Zhongshan North Road Tiaotong: The Road the Japanese Paved to Their Shrine, Now the Street with Taiwan’s Densest Concentration of Japanese Companies

30-second overview: In October 1901, the Japanese opened a 14.5-meter-wide, 3-kilometer-long chokushi kaido, or imperial envoy road, from Taipei Station to Jiantan Mountain so the envoy receiving the enshrined deities could walk to the newly built Taiwan Shrine¹. On April 12, 1923, Crown Prince Hirohito walked this road². Widening began on March 30, 1937, and was completed on March 28, 1941, expanding it to a 40-meter, five-lane road at a cost of 1.62 million yen, with camphor trees planted on the median, sweetgum trees along the sidewalks, mercury streetlights, and automatic traffic signals. The Japanese called it one of “Japan’s three great roads” alongside Tokyo’s Showa-dori and Osaka’s Midosuji³. On October 23, 1944, Taiwan Shrine was destroyed in an air crash and fire⁴. After the war, the KMT demolished the shrine, rebuilt it in 1949 as the Taiwan Grand Hotel, and renamed the road Zhongshan North Road in 1947 in memory of Sun Yat-sen⁵. In 1951, the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group moved into the Yuanshan compound, and Qingguang Market took in imported goods leaking out of the U.S. military PX⁶. On September 29, 1972, Japan and the Republic of China severed diplomatic relations; on December 26, the Taipei Office of the Interchange Association was established⁷. Japanese companies reorganized their Taiwan bases, while the western-side “tiaotong” lanes, the former Taisho-cho alleys from First to Ninth Tiaotong, named in 1922, filled with Japanese-style hostess bars; at their 1995 peak there were five to six hundred of them⁸. In 1997, during Chen Shui-bian’s mayoralty, Taipei abolished licensed prostitution, and the tiaotong bars, operating in a legal gray zone, transformed and redefined themselves as selling “ambiguity”⁹. Across 125 years, three layers of noren curtains on the same road, imperial envoys, the U.S. military, and Japanese companies, have written over one another, but none has disappeared.

Sixth Tiaotong at Nine at Night

If you ask a Japanese corporate employee in Taipei where he wants to go for a drink after work, he will not say Xinyi District, and he will not say the East District. He will say “tiaotong.”

At nine at night, leave MRT Zhongshan Station Exit 2 and walk north. Cross the straight stretch of Chang’an East Road in front of SOGO Fuxing, turn left at the second intersection into Lane 105, Section 1, Zhongshan North Road, and you are in the Japanese colonial-era “Sixth Tiaotong”¹⁰. The lane is narrow, lined on both sides with old two- and three-story buildings. Most signs are in Japanese: “Bunta,” “yakitori,” “izakaya,” “BAR.” The sign of a small shop called Bunta is almost tucked beneath the second floor; without someone leading the way, you would walk past it. Its owner, Hoshi Kazuhiro, who opened the shop in 1999, is from Niigata, Japan. The name “Bunta” comes from the names of his Japanese mother and Taiwanese son¹¹.

📝 Curator’s note: Sixth Tiaotong is simply the short lane running through Lane 105, Section 1, Zhongshan North Road and Lane 107, Linsen North Road, less than 200 meters in total. During the Japanese period it was “Sixth Tiaotong” in Taisho-cho. After the war the lane name disappeared, but the lane remained. After the drama Light the Night aired in 2021, the fictional “Hikari” hostess bar in the series was identified as Sixth Tiaotong, pushing this street, which Taipei locals had not especially wanted to explain to outsiders, onto tourists’ Google Maps¹².

Walk to the end of the lane and the sign for Longdu Restaurant is still lit. In the narrow alley beside it, leading toward Lane 107, Linsen North Road, Bunta’s noren curtain lifts, and what flows out is Japanese, Taiwanese, and laughter in between. Most of the customers inside are Japanese office workers still in their suits: some are expatriate staff from the Taiwan branches of Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and Itochu, while others are local Taiwanese employees of Japanese companies. In this lane, they reproduce the Tokyo and Osaka ritual of “one drink at an izakaya” after work. In Taipei, there is nowhere else where this can be done without tourists interrupting.

