Zhongshan North Road Tiaotong: A Road the Japanese Built to Reach a Shrine, Ultimately Taken Back by Japanese Firms

30-second overview: On April 17, 1923, 19-year-old Japanese Crown Prince Hirohito boarded a carriage at Taihoku Station and traveled along a 15-meter-wide road toward Taiwan Shrine at Yuanshan¹. The Japanese named it Chokushi Kaido, the Imperial Envoy Road. Expansion began on 1937-03-30², and at 11 a.m. on 1941-03-28 a completion-reporting rite was held at Taiwan Shrine. The road was 40 meters wide, a five-lane boulevard with camphor trees on the median, maple trees along the sidewalks, mercury-vapor streetlights, buried power lines, and a construction cost of more than 1.62 million yen². At 10 a.m. on October 25, 1945, Ando Rikichi surrendered to Chen Yi at Taipei Public Hall, now Zhongshan Hall³. Chokushi Kaido was renamed “Zhongshan North Road” to commemorate Sun Yat-sen. In 1951, the year after the Korean War began, the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group, or MAAG, entered Taiwan⁴, and the area around Section 3 of Zhongshan North Road became an “American concession.” Qingguang Market was a distribution point for goods from the P.X.⁵. On 1972-09-29, the day the Republic of China severed diplomatic relations with Japan, Japanese trading houses did not withdraw. On 1979-04-28, Rear Admiral James B. Linder, the final commander of the United States Taiwan Defense Command, left Taiwan; the site of the former USTDC Yuanshan headquarters is now the Taipei Fine Arts Museum⁶. In the 1980s, Japanese firms instead moved in on a large scale, with more than 400 Japanese-style bars and izakaya operating at the same time in the alleys of Tiaotong⁷. Walk into Santiaotong at nine tonight: the noren curtains of izakaya lift, and laughter mixed in Japanese and Tâi-gí, the Taiwanese language, spills out. A five-kilometer road was layered in sequence by three foreign empires. The road the Japanese built to reach a shrine was ultimately taken back by Japanese trading houses. What this article argues is this: the Zhongshan North Road lived by Taipei residents is not a “road commemorating the Father of the Nation,” but a material landscape left behind after an island was taken over in turn by three foreign empires.

Santiaotong at Nine at Night

Ask a 50-year-old Taipei resident for the most captivating moment on Zhongshan North Road, and he will not mention the red-tiled roof of the Grand Hotel. He will say: the moment you walk into Santiaotong at nine at night.

From Exit 4 of MRT Zhongshan Station, walk 50 meters north, turn right at Lane 53, Section 1, Zhongshan North Road, and you have entered Santiaotong. The alley is four meters wide. On both sides stand three- to five-story old buildings. The signs on the ground floor place Japanese katakana alongside Chinese characters: “鳥忠,” “ジョリーパスタ,” “龍居酒屋,” “焼鳥みやちか.” Before 5:30 p.m., it is as quiet as an office lane. After seven, the signs light up one by one. By nine, the noren curtain of the second izakaya lifts, and laughter mixed in Japanese and Tâi-gí spills out.

Qitiaotong is the best-known lane in Tiaotong culture: Lane 121, Section 1, Zhongshan North Road plus Lane 119, Linsen North Road⁸. Netflix’s 2021 series Light the Night was filmed in this alley; the entrance of the drama’s “Hikari” hotel was shot at Sugar Bar in Qitiaotong⁹. The scene where Ruby Lin and Tony Yang first meet was shot on location in Lane 133, Linsen North Road.

But the territory of Tiaotong culture is in fact wider. Itiaotong is Civic Boulevard; Ertiaotong is Lane 33, Section 1, Zhongshan North Road; Santiaotong through Jiutiaotong are neatly arranged between Lane 33 and Lane 135 of Section 1, Zhongshan North Road and between Lane 67 and Lane 145 of Linsen North Road; Shitiaotong is Lane 159, Linsen North Road⁸. Ten alleys run parallel northward, modeled on Kyoto’s grid-like machiwari layout: east-west streets are called dori, and north-south ones are called suji¹⁰.

This grid was not born as a bar district. In 1922, when the Japanese marked this area out as the high-end residential district of Taisho-cho, they built detached Japanese-Western hybrid houses for Japanese officials. It was the safest and most respectable residential area in Taipei under Japanese rule¹⁰. A century later, the people living in the same grid have changed, but the alleys have not. The physical frame of Taisho-cho is the material foundation of the Tiaotong bar district.

