign, approaching the Taipei City Government, the Ministry of Culture, and Taiwan Folk Village²⁸. Taiwan Folk Village’s business conditions deteriorated, and its new owner, Jih Rong Company, eventually donated the station free of charge to the Taipei City Government²⁸.

But “coming home” was more complicated than expected. The original site, where the 1916 station had once stood, is now the plaza of MRT Xinbeitou Station, so the station could not be placed there. After repeated deliberations in cultural-heritage review, the final choice was “displacement of about 50 meters from the original site”: the station was reassembled in Qixing Park, with the address set as No. 1 Qixing Street²⁸.

On April 1, 2017, the station’s 101st birthday, reconstruction was completed and the station officially opened to the public²⁸.

The controversy did not end. Events in Focus published an article titled “With the Wrong Site, Appearance, and Materials, Has Xinbeitou Station Really ‘Come Home’?” questioning the reconstruction²⁹. Its location was not the original site; some timber had to be replaced with new wood because of damage during the Taiwan Folk Village period; added structures differed from the 1916 original appearance²⁹. Cultural-heritage professionals were divided: some believed “saving it is already a good thing,” while others argued that the station has essentially become our 2017 interpretation of its 1916 appearance²⁹.

However one views it, in 2017 that station once again stood in Xinbeitou, 50 meters from the original site, using some new timber, with the form of its four dormer windows still present. It and the 1913 red-brick bathhouse across the way once again became two architectural objects on the same line.

From 1916 to 2017, this station experienced: Japanese-period tourist railway (1916-1945) → postwar Taiwan Railways Beitou-Tamsui Line (1945-1988) → exile in Changhua (1988-2012) → reassembly in Qixing Park (2017 to present). In the eyes of four generations, it has been four different things.

Material Layers: Red Brick, Qilian Stone, Hokutolite, Cypress

Green sulfur spring at Thermal Valley. Photo: Wikimedia Commons contributor. License via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA).

Every material layer on this Beitou street has a story.

Red brick: The bricks used in the 1913 Beitou Public Bathhouse were locally fired red bricks from Taiwan. Fair-faced red-brick walls paired with blue roof tiles formed an overall style modeled on an English country villa⁹. Moriyama Matsunosuke’s design was a standard style for Japanese-period colonial public buildings in Taipei at the time; the Government-General Monopoly Bureau and the Tainan Prefecture Hall used similar styles⁹.

Qilian stone: The Roman-style large bath inside the bathhouse was built of pale-gray Qilian stone⁹. This stone was abundant in Beitou and Shilin, and after the war it was also used to build the baths at Longnice Hot Spring. The construction method of Qilian stone bonded with sulfur mud has kept Longnice’s baths standing for more than 100 years without leaking²².

Hokutolite: The radium-bearing mineral collected by Okamoto Yōhachirō from Beitou Creek in 1905 is formally named Hokutolite¹¹. Among the world’s thousands of minerals, it is the only one named after a Taiwan place name. In 1933, the Japanese government designated Beitou Creek a “natural monument protection area,” the world’s first natural monument centered on a mineral¹¹. It remained protected after the war¹¹.

Cypress: Xinbeitou Station, built in 1916, used Taiwanese hinoki cypress. This was a high-grade local building material the Japanese found in Taiwan and widely used in Japanese-period public buildings¹⁹. The “four round dormer-window openings” added in the 1937 expansion were also a cypress structure¹⁹. The main hall of Puji Temple, formerly Tesshin-in, was also built of cypress¹⁸.

Green sulfur spring: The water of Thermal Valley is a hydrochloric acidic spring with a pH of about 1.6 and a temperature of 90-100°C, commonly called green sulfur spring¹¹. Beitou’s Thermal Valley was formerly called Beitou Creek Hot Spring or Hell Valley. During the Japanese period, tourists once slipped and fell in, dying from scalding injuries, hence the name “Hell”; later, because the name was considered inelegant, it was changed to Jade Spring Valley and then to today’s Thermal Valley¹¹. Thermal Valley’s hot springs benefit the joints, muscles, skin, bronchi, and nerves¹¹, but the water temperature is too high for direct bathing. All Beitou hot-spring hotels draw water from here and mix it with cold water to lower the temperature to around 40 degrees.