The question is: why did Japanese people concentrate in this lane?

The answer goes back 125 years. The street where this lane sits was originally paved from scratch by the Japanese so they could worship their own gods.

The Road the Imperial Envoy Came On: 1901 to 1941

On October 27, 1901, the enshrinement ceremony for Taiwan Shrine was held at the foot of Jiantan Mountain. The principal deity was Prince Kitashirakawa Yoshihisa, who died of illness in Tainan during the 1895 campaign against Taiwan, accompanied by the three pioneer deities: Okunitama-no-Mikoto, Onamuchi-no-Mikoto, and Sukunahikona-no-Mikoto¹³. To allow the imperial envoy who had accompanied the deities from Japan to proceed smoothly from Taipei Station to the shrine at the mountain’s foot, the Japanese specifically built a road more than 3 kilometers long and 14.5 meters wide, naming it “Chokushi Kaido,” or “imperial envoy road,” also known as “Onari Kaido”¹⁴.

Chokushi Kaido in 1932. A purpose-built road constructed by the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office for imperial envoys visiting Taiwan Shrine. Photo: public domain, prewar publication. License via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

Completed in the same year as Chokushi Kaido was Meiji Bridge, which crossed the Keelung River. The first-generation bridge was an iron Parker truss bridge designed by Tokawa Yoshitaro, a civil engineer in the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office¹⁵. An imperial envoy departing from Taipei Station could proceed north along today’s Zhongshan North Road, cross Meiji Bridge, renamed Zhongshan Bridge after the war and demolished in 2002, and arrive at the shrine.

💡 Did you know? The “chokushi” in Chokushi Kaido means “an envoy acting by order of the emperor,” and “kaido” in Japanese means a main road. The road was originally for imperial family members and envoys representing the imperial family; ordinary people could not simply use it. Its scale, 14.5 meters wide, was an overwhelming luxury in Taipei in 1901, when even Hengyang Road, the busiest street inside the old city, was only 6 to 8 meters wide. From the beginning, the Japanese designed this road as “the road on which the emperor comes,” not as a road for citizens.

On April 12, 1923, Crown Prince Hirohito, later the Showa emperor, visited Taiwan and formally walked along Chokushi Kaido. To commemorate this imperial visit, a section was carved out of the high-end residential district west of Chokushi Kaido, originally called “Taisho-cho,” and renamed “Onari-cho,” meaning “the town the crown prince visited”¹⁶.

The more drastic transformation came in 1937. The Japanese began widening Chokushi Kaido: a groundbreaking ceremony was held on March 30, 1937, and a completion report ceremony was held at Taiwan Shrine on March 28, 1941. Over four full years, the 14.5-meter-wide two-lane road was expanded into a 40-meter-wide, five-lane road at a cost of 1.62 million yen¹⁷.

What did the new Chokushi Kaido have? According to contemporary newspaper accounts cited by cultural historian Zhuang Yongming, the central fast lanes and slow lanes on both sides were fully paved with asphalt; trees were planted along the whole route; camphor trees were planted on the medians between fast and slow lanes; sweetgum trees were planted along the sidewalks; mercury streetlights and underground power conduits were installed; and automatic traffic signals were placed at the intersection in front of the Onari-cho police box. In East Asia in 1941, this was advanced infrastructure¹⁷. The Japanese even boasted that Chokushi Kaido could be called one of “Japan’s three great roads” together with Tokyo’s Showa-dori and Osaka’s Midosuji¹⁷.

⚠️ Contested view: Postwar Taiwan’s official narratives often call Zhongshan North Road “Taipei’s Champs-Elysees,” attributing its achievement to postwar government takeover and greening. But Zhongshan North Road’s boulevard DNA, the camphor-tree median, sweetgum-lined sidewalks, and 40-meter-wide, five-lane layout, is entirely a design legacy left by the Japanese colonial government in 1941. After the KMT took over after the war, the main structure was barely changed. Taipei City Government’s Public Works Department itself acknowledges: “Zhongshan North Road is Taiwan’s most thoroughly planned and first modern road”¹⁸. Treating a Japanese colonial project as a postwar achievement is a common form of historical rewriting after 1949.