Curator’s note: General introductions describe Tiaotong as “bars opened when Japanese people came to Taiwan.” That narrative misses a crucial sequence. When the Japanese planned a high-end residential district here in 1922, there were no bars. After the Japanese withdrew in 1945, the Nationalist government took over Japanese-style dormitories and turned them into civil-servant housing; at this point it was still a residential district. The Korean War broke out in 1950, and U.S. forces arrived in 1951. It was the U.S. military that opened bars in these alleys: not Japanese izakaya, but American Bar-style venues for U.S. servicemen. Japan and Taiwan severed diplomatic relations in 1972; U.S. forces left in 1979; Japanese corporate personnel came to Taiwan during Japan’s 1980s bubble economy. Tiaotong’s “Japanese-style bars” were in fact the Japanese second occupation of this street, this time by trading-house employees rather than colonial officials. The grid and orientation were the same, but between them lay 35 years of U.S. military presence. The noren curtains you see and the Japanese you hear when you walk in at nine today are the result of a three-stage relay: high-end Japanese-rule residences, postwar U.S. military bars, and Japanese-firm izakaya after the 1980s.

A Road Whose Name Changed Three Times

To understand Zhongshan North Road, first you need to know its names.

Under Qing rule, this land was not inside Taipei City. The walled Taipei Prefectural City, completed in 1884, enclosed 1.4 square kilometers. Outside the East Gate, Jingfu Gate, lay rice fields, graves, and scattered settlements. The southern end of today’s Section 1, Zhongshan North Road, near the Executive Yuan, was later called Kabayama-cho, a name the Japanese gave it during the 1922 town-name reform to commemorate Kabayama Sukenori, the first Japanese governor-general of Taiwan¹¹.

Beginning in 1898, the Japanese started reshaping the land north of Kabayama-cho and built a north-south road to Yuanshan. What was at Yuanshan? In October 1901, Taiwan Shrine was completed at the foot of Jiantan Mountain in Yuanshan¹². The shrine’s principal deity was Prince Kitashirakawa Yoshihisa, a Japanese royal who led the Imperial Guard Division in the conquest of Taiwan in 1895 and died of illness in Tainan that October¹². The Japanese enshrined this “royal who died conquering Taiwan” as Taiwan’s so-chinju, or general tutelary deity. The shrine’s official rank was kanpei taisha, the highest level of shrine in Taiwan under Japanese rule¹².

The Japanese had a specific name for the five-kilometer road from Taihoku Station, today’s Taipei Main Station, to Taiwan Shrine: Chokushi Kaido. Chokushi in Japanese means “an envoy dispatched by the emperor.” On April 16, 1923, 19-year-old Japanese Crown Prince Hirohito, later Emperor Showa, boarded a carriage at Taihoku Station and traveled along Chokushi Kaido to worship at Taiwan Shrine¹. He was accompanied by members of the imperial family including Prince Kitashirakawa Naruhisa and Prince Fushimi Hiroyasu¹.

On April 17, 1923, Crown Prince Hirohito visited Taiwan Shrine. Photo: National Taiwan Museum collection. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Hirohito’s visit that year was directly related to the later form of Chokushi Kaido. Beginning in 1936, the Japanese started planning an expansion of the road because 1940 marked the 2600th anniversary of Japan’s imperial calendar, and Taiwan Shrine was also to be expanded for the occasion. As the worship road, Chokushi Kaido had to be upgraded along with it². Expansion work began on 1937-03-30. At 11 a.m. on 1941-03-28, a completion-reporting rite was held at Taiwan Shrine. The road was widened from 15 meters to 40 meters; it became a five-lane boulevard; the central express lanes and the slow lanes on both sides were paved with asphalt; trees were planted along the entire route; the green medians between fast and slow lanes were planted with camphor trees; the inner sides of the sidewalks had maples; mercury-vapor streetlights lined the road; power lines were buried. The project cost more than 1.62 million yen. In an era of tightened supplies in the middle and later phases of the war, that budget shows the weight this road carried in the empire’s narrative².

Curator’s note: The completion-reporting rite on March 28, 1941, was the final large public-works ceremony in Japanese-ruled Taiwan. That December came Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of the Pacific War; the Taiwan Governor-General’s construction budget was quickly swallowed by war. Chokushi Kaido was completed at the last moment: 40 meters wide, with camphor trees, maples, and underground power lines. Then the Japanese left. Today, walking along Sections 1 to 3 of Zhongshan North Road, the street trees on the medians have been replaced several times, but the 40-meter road width planned in 1941 has never changed. The empire collapsed while a road was being expanded, but the road itself remained. Some of the trees planted in 1941 survived into the 1970s before being replaced. Like it or not, the Japanese ceremonial space is a material legacy left in the city.