Material layers that have disappeared: The signs of more than one hundred postwar hostess-restaurant hotels, the black motorcycle fleets of time-limited express delivery, the wooden guitars carried on nakashi musicians’ backs, and the music stands in their suitcases. These things were not preserved in the museum, but Chen Ming-chang’s 1988 musical preserved them in sound²⁵.

Three Places Locals Will Take You

If you ask someone who grew up in Beitou, “Besides the museum and Thermal Valley, where else can I go,” they may name these three places.

Puji Temple, formerly Tesshin-in, No. 112 Guangming Road, an eight-minute uphill walk from MRT Xinbeitou Station¹⁸. Built in 1905 with funds from Railway Department employees, it is a rare purely Japanese Shingon temple in Taiwan. The main hall is made of Taiwanese cypress, the roof is Japanese irimoya-style, and the “Greatly Compassionate Beitou Yumori Guanyin Bodhisattva” that Hirata Gengo asked the Railway Department to fund is enshrined inside¹⁸. Each year, the hot-spring guardian Guanyin is open for worship only for a short period¹⁸.

Beitou Park Outdoor Hot Spring Bathing Pool, or Millennium Hot Spring, No. 6 Zhongshan Road, opened in December 1999¹². One ticket costs NT$40. Visitors enter in swimsuits and swim caps. There are six pools, four hot and two cold. The 5:30-7:30 a.m. session is most worth attending: it is the regular routine of the neighborhood’s older women, who chat about village gossip after soaking¹². Note: it has been temporarily closed for renovation since January 24, 2025, with work expected to take about one year¹².

Longnice Hot Spring, No. 244 Guangming Road, built in 1907²². During the Japanese period it was a recuperation facility for Japanese soldiers, originally with only a men’s bath. After the war it was sold to the original lessee, Lin Tianhan, and continued operating under its postwar name from the 1950s to today²². Its baths are built of Qilian stone bonded with sulfur mud and have not leaked for more than 100 years²². The “Monument to His Imperial Highness the Crown Prince’s Crossing” in the garden is the one erected in 1934²⁰. In 2016, it underwent its first major renovation in 60 years and reopened in 2017²².

Visit these three places, along with the Hot Spring Museum and Thermal Valley, and an afternoon from about five to eight-thirty is just right.

The Same Mountain Spring, the Next Generation of Residents

Beitou Park Outdoor Hot Spring Bathing Pool, or Millennium Hot Spring. Photo: Wikimedia Commons contributor. License via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA).

At six in the morning, the outdoor pool has not opened yet, but a row of older women is already sitting by the entrance.

Each carries a plastic bag containing a towel, swim cap, change of clothes, a bottle of water, and a small plastic bag of dry food. The grandmother at the head of the line wears a light-colored T-shirt with loose athletic pants and is chatting with the sisters beside her about yesterday’s vegetable prices at the traditional market.

They know where Thermal Valley is, know which lane gets to Longnice Hot Spring faster, and know what time the MRT Red Line opens in the morning. Some among them are 70, some are 80; some are wives of retired soldiers who moved to Beitou in the 1950s, and some are former hostess-restaurant workers who stayed after the 1979 abolition of prostitution and are now grandmothers.

They may not know that Yu Yonghe came here in 1697. They may not know that patauw means witch. They may not remember that Crown Prince Hirohito came to bathe once in 1923.

But their footprints on this street follow the same mountain path as the four generations before them.

From the Fuzhou man’s work sheds in 1697, to the Osaka man’s thatched hut in 1896, to the colonial red-brick bathhouse in 1913, to the crown prince’s stepping stones in 1923, to the U.S. military jeeps of 1967, to the darkened hostess restaurants of 1979, to the Beitou Elementary School teachers who rediscovered the public bathhouse in 1994, to this line of older women at six in the morning in 2026: this street has changed through five generations of residents, and the flavor of the mountain spring has not changed.

The Ketagalan people called it Patauw, “place of witches.” In 1899, Inō Kanori said it meant “the act of performing magic.”

Those older women may not know that. But every morning at six, they walk into the steam of Thermal Valley.

That, too, is a kind of magic.

