Taipei Main Station: The Underground City That Sends People Away, Yet Also Keeps Them

Image: Taipei Main Station platform and train; Photo: 4300streetcar; License: CC BY 4.0; Original image page: ¹

30-Second Overview: In 1891, Taipei Main Station was a train terminal near the riverbank; the fourth-generation station opened in 1989 moved the railways underground. Today, it connects the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA), Taiwan High Speed Rail (THSR), Taipei Metro, and Taoyuan Airport MRT. What makes Taipei Main Station most worth observing is not how quickly it allows people to leave, but how people repeatedly transform this transit space into a place for lingering, gathering, dining, and debating publicness. ^{2 3 4}

In 1891, the railway promoted by Liu Ming-chuan placed Taipei’s first station by the Tamsui River. Early records also described it as a "train terminal" near Dadaocheng. This name reveals that the railway was initially not an isolated transport facility, but connected to waterways, cargo, and the flow of people entering and exiting the city's edge. ^{2 5 6}

This starting point is far from the black-and-white checkerboard hall of today. The station began as a facility on the city's edge before gradually becoming the city's facade. Each move left footprints of the shifting center of gravity in the city. ^{2 4}

Four Generations of Stations, Four Rewrites of the City

In 1901, the trunk line was rerouted and the Tamsui line opened, moving the station to the area around Guanzqian Road, becoming the "Taipei Parking Lot." Taiwan Pictorial recorded that this station had a brick main structure, tiered waiting spaces, and a VIP waiting room. "Parking Lot" was the term for a station at the time, not a place for parking cars. ^{4 8}

Image: Taipei Main Station and the entrance to Taipei Main Station Underground Street in 2004; Author: Loren36; License: Public domain; Original image page: ⁹

The third-generation Taipei Main Station, completed in 1939, adopted a modernist style, facing Guanzqian Road. User-provided historical materials describe it as a block-style reinforced concrete building where eclecticism and modernism intersect, noting that the station housed a post office and a restaurant. These functions show that the station was no longer just a place for boarding and alighting, but had begun to handle communication, dining, and daily exchanges as a composite space. ^{2 6}

The disappearance of the third-generation station building is a cost easily overlooked in Taipei's modernization. In 1979, the central government approved the project for the undergroundization of railways in Taipei City. In 1986, the third-generation station building was demolished, and passengers used a temporary station building for entry and exit. On September 2, 1989, the fourth-generation underground station building was opened. ^{2 7}

📝 Curator's Note: The history of Taipei Main Station is not "one building replaced by another," but a record of the city continuously redeciding "how people should move."

After Railways Went Underground

Undergroundization cannot be dismissed with just the word "modernization." For engineering, it is the integration of routes, platforms, tunnels, and floors. For users, it is a bodily judgment of "which floor am I on" and "is the exit on the other side." Railways no longer cut directly through the surface city, but have turned paths that could once be understood at a glance into a three-dimensional space that requires reading through signage, floors, and transfer logic. ^{3 7}

Another study on underground three-dimensional space treats Taipei Main Station as a complex field requiring signage and spatial clues for wayfinding, using Taipei Railway Station as a case study for visual guidance information systems. ^{3 10} Therefore, getting lost is not necessarily just personal carelessness; it may also be the reading cost produced by years of engineering, different transport systems, and commercial spaces stacked in the same underground profile.