Chokushi Kaido and Meiji Bridge between 1901 and 1945. Photo: Unknown, hand-painted postcard from the Japanese-rule period. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

At 10 a.m. on 1945-10-25, three months after the end of World War II, Ando Rikichi, in his dual capacity as commander of the Japanese Army’s 10th Area Army and governor-general of Taiwan, surrendered to Republic of China representative Chen Yi at Taipei Public Hall, now Zhongshan Hall³. On the day the surrender ceremony ended, the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office ceased to exist.

Chokushi Kaido ended with it. After the Nationalist government took over, it renamed the road “Zhongshan North Road” to commemorate Sun Yat-sen, the Father of the Nation¹¹, and renamed Meiji Bridge “Zhongshan Bridge”¹³. The ceremonial road the Japanese built for the imperial family became, after the war, a road commemorating the Father of the Nation. The name changed, but the road was still the same road.

The Machine-Gun Fire of 1947

Less than 16 months after Zhongshan North Road was renamed, something happened on this road that changed the fate of postwar Taiwan.

On the evening of 1947-02-27, agents from the Taiwan Provincial Monopoly Bureau seized cigarette vendor Lin Chiang-mai in front of Tianma Tea House in Dadaocheng. During the incident, they struck Lin Chiang-mai with a rifle butt, provoking anger among onlookers. Amid the chaos, agent Fu Hsueh-tung fired his gun and accidentally killed bystander Chen Wen-hsi¹⁴. The next morning, 1947-02-28, people began gathering.

At around 1 p.m., roughly 400 to 500 people set out from Taipei Station, walking along Chongqing South Road toward the Taiwan Provincial Administrative Executive Office, today’s Executive Yuan. The route was Chengde Road, Nanjing West Road, Dihua Street, Minsheng West Road, Yanping North Road, Beimen, Zhongxiao West Road, Chongqing South Road, Zhongshan South Road, and then the Administrative Executive Office¹⁵. When the procession reached the Zhongshan Road intersection, before it had arrived at the square in front of the office, guards raised rifles to stop its advance. Guards on the second floor of the Administrative Executive Office then fired machine guns to disperse the crowd, killing at least two people on the spot and injuring several others¹⁵.

The site of that machine-gun fire, the Zhongshan Road intersection, is today the intersection of Zhongshan South Road and Zhongxiao West Road, just one block south of Section 1, Zhongshan North Road. That same afternoon, Huang Chao-chin, speaker of the Taipei City Council, convened an emergency meeting at Zhongshan Hall, formerly Taipei Public Hall. The next day, 1947-03-01, the “Investigation Committee for the Cigarette-Suppression Bloodshed Incident” was formed at Zhongshan Hall; it was later renamed the “Settlement Committee for the February 28 Incident”¹⁶.

Curator’s note: Conventional narratives of the February 28 Incident focus on Tianma Tea House in Dadaocheng, where the first shot was fired, and the Administrative Executive Office, where the machine-gun fire took place. But Zhongshan Hall’s role is often overlooked. Taipei Public Hall was completed in 1936. On 1945-10-25, Japan’s surrender ceremony was held here; on 1947-02-28, another meeting was held here that would determine the direction of postwar Taiwan for the next 38 years. From peace to war, from surrender to repression, this building witnessed two extreme historical moments within one year and four months. Today, the square in front of Zhongshan Hall is as quiet as a tourist site. But the ground underfoot is the physical scene of two postwar watersheds in Taiwan. The starting point of Zhongshan North Road, the Zhongshan South-North Road junction in front of the Executive Yuan, is only 800 meters from Zhongshan Hall and only 1.5 kilometers from Tianma Tea House. The small triangle formed by these three sites is the physical epicenter of Taiwan’s postwar tragedy.

The U.S. Forces of 1951

On December 7, 1949, the Nationalist government announced its relocation to Taiwan. Chiang Kai-shek arrived in Taipei by plane at 8:30 p.m. on December 10¹⁷. From that year onward, Zhongshan North Road became one of the most important axes of the Republic of China capital: to the north, it connected to the military zone around Yuanshan; to the south, it connected to the Executive Yuan, the Presidential Office, and the five branches of government.

But Zhongshan North Road’s next transformation came from a war.

On 1950-06-25, the Korean War broke out. U.S. President Harry Truman immediately sent the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait and resumed military aid to the Republic of China. In 1951, the Military Assistance Advisory Group, MAAG, formally entered Taiwan¹⁸.