Further Reading:

• Taipei City — a panorama of the 12 districts, Beitou District’s position, and its relationship to Taipei’s other historic districts
• Cultural Map of Taiwan’s 16 Indigenous Peoples — the distribution of the Ketagalan people and other Plains Indigenous groups in Taiwan
• Dadaocheng — a historic district from the same period and another key commercial center in Taipei after the 1860 opening of the port
• Bangka — the prosperous starting point of Taipei’s Qing-era saying “first Tainan-fu, second Lukang, third Bangka,” and its relationship with Beitou
• Ximending — an entertainment district planned by the Japanese in 1896, beginning in parallel with Hirata Gengo’s Tengu-an in Beitou that same year
• Zhongshan North Road Tiaotong — the tree-lined avenue laid out in 1898 as Chokushi Kaidō toward Taiwan Grand Shrine at Yuanshan; after the 1972 severing of Japan-ROC diplomatic relations, its Japanese-business izakaya culture and Beitou’s 1979 abolition of prostitution became two diverging strands in postwar Taipei’s special-business landscape

Image Sources

This article uses six CC-licensed images, all cached in public/article-images/geography/ to avoid hotlinking Wikimedia Commons:

• Beitou Hot Spring Museum 2 — Photo: Wikimedia Commons contributor, 2020-08-20, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Crown Prince Hirohito's visit at Hokutō Public Bathhouse 1923 — Public domain (prewar document, 1923)
• Entrance of Beitou public hot spring — Photo: Wikimedia Commons contributor, CC BY-SA
• Beitou Thermal Valley — Photo: Wikimedia Commons contributor, CC BY-SA
• Beitou Park Outdoor Hot Spring Bathing Pool — Photo: Wikimedia Commons contributor, CC BY-SA
• Front view of Xinbeitou Station on a bright sunny day — Photo: Wikimedia Commons contributor, CC BY-SA

