Explore Taipei

Taipei Water Park in Gongguan occupies the grounds of the city's first waterworks, built under Japanese rule in 1908. Its centrepiece is the Museum of Drinking Water, the former pumping station with Baroque columns, and around it are gardens, the old slow-sand filter beds and a water-play area for children in summer.

The National Taiwan Museum, founded in 1908 under Japanese rule, is the oldest museum in Taiwan. Its main building of 1915 at the north end of 228 Peace Memorial Park, with a domed hall and Doric columns, shows the island's natural history, Indigenous cultures and archaeology; a former bank across the road holds its land-bank branch with dinosaur skeletons.

The Taipei Fine Arts Museum, opened in 1983 in Zhongshan district, was Taiwan's first museum of modern and contemporary art. Its white building of stacked, interlocking boxes stands beside the Expo Park and shows Taiwanese art from the 20th century to today and international exhibitions, and it hosts the Taipei Biennial.

The National Palace Museum in Shilin holds one of the largest collections of Chinese imperial art, some 700,000 objects brought from the Forbidden City and other palaces and moved to Taiwan in 1948–49. The main building of 1965 shows bronzes, jade, ceramics, calligraphy and paintings in rotating displays, among them the Jadeite Cabbage.

The Taipei Astronomical Museum in Shilin, opened in 1997, is the city's astronomy museum, recognisable by the golden dome of its observatory. Its exhibition floors cover the solar system, stars and space flight, and it has a planetarium dome theatre, an IMAX cinema and a public telescope.

The Beitou Museum occupies a wooden Japanese-style building on the hillside above Beitou, built in 1921 as the Kazan Hot Spring Inn and later used as an officers' club. Today it shows Taiwanese folk art and Indigenous objects in its tatami rooms and serves kaiseki meals and tea in the old banquet hall.