Where was MAAG headquartered? On Section 3 of Zhongshan North Road, near Yuanshan¹⁸. The specific site is today’s Zhongshan Fine Arts Park, several hectares of land between Minzu East Road and Zhongshan North Road¹⁸. After the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty took effect on 1955-04-26, the United States Taiwan Defense Command, USTDC, was established; from 1955-11-01, it was based at Yuanshan in Taipei, with headquarters on the present site of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum⁶.

At its peak, MAAG had 2,347 officers and enlisted personnel¹⁸. Throughout the 1950s to 1970s, the area around Section 3 of Zhongshan North Road concentrated two major U.S. military headquarters, USTDC and MAAG, plus the U.S. embassy in Taiwan, housed from 1953 in a Victorian-style residence at No. 18, Section 2, Zhongshan North Road¹⁹, and the Tianmu U.S. military housing complex for MAAG dependents, built from 1953 around Lane 181, Section 7, Zhongshan North Road²⁰.

Former U.S. ambassador’s residence, today’s SPOT-Taipei, No. 18, Section 2, Zhongshan North Road, 2025. Photo: Outlookxp. CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Over the five kilometers from Section 1 to Section 3 of Zhongshan North Road stood, in sequence, the United States’ diplomatic, military, and residential strongholds. Only six years after the street had changed from Chokushi Kaido to Zhongshan North Road, it became an “American concession.”

Qingguang Market emerged in this context. In 1951, near the intersection of Zhongshan North Road and Shuangcheng Street, the market was originally to be called “Zhenguang Market,” but because Zhenguang sounded in Tâi-gí like “absurd,” the name was changed to “Qingguang,” meaning “intelligent”²¹. The key to the market’s formation was the U.S. military P.X., or Post Exchange. Imported goods flowing out from U.S. servicemen and dependents, including jewelry, clothing, gifts, and department-store items, were all resold at stalls in Qingguang²¹. In the 1950s and 1960s, Qingguang was the place in Taipei where one could most quickly touch the material life of “America.”

During the August 7 Flood of 1959, from 1959-08-07 to 09, USTDC mobilized three U.S. Navy helicopters to assist in disaster relief. Washington later dispatched the helicopter carrier USS Thetis Bay to Taiwan with 21 Sikorsky H-34 helicopters; the mission was code-named Operation Hunger²². U.S. aid poured heavily into Taiwan during post-disaster reconstruction.

On 1963-08-26, the Taipei U.S. Armed Forces Club was established on Section 3 of Zhongshan North Road. From 1965 to 1972, during the Vietnam War, it hosted hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops stationed in Vietnam for R&R, or rest and recuperation²³. At the peak of the Vietnam War, thousands of U.S. servicemen flew from Vietnam to Taipei every week and spent money around Section 3 of Zhongshan North Road and the Qingguang Commercial District. American Bars, imported-goods shops, hostess bars: this consumption ecosystem originated in the material legacy of U.S. military spending, not in the later 1980s prototype of Tiaotong culture.

Curator’s note: The common account attributes Tiaotong’s “bar culture” to the Japanese-rule tradition of geisha drinking companionship. That reverses the sequence. In the 1920s, Taisho-cho was a high-end residential district, with no bars. From 1945 to 1950, after the Nationalist government took it over, it became civil-servant housing, still without bars. Bars only grew in the Tiaotong alleys after U.S. forces arrived in 1951. The earliest were American Bar-style venues: cowboys, jazz, martinis, dancers, and dancing. After Taiwan and Japan severed diplomatic relations in 1972 and U.S. forces withdrew in 1979, Japanese firms took over the same storefronts in the 1980s, turning American Bars into Japanese izakaya-style venues and replacing dancing with mamasan hostess service. But the material landscape was inherited from the U.S. military era, not from the Japanese-rule period. Tiaotong’s “Japanese style” flowed back only after 1980; it was not left over from the 1920s.

Japan Did Not Leave in 1972

On the morning of 1972-09-29, in the East Hall of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka and Foreign Minister Masayoshi Ohira signed the Japan-PRC Joint Communique with PRC Premier Zhou Enlai and Foreign Minister Ji Pengfei, announcing the establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and the People’s Republic of China²⁴.

That same day, the Republic of China government, invoking the principle that “the Han and the traitors cannot coexist,” announced the severing of diplomatic relations with Japan²⁴. The Japanese embassy in Taipei was quickly reorganized as the Taipei office of the Interchange Association, a nongovernmental counterpart institution.

But Japanese businesspeople did not leave.