References

1. Yu Yonghe came to Taiwan to mine sulfur and wrote Small Sea Diaries — Taiwan Literature Knowledge Platform — An entry on the Taiwan Literature Knowledge Platform built by the National Museum of Taiwan Literature. It records the historical background of the 1696 Fuzhou gunpowder depot fire, after which Yu Yonghe volunteered to cross the sea to Taiwan to mine sulfur, as well as details of his 1697 arrival at Beitou’s Dahuangzui, establishment of work sheds, and exchange of cloth with the Ketagalan people for sulfur-bearing soil. It also records Small Sea Diaries’ specific description of the Beitou Creek hot spring as “boiling cauldrons and melting copper, utterly unlike boiling soup.”↩
2. Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Knowledge Network — Plains Indigenous Groups — Where Did the Ki-Patauw Witch Account Come From? — An official page of the Taipei City Government’s Indigenous Peoples Commission knowledge network. It records Spanish and Dutch archival documents that wrote Beitou Village as Kipatauw; in 1899, Inō Kanori collected oral accounts in Beitou Village stating that patauw meant witch. Modern oral accounts from tribal leaders point out that Kipatauw is actually the verb “to perform magic,” and that Inō Kanori’s incomplete field record has been used ever since.↩
3. Hirata Gengo — Taipei Hot Springs Association — An official page of the Taipei Hot Springs Association. It records that Hirata Gengo was born in Japan in 1845, began mining work for the Sumitomo family in Osaka in 1885, discovered the Beitou hot springs in December 1895, and in March 1896 purchased a thatched hut at No. 73, Beitou Village, Zhilan Second Fort, Taipei Prefecture, today’s No. 234 Guangming Road, converting it into the Tengu-an inn, Taiwan’s first hot-spring hotel.↩
4. Beitou Public Bathhouse — National Cultural Heritage Database — An official entry in the Ministry of Culture Bureau of Cultural Heritage’s National Cultural Heritage Database. It records that the Beitou Public Hot Spring Bathhouse was built in June 1913, Taishō 2, by Taipei Prefecture using more than 56,000 yen in public-health funds, modeled on Izusan Onsen in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, and completed on June 17, 1913.↩
5. Xinbeitou Branch Line — Wikipedia — The Wikipedia entry on the Xinbeitou Branch Line. It records that the line opened on April 1, 1916, Taishō 5, was promoted by Murakami Shōichi, head of the Transportation Section of the Government-General Transportation Bureau’s Railway Department, was 1.2 kilometers long and built purely for tourism, and was Taiwan’s earliest railway built purely for tourism.↩
6. 16 Crown Prince Hirohito’s 1923 Visit to Beitou — Beitou Hot Spring Museum — An official service-learning page of the Beitou Hot Spring Museum. It records Crown Prince Hirohito’s April 25, 1923 visit to Beitou, including his tours of Caoshan and the Beitou Public Hot Spring Bathhouse and inspection of Hokutolite, as well as the historical detail that the bathhouse’s second floor specially added an imperial rest room of more than 30 ping, today the museum’s second-floor audiovisual room.↩
7. Fifty Years Ago, a Time Magazine “Hot Spring Photo” Enraged Chiang Kai-shek! — CitiOrange — An in-depth CitiOrange report. It records the U.S. military R&R program after the Vietnam War began in 1965; Time magazine’s December 22, 1967 report on Taiwan under the theme “Beitou: Tenderness Town”; the 210,000 Vietnam War U.S. servicemen who vacationed in Taiwan for R&R; their US$52.8 million in spending; and the political embarrassment the report caused Chiang Kai-shek.↩
8. Sex Trade Industry in Taiwan — Wikipedia — The Wikipedia entry on Taiwan’s sex trade industry. It records the April 30, 1954 establishment of Beitou’s Female Hostess Lodging Household Association; the Taipei City Council’s February 5, 1979 abolition of the legal status of hostesses in Beitou District, during Lee Teng-hui’s 1978-1981 term as mayor; and the further November 1, 1979 prohibition on hotels summoning women to accompany guests in drinking, bathing, and lodging, and on bands selling songs.↩
9. Beitou Hot Spring Museum — Wikipedia — The Wikipedia entry on the Beitou Hot Spring Museum. It records the complete timeline: the Beitou Public Hot Spring Bathhouse was completed on June 17, 1913; its designer was Moriyama Matsunosuke; Taipei Prefecture head Imura Daikichi ordered its planning; after the war it became the Yangmingshan Public Service Office; in 1994, Beitou Elementary School teachers Lü Hongwen, Huang Guiguan, Xie Shuling, and Xu Jiabao rediscovered it; in February 1997 it was designated a Class III historic monument; and on October 31, 1998 the museum officially opened.↩
10. Beitou Park — Wikipedia — The Wikipedia entry on Beitou Park. It records that the park was established according to the Taiwan Government-General’s 1911 “Park Management Regulations,” opened on June 17, 1913, and included facilities such as a circular fountain, a wild-duck fountain, plantings, and benches.↩
