Explore Taipei

Huashan 1914 Creative Park occupies a former sake and later rice-wine distillery near Zhongxiao Xinsheng station, founded in 1914 and closed in 1987. Its red-brick warehouses and factory halls now hold exhibitions, concerts, design shops, cafés and small cinemas, with lawns between the buildings.

Xingtian Temple on Minquan East Road, completed in 1967, is dedicated to Guan Yu, the deified general venerated as a patron of merchants. It has no offering boxes, sells no incense and burns no paper money, and volunteers in blue robes perform blessing rituals for the many worshippers who come each day.

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 Taipei Confucius Temple in Datong district was built between 1927 and 1939 in the southern Fujian style by the master craftsman Wang Yi-shun, replacing an earlier temple demolished under Japanese rule. Its Dacheng Hall has no statue of Confucius, only a memorial tablet, and an annual ceremony on 28 September marks his birthday.

Dalongdong Baoan Temple in Datong district was founded in the 18th century by immigrants from Tong'an in Fujian and is dedicated to Baosheng Dadi, a deified physician. Restored in the 1990s, work that earned a UNESCO Asia-Pacific heritage award in 2003, it is known for its wood carvings, wall paintings and the Baosheng Cultural Festival each spring.

Bangka Lungshan Temple in Wanhua was founded in 1738 by settlers from Fujian and rebuilt several times, most recently after bombing in 1945. Its halls, with carved stone dragon pillars and roofs crowded with ceramic figures, are dedicated to the Buddhist goddess Guanyin and to Taoist and folk deities, and worshippers come throughout the day.

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.