The 1970s were a period of rapid growth in Japan following the Jimmu Boom and Iwato Boom, amid the “Remodeling the Japanese Archipelago” era. Companies in Tokyo and Osaka established overseas branches in large numbers, and Taipei was one of the key destinations for Japanese expatriates⁷. The 1972 diplomatic break not only failed to drive Japanese firms out; because of the political vacuum after the break, private commercial activity required denser unofficial nodes. Where did Japanese corporate personnel choose to live after coming to Taiwan? Quite naturally, they chose the grid where Japanese residents had lived in the Taisho-cho period: east of Zhongshan North Road and along both sides of Linsen North Road, in the Tiaotong alleys.

Seen as a “relay” between the U.S. military and Japanese firms, the eight-year transition from the 1972 Taiwan-Japan diplomatic break to the 1979 U.S. military withdrawal to the post-1980 arrival of Japanese firms completely rewrote the consumption pattern of the same street. On 1979-04-26, the United States Taiwan Defense Command held its final flag-lowering ceremony at its Yuanshan headquarters⁶. On 1979-04-28, Rear Admiral James B. Linder, the final USTDC commander, left Taiwan⁶. On 1979-05-03, the last U.S. serviceman left Taiwan¹⁸.

Qingguang Market felt the impact immediately. “After the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group and Defense Command withdrew in 1979, Qingguang Market, which had enjoyed 30 years of prosperity, gradually declined and lost its former bustle”²¹. But the Tiaotong alleys on the same street did not decline. In the year U.S. forces left, Japanese firms had already begun taking over.

During Japan’s bubble economy of the 1980s, the number of Japanese corporate personnel in Taiwan surged. Japanese-style bars, izakaya, Japanese restaurants, and karaoke venues opened in large numbers around Linsen North Road; “at the height of the boom, as many as more than 400 businesses operated here at the same time”⁷. In 1989-03, the first Partyworld KTV opened on Linsen North Road, expanding to five branches by the end of that year²⁵. Linsen North Road in the late 1980s and early 1990s was one of the birthplaces of Taiwan’s KTV industry.

The term “Tiaotong” itself, from Japanese jo for lane and dori for street, also became fixed in this period. Before the 1980s, Taipei residents referred to this area as “Linsen North Road” or “the alleys inside Section 1 of Zhongshan North Road.” Only after the 1980s did Japanese-style numbering such as Qitiaotong, Batiaotong, and Jiutiaotong come into common use.

Curator’s note: On the day the Japan-PRC Joint Communique was signed, 1972-09-29, Japan’s embassy withdrew from Taipei, but most employees of Japanese trading houses did not leave. Why? Because Japan’s 1970s economic momentum came from exports: semiconductors, automobiles, and electrical appliances needed overseas markets, and Taiwan was the closest option geographically and culturally. After the diplomatic break, the two sides gave up formal diplomatic parity in exchange for continued room for free movement at the economic level. The same logic applies to the 1979 severing of Taiwan-U.S. diplomatic relations: U.S. military personnel left, but the Taiwan Relations Act passed that same year, and the unofficial U.S.-Taiwan relationship has continued through the American Institute in Taiwan to the present. Taipei was the material testing ground of the 1970s and 1980s diplomatic model of “breaking relations but continuing exchanges.” The two plots on Section 3 of Zhongshan North Road, USTDC and MAAG, became a fine arts museum and fine arts park: military land was downgraded into cultural land. But Japanese firms continued coming into the Tiaotong alleys. At street level, that transition is hard to see.

The Denaming of 1996

Before 1996, the road in front of the Presidential Office was called Chiehshou Road, a name changed in 1946 to celebrate Chiang Kai-shek’s 60th birthday²⁶. The same road connected northward to Section 1 of Zhongshan North Road, then to Sections 2 and 3, all the way to Yuanshan. The six-kilometer north-south axis from Chiehshou Road to Zhongshan North Road was the most concentrated material landscape of political power in Taiwan.

On 1996-03-21, Chen Shui-bian, one year into his term as Taipei mayor, announced that “Chiehshou Road” would be renamed Ketagalan Boulevard²⁶. The reason was clear: Chiehshou Road commemorated an individual leader, while Ketagalan Boulevard commemorated the Indigenous people of the Taipei Basin²⁶.

This renaming created a symmetrical structure in the history of Zhongshan North Road. In 1923, Crown Prince Hirohito boarded a carriage at Taihoku Station and traveled along Chokushi Kaido, the highest ceremonial space of the Japanese empire. In 1996, Chen Shui-bian named the southern end of this road for an Indigenous people, a reverse gesture by democratizing Taiwan toward colonial history. Seventy-three years earlier, the Japanese emperor was worshipped from the end of this road; seventy-three years later, the other end of the road was named for the Indigenous people who were here before the Japanese arrived.