Today, Taipei Main Station is more than just a TRA station. Taoyuan International Airport's official transfer information lists A1 Taipei Main Station as an important urban node for the Airport MRT, with express trains taking about 35 minutes to the First Terminal and local trains about 49 minutes. The official page also lists pre-check-in services in the urban area. ¹¹

This means the station does not only bear the function of "arriving and then transferring," but also moves part of the airport procedures into the city. Passengers can turn here towards Taipei City, other cities in northern Taiwan, or the next leg of a domestic journey. Commuters, workers, shoppers, and those waiting also use the same forecourt simultaneously. ¹¹

TRA official data describes the traffic scale of Taipei Station as over 500,000 passengers entering and exiting daily, listing it alongside Osaka Station as a transportation hub. This number makes the station look like a massive machine, but human flow is not water: it stops in the hall, detours in the underground street, and reconfirms direction at certain exits. ¹²

How a Station Becomes an Underground City

The surface station building is easily seen, but what truly makes North Station "North Station" are the invisible分流 (diversion), equipment, and joint management. The Joint Disaster Prevention Center opened in 2019 integrates disaster information, equipment control, and emergency handling for the Taipei Main Station Special District, covering different operating units such as TRA, THSR, Taipei Metro, Taoyuan Airport MRT, the underground street, and malls. ¹³

Image: Taipei Main Station Floor Plan; Author: Tsungyenlee; License: CC BY 2.5; Original image page: ¹⁴

The floor plan turns the feeling that "North Station is complicated" into observable data. It arranges different floors, platforms, transfer areas, and exits on the same long surface, allowing users to see that they are not lost in a corridor, but changing layers in a vertically stacked transport system. This image also reminds us that wayfinding is not an ancillary task before arrival, but part of the station usage experience. ^{3 14}

The underground streets around Taipei Main Station are not a single, homogeneous corridor. A 2008 study on Taipei Underground Street, Station Front Underground Street, and Taipei New World Underground Street observed users, commercial facilities, and public activities in different underground streets, pointing out that transport systems, commercial types, spatial dimensions, and ground land use jointly influence usage methods. ¹⁵

The study also recorded that the wide walkways and stairwells of underground streets are not only for passage but can also become places for hobby groups to gather and exchange. Another study understands the underground street as an urban downward expansion formed after railway undergroundization and metro network construction: transport, commerce, management, and leisure activities are all buried into the city together. ^{15 16}

This perspective refuses to treat the underground street as an附属 (ancillary) corridor of the station. Some only pass through, some treat it as a shopping route, and some complete social lives unrelated to transport within it. Planners designed the flow lines, but what users actually lived out might be a place. ^{17 15}

Underground spaces do not completely obey planning just because they are planned. Research observed that teenagers used the squares and passages of the underground street for practice in street dance and other club activities, forming a certain resistance to established spatial usage methods. This resistance does not necessarily appear in slogans. It may just be a few people stopping simultaneously in a place originally meant only for passage. ¹⁶

📝 Curator's Note: What is most worth seeing in the underground street is not the list of shops, but who can turn "passing through" into "being here." In that second, the transit space begins to have social memory.

After the West Station Disappeared, Transport History Did Not

If one only looks at the main station building, the story of Taipei Main Station might seem too neat. The adjacent Taipei West Station was built in 1954, standing alongside Taipei Main Station as a transportation hub. Jinma, Jinlong, and Guoguang buses once departed from there. The opening of the highway brought a peak, but the opening of the high-speed rail changed its original function. ¹⁸

After the West Station was demolished in 2016, the original site was planned to be converted into park green space and new waiting facilities. A building with a 62-year history was removed, leaving behind people's memories of Spring Festival homecomings, platforms, and waiting room benches. ¹⁸

The disappearance of the West Station reminds us that the life of transport architecture is determined not only by appearance, but also by new speeds and routes. Looking back at the main station from the West Station, Taipei Main Station is not an ever-changing city facade, but only the current generation still in use.

The Hall: A Passage, Exhibition Hall, or Living Room?

