Explore Taipei

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.

Taipei Children's Amusement Park is a city-run amusement park in Shilin, opened in 2014 to replace the old Yuanshan children's park. Its rides, among them a Ferris wheel, a carousel, a roller coaster and a drop tower, are sized for families with younger children, beside the Taipei Astronomical Museum and the science centre.

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.

Beitou Thermal Valley, also called Hell Valley, is a steaming hot-spring pool in a small ravine above Beitou, fed by acidic water at up to about 90 °C. A walkway with railings runs round the green pool, which gives off clouds of sulphurous vapour, and the spring's water supplies many of Beitou's bathhouses.