Section 3 of Zhongshan North Road, viewed northward from the Taipei Expo Park pedestrian overpass, April 25, 2011. Photo: 玄史生. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

1996 was also the key year when buildings at both ends of Zhongshan North Road began major transformations. In 1995, the former U.S. ambassador’s residence was slated for demolition; on 1997-02-20, the Ministry of the Interior designated it a municipal historic site¹⁹. On 2002-11-10, after restoration, the former U.S. embassy residence became SPOT-Taipei, operated by the Taiwan Film and Culture Association led by Hou Hsiao-hsien, with restoration of the physical structure sponsored by the TSMC Education and Culture Foundation²⁷. The Victorian-style residence that had sat idle for 18 years after Taiwan and the United States severed diplomatic relations became a home for Taiwan’s film culture.

On 2002-12-20, Zhongshan Bridge, formerly Meiji Bridge, was demolished, cut into 435 pieces, and stored on the former site of Zaichun Swimming Pool¹³. Completed in 1933, the reinforced-concrete arch bridge had once been selected as one of the “Eight Views of Taiwan”¹³. After surviving 69 years, it was demolished during Ma Ying-jeou’s mayoralty on the grounds that it obstructed flood discharge in the Keelung River. On the axis from Chokushi Kaido to Zhongshan North Road, the last physical link from the Japanese-rule period had been cut apart.

View near Meiji Bridge, Japanese-rule period. Photo: Li Huo-tseng. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Three Places, Three Imperial Traces

After telling the story of Zhongshan North Road and Tiaotong culture, locals will not take you to photograph the Grand Hotel, nor to eat at Din Tai Fung. Locals will take you to see three places, each corresponding to the trace of an empire.

SPOT-Taipei (No. 18, Section 2, Zhongshan North Road). Built in 1926, this white Southern Victorian-style residence became the U.S. consulate general in Taipei in 1949 and the U.S. ambassador’s residence in 1953. After the 1979 diplomatic break it sat idle for 18 years, was listed as a municipal historic site in 1997, and became SPOT-Taipei Film House in 2002¹⁹²⁷. Today SPOT-Taipei screens four to six art films a day and has the Woolloomooloo Cafe and Bistro on the first floor. Sitting on the second-floor balcony, you see the constant traffic of Section 2, Zhongshan North Road before you; under your feet is the floor on which U.S. ambassadors in the Republic of China ate breakfast from 1953 to 1979. The conversion from an American political node into a Taiwanese film-cultural node is more concrete than any written description.

The Grand Hotel (No. 1, Section 4, Zhongshan North Road, Yuanshan). From 1901 to 1944, this site was Taiwan Shrine, later elevated to Taiwan Grand Shrine. After a Japanese aircraft, according to legend one of Japan’s own planes, crashed into it in 1944, it was dismantled²⁸. On 1952-05-10, the Taiwan Friendship Association led by Soong Mei-ling took over the former Taiwan Shrine site and rebuilt it as the Taiwan Hotel, later renamed the Grand Hotel²⁸. The hotel’s foundation was fully completed in 1963, and in 1973 the 14-story red-tiled Chinese palace-style building designed by Yang Cho-cheng was completed. From then on, the Grand Hotel became one of Taipei’s most iconic buildings. From the Japanese empire’s highest sacred site to the Republic of China’s ceremonial national gateway, the same plot of land moved from worship to hotel, but its political meaning of “highest rank” never disappeared.

The Grand Hotel, March 11, 2012. Photo: lienyuan lee. CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Taipei Fine Arts Museum (No. 181, Section 3, Zhongshan North Road). Beginning on 1955-11-01, this site served for nearly 30 years as the Yuanshan headquarters of the United States Taiwan Defense Command. From 1955 to 1979, it was the U.S. military’s Taiwan command in the Pacific theater. It was from an office here that Rear Admiral Linder issued the order for the final flag-lowering ceremony on 1979-04-26⁶. After U.S. forces withdrew in 1979, the land sat idle for several years. On 1983-12-24, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum formally opened on the former USTDC site. A U.S. military command became Taiwan’s first public museum of modern art. No transformation more cleanly explains the direction of Taiwanese society after 1979: from military periphery to cultural subject.

After visiting these three places, you understand the true texture of Zhongshan North Road. Beneath the red tiles of the Grand Hotel is the foundation of Taiwan Shrine from 1901 to 1944. The white wooden shutters of SPOT-Taipei belonged to an American diplomatic office from 1926 to 1979. Beneath the fair-faced concrete and brick walls of Taipei Fine Arts Museum was the base of the U.S. military command from 1955 to 1979. Along a five-kilometer road, three places correspond to the material traces of three foreign empires. Each place was “rebuilt after the previous empire left.”