The hardest place to define in Taipei Main Station might not be the platform, but the hall. A Public Television (PTS) report pointed out that the hall was originally designed as a multi-purpose exhibition space, but gradually formed a culture of people sitting on the floor when there are no events. ¹⁹

This transformation created a gap in spatial use: designers imagined an open venue for events, but travelers and residents used it as a public indoor square for waiting, resting, and gathering. When seats are insufficient, the black-and-white checkerboard floor is not just decoration, but a plane where one can linger without consuming. ^{20 21}

In 2012, Indonesian migrant workers gathered in the hall during Eid al-Fitr. When it rained, the crowd surged indoors, and station management set up red ropes and signs citing the maintenance of flow lines and order, triggering protests from human rights groups regarding discriminatory use of public space. The following year, the station management adopted flexible persuasion, pre-planned flow lines, and strengthened cleaning, temporarily shifting the conflict towards coordination. ^{19 21 22}

During the 2020 pandemic, TRA prohibited people from sitting in the hall. Reports recorded that this measure affected migrant workers who treated the hall as a gathering place, and collided with the tradition of Muslim migrant workers holding Eid al-Fitr activities here. ^{20 22}

The controversy quickly shifted from pandemic prevention measures to a debate on public space. In 2012 and 2013, civic groups had already held activities such as picnics in the Taipei Main Station hall. After the ban on sitting in 2020, online actions emerged to reassert the right to use the hall through sit-ins and picnics. ²²

This controversy is striking because the hall looks like the most impersonal place: checkerboard floors, large spaces, signs, and constantly moving people. However, precisely because it is used by many, it becomes a place where different life rhythms collide. Migrant workers' holidays, travelers' waiting, and managers' considerations for evacuation are not three unrelated stories, but different needs of the same hall. ^{19 20 22}

A design discourse based on Taipei Main Station and its surrounding underground streets describes this place as an underground space connecting mass transit, old commerce, and new public leisure, also discussing how the gathering of migrant workers and the homeless challenges the formal urban image pre-imagined by planners. ^{16 10}

📝 Curator's Note: The true entrance of Taipei Main Station is not only on the ground, nor only on the map. It is in every moment someone asks, "Can I sit here?"

Bento: Packing the Journey into a Paper Box

Image: 60-TWD TRA Pork Rib Bento; Photo: hirotomo t; License: CC BY-SA 2.0; Original image page: ²³

Railway station food is not just supply for travelers hungry on the road. A report in Taiwan Pictorial viewed train staff pushing food carts to sell bento on trains as a shared memory for many Taiwanese. The appearance of lunch boxes, train windows, and scenery along the way together gave the journey a shape that could be remembered. ²⁴

The history of TRA bento did not start with a forever-unchanging recipe. Data compiled by StoryStudio points out that in 1912, the trunk line's express trains already had first-class dining cars. After the war, in 1949, TRA produced bento in railway restaurants at stations such as Kaohsiung, Tainan, Taichung, Taipei, and Songshan, transporting them to trains for sale, and established a "Xiao Ying" (Small Camp) department in 1960 to integrate related sales. ²⁵

Bento gradually transformed from a catering service on platforms and trains into a product operated by the railway system itself. Like the station, it possesses both transport and life functions. What passengers buy is not just calories, but a ritual of "I am setting off." ²⁵

Taipei Main Station is one of the places where this ritual intensively occurs. A 2013 Taiwan Pictorial report recorded that the TRA Bento Shop next to East Gate 2 of Taipei Main Station already had a queue at 11 AM. Some bought it to catch the THSR or train, some ate it nearby, and some specially bought it to take home to share with family and friends. ²⁶

The pork rib bento survived not just because of the ribs themselves. Kuanghua reports recorded that the container for TRA bento changed between thin wooden boxes, aluminum boxes, stainless steel boxes, aluminum foil boxes, and paper boxes. After 2003, in compliance with the ban on plastic lunch boxes, it fully switched to paper box and wood chip materials in octagonal, round, and oval shapes. The shape of the box thus became part of passengers' memories: opening it, one sees not just the dish, but how a generation rode the train. ²⁶

A 2020 report pointed out that the pork rib bento at Taipei Railway Restaurant is made with Taiwan-produced rice, and the ribs undergo processes such as pounding, marinating, deep-frying, and braising. These details show that railway bento must be suitable for movement, waiting, and sharing to truly become station culture, rather than just a dish in a restaurant. ²⁴

📝 Curator's Note: The station sends people to other places; the bento packs the homely taste before departure into the carriage together. It is the smallest station, operating as soon as the lid is opened.