11. Thermal Valley — TravelKing — TravelKing’s official introduction page. It records that Thermal Valley’s hot spring is commonly known as green sulfur spring, a hydrochloric acidic spring with a pH of about 1.6 and water temperature of 90-100°C, formerly called Hell Valley and later renamed Jade Spring Valley; in 1905, the Japanese Okamoto Yōhachirō discovered in Beitou Creek the radium-bearing mineral Hokutolite, the world’s only mineral named after a Taiwan place name, found only in Beitou, Taiwan, and Tamagawa Onsen, Japan.↩
12. Beitou Park Outdoor Hot Spring Bathing Pool_Millennium Hot Spring — Taipei Travel — The official Taipei Travel attraction page. It records that Beitou Park Outdoor Hot Spring Bathing Pool opened in December 1999, the 88th year of the Republic of China, received the name Millennium Hot Spring because it coincided with the millennium, occupies about 1,000 square meters, has six public pools, four hot and two cold, with temperatures of 38-45°C, a weekday ticket price of NT$40, and the latest notice that it has been temporarily closed for renovation since January 24, 2025.↩
13. Beitou Village — Wikipedia — The Wikipedia entry on Beitou Village. It records that Spanish and Dutch archival documents generally wrote Beitou Village as Kipatauw, including the 1654 Map of Tamsui and Its Surrounding Villages compiled by the Dutch East India Company.↩
14. Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Knowledge Network — Plains Indigenous Groups — Beitou Village — An official page of the Taipei City Government’s Indigenous Peoples Commission knowledge network. It records that in the mid-17th century, Kipatauw had more than 30 households and over 100 people; Inner Beitou lay in today’s Qingjiang, Xuechang, Anmin, Zhongzheng, Zhongyang, Wenquan, Zhonghe, and Baxian neighborhoods of Taipei’s Beitou District, while Outer Beitou lay around Beitou Village in today’s Tamsui District, New Taipei City. It also records historical details of the surviving Fanzaicuo settlement and Baode Temple’s worship of the “Fanzai Prince” and “Pingpu Village” Earth God.↩
15. A Witness to Plains Indigenous Settlement Remains — Baode Temple’s Fanzai Prince and “Pingpu Village” Earth God in Beitou — An article in the Council of Indigenous Peoples’ Indigenous Peoples Literature e-journal. It records details of the 1709, Kangxi 48, Chen-Lai-Zhang reclamation partnership’s petition boundaries, “east to Leixia Xiulang, west to beyond the Bali branch at Gandou, south to the foot of Xingzhi Mountain, and north to Dalang Gonggou,” as well as the historical process by which Ketagalan land rights were lost and language declined after Han reclamation.↩
16. Hirata Gengo — Wikipedia — The Wikipedia entry on Hirata Gengo. It records his complete life: born in 1845, Kōka 2; died July 7, 1919, Taishō 8; began mining work for the Sumitomo family in Osaka in 1885, Meiji 18; sought a hot-spring site because of an injury in 1895; and returned to Beitou in 1896 to purchase a thatched hut and convert it into the Tengu-an inn.↩
17. The Site of Taiwan’s First Hot-Spring Hotel, Tengu-an — Taiwan Memo — A detailed heritage-record blog post. It records that the Tengu-an site was at today’s No. 234 Guangming Road, Beitou District, Taipei; since 2010, it has been the location of the Radium Kagaya International Hotel; and the hotel preserves the “Tengu-an Historic Park” to commemorate this origin of Taiwan’s hot-spring industry.↩
18. Beitou Puji Temple — Beitou District Office Historic Site Guide — An official historic-site guide page of the Taipei City Beitou District Office. It records that Puji Temple was first built in 1905 with funds from employees of the Taiwan Government-General Railway Department; during the Japanese period it was called Tesshin-in, with two explanations, either commemorating railway worker casualties or the posthumous title “Tesshin” of Transportation Section head Murakami Shōichi; its main hall uses Taiwanese cypress; and it enshrines the “Greatly Compassionate Beitou Yumori Guanyin Bodhisattva,” carved with Railway Department funding after Hirata Gengo’s petition.↩
19. Xinbeitou Station — Wikipedia — The Wikipedia entry on Xinbeitou Station. It records the full timeline: Xinbeitou passenger halt opened on April 1, 1916; Taiwanese hinoki cypress was its main building material; its 1937 expansion added four round dormer-window openings; the line was abolished on July 15, 1988; and through the mediation of architect Li Chung-yao, the Taipei City Government sold it for a symbolic NT$1 to Shi Jinshan of Changhua’s Taiwan Folk Village.↩
20. Longnice Hot Spring — Garden Treasure — Monument to His Imperial Highness the Crown Prince’s Crossing — An official page of Longnice Hot Spring bathhouse. It records that during the crown prince’s 1923 visit to Beitou, stepping stones, tobiishi, were specially laid to facilitate his creek crossing; in 1934, 11 years later, local people erected the “Monument to His Imperial Highness the Crown Prince’s Crossing” beside Beitou Creek’s Second Waterfall; and the monument is now preserved in the Longnice Hot Spring garden.↩