Curator’s note: These three places share one feature: they are now all cultural spaces, a hotel, a film house, and a fine arts museum. Before 1979, the political symbols on this street were extremely dense: shrine, embassy, military command. But in the 40 years after 1979, all of these political nodes were transformed into cultural nodes. This is not a coincidence. After the 1979 severing of Taiwan-U.S. diplomatic relations, Taiwan faced the predicament of having no formal diplomatic relations and no membership in major international organizations. Cultural subjectivity, through film, art, literature, and design, became one of the island’s only channels for speaking to the world. Taipei Fine Arts Museum opened in 1983; SPOT-Taipei opened in 2002. Both were material practices in that direction. Zhongshan North Road changed from a “ceremonial road,” a “diplomatic road,” and a “military road” into a “cultural road,” reflecting Taiwan’s broader postwar trajectory of losing diplomacy while building culture.

The Same Road, the Same Grid, Different Guests

At nine at night, we return beneath the noren curtains of Santiaotong.

On April 17, 1923, 19-year-old Crown Prince Hirohito set out by carriage from Taihoku Station. Along both sides of the road stood Taiwanese islanders and Japanese mainlanders in kimono, bowing toward the crown prince in the carriage. The crown prince did not know that 22 years later this road would be renamed “Zhongshan North Road,” much less that 88 years later the same road would be filled with Japanese corporate employees in suits entering izakaya.

At 1:30 p.m. on February 28, 1947, more than 400 Taipei residents walked south from the Zhongshan Road intersection. They did not reach the square in front of the Administrative Executive Office, because machine-gun fire scattered the procession. Several people died; no one clearly remembered the number that day. Three weeks later, Kaohsiung Fortress commander Peng Meng-chi ordered a crackdown, and the entire island began entering martial law. The walk from the entrance of Zhongshan Hall to the Zhongshan North Road intersection is only 800 meters.

On November 1, 1955, the United States Taiwan Defense Command formally raised its sign at its Yuanshan headquarters. The 2,347 officers and enlisted personnel of MAAG and USTDC, plus large numbers of dependents, moved into the area around Section 3 of Zhongshan North Road and the Tianmu U.S. military housing complex. Qingguang Market rose with them, as imported goods flowed from the P.X. into the hands of Taiwanese consumers. Section 3 of Zhongshan North Road became an “American concession” overnight.

On April 26, 1979, Rear Admiral Linder lowered the Stars and Stripes at Yuanshan. Later that day he wrote to the Pentagon reporting on the withdrawal plan. The coffee mug on his desk bore the U.S. Navy emblem. That cup of coffee had been brewed from beans brought by U.S. aid.

In March 1989, the first Partyworld KTV opened on Linsen North Road. In September that same year, Taiwan further liberalized karaoke. Japanese song lists such as “Kimi ga Iru Dake de” and “Tadaima” appeared in the songbooks alongside Lo Ta-yu’s “Lukang, the Small Town” and Wu Bai’s “Last Dance.” Japanese corporate employees and Taiwanese young people ordered the same songs in the same private rooms.

On the evening of November 26, 2021, Part 1 of Netflix’s Light the Night premiered. Ruby Lin’s character Lo Yu-nung walked into the “Hikari” hotel in Qitiaotong, with the Tiaotong of 1988 as the backdrop. After the series aired, every Saturday night the Tiaotong alleys were packed with young people trying to take check-in photos. They did not know that the ground under their feet was a layering of Taisho-cho in 1922, the U.S. military concession in 1951, and the birthplace of Partyworld KTV in 1989.

At 9:30 p.m. on some Friday in 2026, deep inside Santiaotong, a 50-year-old Japanese corporate employee walks out through the wooden door of Torichu, lights a cigarette, glances at the signs in Chinese characters and kana, and walks toward MRT Zhongshan Station. His company is in Neihu Technology Park, but every Friday night he takes a taxi to Tiaotong for two drinks, because the Torichu here tastes exactly like Torichu in Tokyo’s Shimbashi. The sake he just drank was from Niigata, but the cup was fired by a Taiwanese ceramic artist. He has been in Taipei for eight years, but the noren curtains in this alley have been here since the 1980s, when Japanese corporate employees of his father’s generation came to Taipei.