The Shrine Was Destroyed in an Air Crash, and Glazed Roof Tiles Wrote Over It

On the evening of October 23, 1944, a Japanese military aircraft scheduled to land at Taipei Airfield, today’s Songshan Airport, crashed near the new precinct of Taiwan Shrine, starting a major fire¹⁹. The shrine had only just been elevated from “shrine” to “jingu,” or imperial shrine, on June 17, with the addition of Amaterasu Omikami; Taiwan Jingu’s status was equivalent to that of Ise Jingu. The plan to transfer the shrine to the new precinct was interrupted by the fire¹⁹. In August 1945, Japan was defeated, and the jingu reconstruction plan ended permanently.

The Nationalist government that received Taiwan after the war demolished the shrine in 1949 and rebuilt the site as the “Taiwan Grand Hotel.” On May 10, 1952, operations were taken over by the Taiwan Tunghu Association, a foundation headed by Soong Mei-ling. The hotel was renamed the Grand Hotel, and Chiang family confidante Kung Ling-wei, Soong Mei-ling’s niece, publicly known as “Second Miss Kung,” served as its first general manager²⁰. Basic facilities were completed in 1963. In 1970, construction began on a 14-story Chinese palace-style tower, designed by architect Yang Cho-cheng, and it was completed on October 10, 1973²⁰.

The main Chinese palace-style building of the Grand Hotel, completed on October 10, 1973. After the shrine was destroyed in an air crash and fire in 1944, the postwar KMT demolished the shrine in 1949 and completed the building’s current form in 1973. Photo: peellden / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Full source in the §Image Sources section.

The Chinese palace-style architecture of the Grand Hotel and the Taiwan Shrine site beneath it form one of Taipei’s most naked acts of cultural overwriting. On June 27, 1995, renovation work on the glazed roof tiles above the 12th floor accidentally started a fire, and the red glazed tiles burned through the night. It was the hotel’s greatest crisis in the 22 years since its completion. But the hotel’s Golden Dragon Fountain, the komainu guardian lions donated in 1930 by the seventh governor-general Ishizuka Eizo, and the bronze dragons cast by architect Moriyama Matsunosuke, all relics from the Japanese-era shrine, remain today in the Grand Hotel’s Dragon Hall and garden²¹.

Not long after the war, though the exact month is not clearly recorded in public archives, Chokushi Kaido was renamed “Zhongshan North Road” in memory of Sun Yat-sen, founding father of the Republic of China⁵. Meiji Bridge was also renamed Zhongshan Bridge. The second-generation Meiji Bridge, completed in 1933 as a deck-type reinforced-concrete arch bridge 120 meters long and 17 meters wide, lasted 69 years before being demolished in 2002 during Ma Ying-jeou’s mayoralty²². The naming rewrite from Chokushi Kaido to Zhongshan North Road took less than three years.

The PX Leaked into Qingguang Market: Twenty-Eight Years of the U.S. Military

On May 1, 1951, the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group, or MAAG, was formally established in Taipei. Its headquarters were set in the eastern section of the Yuanshan compound, with its front gate on Zhongshan North Road and its rear entrance at Linsen North Road²³. From 1951 until its withdrawal from Taiwan on March 1, 1979, MAAG was stationed in Taiwan for 28 years, reaching a peak of 2,347 personnel in 1955²³. U.S. military dependents’ housing was concentrated near the end of Section 7 of Zhongshan North Road, Shanzihou on Yangmingshan, and Tianmu²³.