How a Station Preserves Its Own Memory

In 2024, the TRA Cultural Walking Tour brought participants into the archives room, usually not open to the public, where they saw old tickets, electric block instruments, manual switchboards, and operation manuals. A tour volunteer said, "Only when every object stored together naturally connects into a story can it be called history." ⁵

This sentence changes how we look at the station. The roof, platforms, and exits of the station building are large-scale history. A discontinued hard ticket, a telephone switchboard no longer in use, make it touchable how the system operated. ⁵

The current station body is approximately square, with three doors on each of the four sides, totaling twelve doors. Some doorways have compasses on the ground; South Gate 2 is recessed and serves dual purposes for escape. These details do not appear in the four words "Transportation Hub," but they show how architecture hides direction, diversion, and safety into daily actions. ⁵

Taipei Main Station also preserves the layers of the city's surroundings. Exiting the station area, one can connect to the North Gate, National Taiwan Museum, Railway Ministry Park, 228 Peace Memorial Park, and Zhongshan Hall. The station is not an isolated box, but an entrance that connects different regimes, different transport technologies, and different urban memories. ^{3 5}

The Station Also Decides Where the City Grows

The location of Taipei Main Station affects not only where trains stop. In the Qing dynasty, the station was near Hegou Tou Street and Dadaocheng, convenient for cargo loading/unloading from the Tamsui River and for officials entering Taipei City by water. Later, as routes changed, the center of gravity of the city's development also flipped. ⁵

This detail changes "the station is a transport node" into a larger question: Transport nodes will in turn manufacture the city. When railways no longer proceed along the originally planned direction, the relationship between today's Xinzhuang, Banqiao, and western Taipei will be rearranged over decades. ⁵

When the station was set up near its current site in 1901, the area around Guanzqian Road was arranged as the city entrance. Today, the North Gate, National Taiwan Museum, Railway Ministry Park, and Zhongshan Hall still surround the station, forming a walkable urban profile. ^{3 4 5}

Therefore, the "center" of Taipei Main Station is not only inside the station. It pulls outward on roads, underground streets, old city gates, museums, and commercial districts; inward, it compresses travelers of different speeds into the same hall. People pass through quickly here, and also see here how Taipei stacks the past onto the present.

📝 Curator's Note: The deepest influence of a station is often not how many people it carries, but how many people it makes start to think of a certain place as the "center."

The Next Version of North Station

The future of Taipei Main Station cannot only ask if it will be faster, brighter, or easier to shop. It must also ask: After transfer efficiency improves, who can still linger here? After malls increase, do those without consumption still have seats? As space becomes cleaner, does it also clear away the life traces of certain people? These questions have repeatedly appeared in records of the ban on sitting in the hall, migrant worker gatherings, and underground street usage. ^{19 20 21 22}

In 2019, TRA established the Taipei Main Station Special District Joint Disaster Prevention Center, including units such as TRA, THSR, Taipei Metro, Taoyuan Airport MRT, as well as the underground street and malls. The same year's drill involved about 25 units and 430 people. These numbers show that North Station's underground city has become too large to be managed by the intuition of a single station master or a single company. ¹³

The 1891 train terminal was near the river; the 1901 parking lot moved the city's entrance to Guanzqian Road; the 1989 fourth-generation station hid railways underground; the West Station ended its mission in the high-speed rail era. Each renovation made Taipei easier to pass through, and made "lingering" something that needs to be discussed more. ^{2 4 18}

Therefore, what is most worth remembering about Taipei Main Station is not how many lines it has, how many exits, or what color the next renovation will change to. What it truly preserves is a city's contradiction: People need a place to leave quickly, and also need a place to sit down before leaving.

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