✦ The name “Chokushi Kaido” has never completely disappeared. It was renamed “Zhongshan North Road” in 1945, and its southern end was renamed “Ketagalan Boulevard” in 1996. But the 40-meter width on both sides of the road, the positions of the camphor and maple trees, and the grid orientation of the Tiaotong alleys were all fixed by the 1937-1941 expansion project. A road’s name can change three times, but the material structure of a road is never updated so easily.

The core contradiction of Zhongshan North Road is this: the ceremonial road to a shrine that the Japanese began building in 1898, that Crown Prince Hirohito traveled in 1923, and that was expanded into a 40-meter, five-lane road from 1937 to 1941 was renamed after the war to commemorate the Republic of China’s Father of the Nation, became a U.S. military concession in the 1950s, and after U.S. forces left in 1979, the people who ultimately took over the street were again Japanese. Only this time they were not imperial envoys from the emperor, but employees sent to Taipei by Sony, Panasonic, and Itochu.

What others see in Zhongshan North Road is the central axis between the Grand Hotel and the Presidential Office. The Zhongshan North Road lived by Taipei residents is an axis of three overlays: the form of Chokushi Kaido in 1923, the bar locations of the 1951-1979 U.S. military concession, and the Tiaotong noren curtains taken over by Japanese firms after the 1980s. Three foreign empires were layered onto it in sequence. Each time an empire changed, the name changed. But the same five-kilometer road has always remained the same five-kilometer road.

Next time you walk past SPOT-Taipei on Section 2 of Zhongshan North Road, stop for 30 seconds. Looking north from SPOT-Taipei, you see the U.S. embassy residence vacated in 1979. Another 1.5 kilometers north is Zhongshan Fine Arts Park, the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group site vacated in 1979. Another 500 meters north is the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the United States Taiwan Defense Command site vacated in 1979. The three sites form a single line, all along Zhongshan North Road. Another kilometer north is the Grand Hotel, the foundation of Taiwan Shrine dismantled in 1944. Japan left 81 years ago, and the United States left 47 years ago, but at nine tonight on this street, Japanese corporate employees are still laughing in mixed speech with Taipei residents.

Further Reading:

• Taipei City: Three Times Within One City, 1738 Longshan Temple Watching 2004’s Taipei 101 — Zhongshan North Road’s position within Taipei’s 12 districts, placed alongside the three timelines of Bangka, Dadaocheng, and Xinyi
• Dadaocheng: One 800-Meter Street That Holds Three Centuries — a sibling historic district in the same batch, a townscape that rose with the tea trade in 1860; the first shot of the February 28 Incident occurred at No. 189, Nanjing West Road in Dadaocheng
• Bangka: The Busiest Place in Qing-ruled Taipei, Now Taipei’s Oldest District by Average Age — a sibling historic district in the same batch; its mode of street formation differs from Tiaotong culture’s Japanese-rule planning
• Ximending: The Entertainment District the Japanese Built in 1896, Still Taipei’s Youngest Street 130 Years Later — a sibling historic district in the same batch; like Tiaotong, it was an entertainment district planned outside the city under Japanese rule, but it took a completely different subcultural route
• Taiwanese Tea Ceremony and Life Aesthetics — the mutual influence between Japanese-style aesthetics in Tiaotong culture and the postwar revival of Taiwanese tea ceremony
• The February 28 Incident — at 1 p.m. on February 28, 1947, a crowd marching to the Zhongshan Road intersection was fired on by guards with machine guns; Zhongshan Hall convened an emergency meeting the same day and became the base of the incident settlement committee
• Beitou Hot Springs Street — Beitou’s 1979 abolition of licensed prostitution versus Taipei’s citywide abolition in 1997; together with Linsen North Road’s Tiaotong culture, these form two branches of Taipei’s postwar special-entertainment landscape

Image Sources

This article uses six public-domain or CC-licensed images, all cached in public/article-images/geography/ to avoid hotlinking source servers:

• Section 3 Zhongshan North Road Birdview from Overpass — Photo: 玄史生, 2011-04-25, CC BY-SA 3.0
• 1923 Japanese Crown Prince Hirohito Visiting Taiwan Shrine — Photo: National Taiwan Museum collection / Unknown author, 1923-04-17, Public domain
• View of main road to Taiwan Grand Shrine — Photo: Unknown, hand-painted postcard from the Japanese-rule period, 1901-1945, Public domain
• View near the Taihoku Meiji Bridge — Photo: Li Huo-tseng, 1895-1945, Public domain
• Former U.S. Ambassador’s Residence, Zhongshan North Road Side — Photo: Outlookxp, 2025-08-02, CC BY 4.0
• Taipei Grand Hotel 台北圓山飯店 - panoramio — Photo: lienyuan lee, 2012-03-11, CC BY 3.0

References