When so many American military personnel and dependents moved into the two sides of Zhongshan North Road, traces of material circulation surfaced before traces of ideology:

The block enclosed by Section 3 of Zhongshan North Road, Shuangcheng Street, and Nong’an Street was originally just a small market. Because it was near the offices and dormitories of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group, food, daily goods, and foreign cigarettes from the U.S. military PX often flowed into civilian hands; in 1950s and 1960s Taipei, these were scarce goods²⁴. Imported items brought from the United States by U.S. military dependents also entered the market through familiar Taiwanese vendors: jeans, Washington apples, Elizabeth Arden cosmetics, and perfume²⁴. The market was originally going to be called “Zhenguang Market,” but in Taiwanese Hokkien “Zhenguang” sounded like “absurd,” so it was later changed to the homophonous “Qingguang,” meaning “light of wisdom.” The name continued into 2026²⁴.

📝 Curator’s note: Qingguang Market, Zhonghua Market, Guanghua Market, and the Taipei Circle of the same era formed a “material-geography triangle” in 1950s to 1970s Taipei. Zhonghua Market received the nostalgia of military dependents who came from China, including northern noodles and Shanghai tailoring. Guanghua Market dealt in electronic parts and used books. Qingguang Market was the “Westernized Taipei” directly connected to the U.S. military lifestyle. The three markets had different supply-chain origins, but all were born from 1950s Taiwan’s dependence on foreign powers, China and the United States.

American-style bars appeared alongside Qingguang Market. During the Korean War and Vietnam War era from the 1950s to the 1970s, many American-style bars opened along Sections 2 and 3 of Zhongshan North Road for U.S. military leisure and entertainment²⁵. In 1980, Taiwan’s first 7-Eleven also opened in the tiaotong district on this road²⁶. This road has always been Taipei’s earliest receiver of “American,” “Japanese,” and “modern” signals, a fact that seems both coincidental and inevitable.

On March 1, 1979, MAAG ceased operations and the U.S. military officially withdrew from Taiwan²³. But the material traces remained: after a 1997 fire, Qingguang Market was rebuilt and transformed into a tourist night market, and the aunties on Shuangcheng Street still run stalls selling glittering imported goods²⁴.

The deeper material trace is St. Christopher’s Church. Established in 1957 on Section 3 of Zhongshan North Road, the Catholic church was originally built to serve American soldiers stationed at the U.S. military command on Zhongshan North Road²⁷. The U.S. military left in 1979, but the church did not. In the 1990s, as more and more Filipino migrant workers entered Taiwan, several blocks around Section 3 of Zhongshan North Road, Dehui Street, and Nong’an Street were occupied on Sundays by thousands of Filipino workers and temporary vendors, forming “Little Manila”²⁸. Of St. Christopher’s three priests, one came from Italy and the other two came from the Philippines specifically to preach in Taiwan²⁹. Every Sunday, the church, which seats more than 600, has to hold five Masses to accommodate the crowd²⁹. Father Yves Moal says: “In addition to guiding people in the Catholic faith, the church also provides consultation services for Filipino workers”²⁹.

There was an 11-year gap between the U.S. military housing and Little Manila, but the spatial structure that received goods, received religion, and received vulnerable migrant workers was the same.

Jiutai Street Became Linsen North Road: Another Act of Commemoration in 1968

The north-south road east of Zhongshan North Road, running parallel to it and enclosing the tiaotong lanes, was originally called “Jiutai Street.” When it was upgraded to a street at the end of 1960, the KMT named it after Jiutai County in Jilin Province, the registered ancestral origin of soldiers who had relocated to Taiwan with the military³⁰. In 1967, the road was opened through to Beiping East Road. In 1968, on the centenary of former Nationalist government chairman Lin Sen’s birth, Lin Sen was born in 1868, it was renamed “Linsen North Road”³⁰.

This naming logic came from the same source as Zhongshan North Road: both roads were commemoratively named by the KMT after figures such as the “premier” and “chairman” of the preceding regime, covering over the original Japanese-era street names, whether Chokushi Kaido or the Japanese town names that existed before the Jiutai Street period. The difference is that Zhongshan North Road had already been renamed in 1947, while Linsen North Road came 21 years later because the road itself was only opened into its present form in 1967.