21. Beitou Museum — Wikipedia — The Wikipedia entry on Beitou Museum. It records that its predecessor, Kazan Hotel, was first built in 1921; it is Taiwan’s only surviving pure wooden two-story Japanese-style building of its kind; near the end of World War II it was requisitioned by the military as a “Japanese officers’ club”; Beitou elders orally recounted kamikaze pilots making merry there in the week before deployment; after the war, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs took it over as Kazan Guest House; and in 1983 Zhang Chunming of San Fu Chemical took it over and turned it into the Taiwan Folk Arts and Antique House, later renamed Beitou Museum.↩
22. Longnice Hot Spring — National Cultural Memory Bank — An official Ministry of Culture National Cultural Memory Bank entry. It records that Longnice Hot Spring was built around 1907, its name came from Beitou Creek’s “Second Waterfall,” it was a recuperation facility for Japanese soldiers during the Japanese period and originally had only a men’s bath, it was sold around 1950 after the war to the original lessee Lin Tianhan and added a women’s bath and private bathing rooms, its baths were built of Qilian stone bonded with sulfur mud, and it underwent its first major renovation in 60 years starting in 2016 before reopening in 2017.↩
23. Introduction to Nakashi Culture — Station: A Century — An exhibition introduction page from “Station: A Century,” a collaboration between Beitou Community College and Beitou local studies. It records that nakashi is a transliteration of the Japanese nagashi; it rose with hot-spring hotels in the 1960s; at its 1970s peak Beitou had more than one hundred hotels and more than one hundred nakashi bands; instruments evolved from early self-accompanied singing to accordion, guitar, and drums, and then to electronic keyboards and electric guitars; and after the 1979 abolition of prostitution, the culture gradually declined, compounded by the rise of karaoke and KTV.↩
24. Beitou Time-Limited Express Delivery — Taipei Hot Springs Association — An official introduction by the Taipei Hot Springs Association. It records the Japanese-period transport needs of female hostesses moving among hot-spring hotels, motorcycles replacing three-wheelers as the mainstream in the 1950s, the more than 1,000 time-limited express delivery motorcycles at the 1970s peak, and the post-1979 expansion of service targets after prostitution was abolished, when firms shifted mainly toward Beitou residents and transformed into ordinary household courier services.↩
25. Beitou’s Former Glory: Interview with Chen Ming-chang and Ho Hong-chi — Central News Agency — An in-depth CNA culture feature interview. It records that Chen Ming-chang was born in Beitou Township on July 4, 1956; personally experienced Beitou’s dense hostess restaurants and nakashi culture in childhood; and collaborated with Greenray Theatre on the 1988 musical Goodbye, Beitou, directed by Wu Nien-jen, music by Chen Ming-chang, lyrics by Chen Ming-yu, performed by Pan Li-li, including the creative background and the opening lyric, “Spring-night rain falls down, cold and frosty...”↩
26. Defending the Right to Survival to the Death — Taipei City’s Abolition of Licensed Prostitution (1997.09-1999.03) — Women in Taiwan — An entry on the National Museum of Taiwan History’s Women in Taiwan history platform. It records the Taipei City Council’s July 30, 1997 abolition of the “Taipei City Regulations for the Management of Prostitutes,” the September 4 establishment of the Taipei Licensed Prostitutes Self-Help Association, and the historical protest by 128 licensed prostitutes during Chen Shui-bian’s mayoralty, a different event from Beitou’s 1979 abolition of prostitution.↩
27. Ketagalan Culture Center — Wikipedia — The Wikipedia entry on the Ketagalan Culture Center. It records that the center opened in November 2002, is located at No. 3-1 Zhongshan Road, Beitou District, Taipei, near MRT Xinbeitou Station and Beitou Park, and is the nation’s first cultural, artistic, educational, and research center centered on Indigenous peoples.↩
28. After 24 Years Adrift, Homecoming Nears: The Return of Xinbeitou Train Station — Taiwan Panorama — An in-depth report by Taiwan Panorama, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of China. It records that the 1996 Beitou Village magazine article “Finding a Lost Family Member: Welcoming Xinbeitou Station Back” ignited local discussion; from 2003-2004, civic groups launched the “Bring Xinbeitou Station Home” campaign; after Taiwan Folk Village’s business deteriorated, the new owner, Jih Rong Company, donated the station free of charge; and on April 1, 2017, the station’s 101st birthday, it was officially reopened to the public after reassembly in Qixing Park.↩
29. With the Wrong Site, Appearance, and Materials, Has Xinbeitou Station Really “Come Home”? — Events in Focus — An in-depth Events in Focus report. It records the controversies over the reassembly of Xinbeitou Station in Qixing Park: the location is not the original site, because the 1916 original is now the MRT plaza; some timber was replaced with new wood because of damage during the Taiwan Folk Village period; added structures differ from the 1916 original appearance; and cultural-heritage professionals are divided between the views that “saving it is already a good thing” and “this is no longer the 1916 station.”↩