⚠️ Contested view: “Tiaotong” and “Linsen North Road” belong to two different temporal layers. “Tiaotong,” from First Tiaotong through Ninth Tiaotong, is the lane-numbering system left after the 1922 Japanese-era town-name reform. After the war, the official road names no longer used it, but the physical lanes and the colloquial name “tiaotong” remained among the public. “Linsen North Road,” by contrast, is a postwar road name that only appeared in 1968. So when someone says “the tiaotong of Linsen North Road,” they are describing “a hybrid geography in which a 2026 postwar road name is overlaid on 1922 Japanese-era lanes,” with two historical-layer names for the same land used simultaneously.

The postwar fate of the tiaotong lanes unfolded in two phases. The first was from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the Japanese-style official residences of what had been a high-end Japanese-era residential district were taken over by the KMT and converted into civil-servant housing, adding the smell of cooking in military dependents’ villages and mainland Chinese accents to the lanes³¹. The second came after the 1980s, when these civil-servant residences were gradually vacated, rebuilt, or rented out, and the lanes began receiving Japanese companies and Japanese-style hostess bars.

After the Break in Diplomatic Relations, Japanese People Lit the Noren a Second Time

On September 29, 1972, Japan and the People’s Republic of China issued the “Joint Communique of the Government of Japan and the Government of the People’s Republic of China,” establishing diplomatic relations. On the same day, the Republic of China government, invoking the principle that “Han and traitors cannot coexist,” announced the severing of diplomatic relations with Japan³². Three months later, on December 26, Japan’s Interchange Association and the Republic of China’s Association of East Asian Relations signed an agreement to establish mutual liaison offices. Ito Hiroyasu, former acting Japanese ambassador to the Republic of China, became the first representative of the Taipei office⁷.

After the break in relations, Japan’s official presence in Taiwan disappeared on the surface, but in substance it continued through the Interchange Association and employees of Japanese companies. The 1980s coincided with the growth period of Japan’s bubble economy, and Japanese firms came to Taiwan one after another to establish branches. More and more Japanese people, especially middle-aged expatriate staff, came to Taipei for work assignments lasting several years. Where did they want to go after work? Ximending and Hengyang Road had been the old territory of Japanese companies in the 1950s and 1960s, but after the 1980s Ximending became younger and Hengyang Road’s commercial life declined.

Tiaotong became the new choice. It had low-rise buildings converted from old Japanese-style official residences, narrow-lane dimensions sharing the same origins as Kyoto’s town divisions, and the memory of a “Japanese spatial sensibility” passed down from the colonial period. Beginning in 1980, tiaotong formally transformed into a dense district of Japanese-style hostess bars³³.

By the peak around 1995, the number of tiaotong bars reached five or six hundred³³³⁴. An industry structure took shape: the mama-san, or proprietress; the sanqizai, or introducer; and the xiaojie, or hostess and conversation companion, were the three roles supporting the whole ecosystem³⁵. The tiaotong mama-san “Zimin,” interviewed by BIOS monthly, said that most of the women in her shop “have regular jobs during the day and work part-time at the hostess bar at night”³⁵. The customer structure also stabilized: regular Japanese employees, local Taiwanese business clients, and a small number of foreign old-timers who had known tiaotong since the U.S. military era. Performance systems such as “how many entries and exits,” counting tips by the number of times a guest entered and left hostess bars in the same night, also became tiaotong jargon during this period³⁵.

💡 Did you know? The legal boundary between Japanese-style hostess bars and special businesses has been a gray zone in Taiwan for 70 years. During the Japanese period, tiaotong belonged to an officially tolerated mixed residential-commercial district. In the early postwar period, the KMT took it over as a “special business management district.” From 1962 onward, Taiwan had a licensed-prostitution system, in which women holding prostitution licenses operated in designated places. But the Japanese-style hostess bars of tiaotong and Linsen North Road were never part of the licensed-prostitution system. They registered as “hotel businesses” or “special food and beverage shops,” selling services such as “conversation companionship” and “drinking companionship.” This classification meant that tiaotong was relatively unaffected directly after the 1997 abolition of licensed prostitution.

Rising in the same era as the tiaotong Japanese-style hostess bars were large commercial facilities such as the Regent Taipei, opened in 1990 on Section 6 of Linsen North Road, and Shin Shin Department Store, opened in September 1972, the same month Japan and the ROC severed relations, on Section 5 of Linsen North Road³⁶. Linsen North Road is 2,142 meters long, gathering hotels, department stores, all kinds of businesses, and clubs. In Taipei, the scale and business mix of this road are unique³⁶.

After the Abolition of Licensed Prostitution, What Was Sold Was Ambiguity

On July 30, 1997, the Taipei City Council passed the abolition of the “Taipei City Regulations for the Management of Prostitutes,” with no transition period³⁷. On September 1, nearly 100 licensed prostitutes petitioned at Taipei City Hall. On September 4, the “Taipei Licensed Prostitutes Self-Help Association” was founded to seek a two-year buffer period before abolition³⁷. This policy, promoted during Mayor Chen Shui-bian’s term, led to the formal end of the licensed-prostitution system in 2001.

The abolition movement targeted the licensed-prostitution system, and its “direct impact was limited” on the Japanese-style hostess bars of tiaotong and Linsen North Road. But it created broader pressure toward “going ashore” and “name rectification”³⁸. After 2000, tiaotong businesses collectively pushed to reposition Japanese-style hostess bars as cultural spaces, drawing a boundary between themselves and sex work.

The most representative figure is Siena. She entered the trade in 2003 at the age of 22. From Kaohsiung, she had begun working part-time at age 13. At 32, she took over her first Japanese-style bar on Eighth Tiaotong, later moving to Sixth Tiaotong to open “BAR NINE,” which is purely a bar and does not hire women to sit with guests³⁹. Starting in 2016, she began leading tiaotong cultural tours. In 2020 she helped establish the Entertainment Public Relations Workers’ Union, and in 2021 she became a cultural consultant for the drama Light the Night³⁹.

In an interview with Marie Claire, Siena said: “What we sell is ambiguity; what matters is friendship”³⁹. She also described herself as “not pretty, with a bad figure and a rough, loud voice.” This self-description is itself a kind of declaration of tiaotong culture: the value of Japanese-style hostess bars is not in “prettiness,” but in “conversation,” “human feeling,” and “atmosphere”³⁹. In another BIOS monthly interview, mama-san Zimin said: “I hope that ten years from now, I’ll still be guarding this shop”³⁵. Placed inside the Sixth Tiaotong lanes laid out in 1922, this sentence is more precise than any commercial slogan.

In 2017, Initium Media published a feature under the title “Here, We Sell Love,” with the subheading: “Whatever your preferences or needs may be, this red-light district only one road away from the famous Zhongshan North shopping street can accept you without judgment”⁴⁰. This framing both preserved Linsen North Road’s label as a “red-light district” and acknowledged it as a space of “acceptance without judgment,” something other parts of Taipei cannot do.

✦ In 2021, Netflix aired the prime-time-style drama Light the Night. The “Hikari” hostess bar in the series was identified as having been filmed on Sixth Tiaotong, pushing this street, laid out in 1922 and originally one Taipei locals had not especially wanted to explain to outsiders, onto tourists’ Google Maps¹². Along with it came the “Night Walk Linsen North” and “Tiaotong Art Festival” organized in 2017 by the Tiaotong Commercial District Development Association, the 2019 arrival of Kyoto’s old eel restaurant Edogawa with its first overseas branch on Sixth Tiaotong, and the first “Tiaotong Festival” in 2025⁴¹. The street formally entered the field of cultural tourism.

Three Layers of Noren on the Same Road

Return to Section 3 of Zhongshan North Road on a Sunday. At 11 in the morning, Mass at St. Christopher’s Church lets out, and Filipino workers and one or two hundred Taiwanese parishioners walk out of the church together. Nearby convenience stores and CD shops selling Filipino goods have already turned on the music. By 4 in the afternoon, the district will have become something else. You will hear Tagalog, English, Taiwanese, and Mandarin mixed together, and see stalls on the ground selling Filipino newspapers, dried mango, and sunglasses²⁹.

At 9 at night, walk 4 kilometers south to Lane 105, Section 1, Zhongshan North Road, and the noren curtain of Bunta Izakaya lifts. Japanese company employees in suits come after work for a bowl of rice and a glass of beer. They speak Japanese, but when ordering they mix in Chinese that the Taiwanese staff understand.

Walk another 5 kilometers north to the foot of Jiantan Mountain, and the red glazed roof tiles of the Grand Hotel glow under the night lights. The Golden Dragon Fountain sculpture below was recast in 1956 using metal from shrine relics, and the komainu remain in their original positions²¹. Looking down from the high windows of this palace-style building, the entire tree-lined boulevard of Zhongshan North Road stretches all the way to Taipei Station: work began in 1937, it was completed in 1941, it cost 1.62 million yen, it had camphor and sweetgum trees, and it was a 40-meter-wide, five-lane road¹⁷.

This road has carried three layers of noren across 125 years: the red Japanese flag of the 1901 imperial envoy, the Stars and Stripes of the U.S. military arriving in 1951, and the izakaya lanterns of Japanese company employees after the 1972 diplomatic break. Each layer writes over the previous one, but the material traces of the previous layer remain: the shrine’s komainu are in the Grand Hotel, the imported goods from the U.S. military PX are in Qingguang Market, and the lane numbers of Japanese-era Taisho-cho are still called “Sixth Tiaotong.”

If a Japanese company employee who has been in Taipei for a month walks after work through Bunta’s noren in Sixth Tiaotong, he will not realize that he is sitting in a Japanese-era district laid out in 1922, on the west side of a Chokushi Kaido widened in 1937, in a material gap left after the U.S. military departed in 1979. He will only feel that the lane is “like Kyoto” and “comfortable.” But the position where he sits carries the contemporary echo of a 125-year geoeconomic structure. It cannot be explained merely as cultural exchange.

The same piece of land can simultaneously be a road the emperor once traveled, a street where the U.S. military once lived, a Mass ground for Filipino workers, and the noren of Japanese company employees. No layer has completely disappeared, and no layer completely dominates. What Zhongshan North Road Tiaotong teaches us is this: colonial traces do not disappear simply because they are demolished, but neither can they be preserved simply by commemorating them. They are just quietly stacked there, and every layer is still being used by someone.

Further Reading

• Dadaocheng: Another Taipei That Grew by the Tamsui River After the 1853 Armed Feud — the geographic context of the same-era transplantation of Japanese town divisions and the connection between Onari-cho’s western boundary and Dadaocheng’s southeastern edge
• Ximending: The Entertainment District the Japanese Built in 1896, Still Taipei’s Youngest Street 130 Years Later — another Japanese-era entertainment district and postwar road-renaming case, parallel to Chokushi Kaido
• Taipei City: Established as a Prefecture in 1885, Ceded in 1895, and a Capital of 2.4 Million People in 2026 — a panorama of the whole historic-district network; this article is its deep dive into the Zhongshan District segment
• New Taipei City: The Ring-Shaped Metropolis Surrounding Taipei, Where Fort San Domingo Predates Taipei by 200 Years — across the Tamsui River, Fort San Domingo in Tamsui and Chokushi Kaido are two layers of colonial geography
• The Martial Law Period: Thirty-Eight Years from 1949 to 1987 — the U.S. military housing and tiaotong civil-servant dormitories on both sides of Zhongshan North Road are material traces of this period

Image Sources

This article uses 2 public-domain / CC-licensed images, all cached under public/article-images/geography/ to avoid hotlinking source servers:

• Chokushi Kaido 1932 — old photograph of Chokushi Kaido in 1932, public domain, prewar publication that has entered the public domain due to age
• The Grand Hotel Taipei (Main Building) — Photo: peellden, 2010s, CC BY-SA 3.0

References