Things to Do in Taipei, Taiwan

Taipei 101

Taipei 101 dominates the Xinyi skyline as a landmark skyscraper and mixed-use complex. Rising 508 meters with 101 above-ground floors, it blends contemporary engineering with symbolic references to bamboo and traditional Chinese forms.

The tower contains offices, a multilevel shopping mall, and public observatories that offer a clear sense of the city’s urban layout and geography.

Visitors most often experience the building through its high-speed observatory elevators and the 89th-floor viewing areas. The pressurized elevators ascend very rapidly, compressing the journey to the upper observation levels into a brief, dramatic vertical ride.

The 89th-floor indoor deck gives a 360-degree panorama; accessible outdoor viewpoints and a sky garden convey seasonal light and weather differences over Taipei.

Official Taipei 101 website →

National Palace Museum

The National Palace Museum sits in Taipei’s Shilin district and preserves one of the world’s most extensive collections of Chinese art. The holdings span roughly five thousand years and include bronzes, ceramics, jade, paintings, calligraphy, and imperial treasures.

The collection is widely regarded as a central reference for Chinese material culture and court arts.

The museum’s core collections trace their institutional history to collections once housed in the Palace Museum in Beijing. Many objects were relocated to Taiwan in the mid‑20th century and later installed in the Waishuangxi site in Shilin.

The present museum complex was built to evoke traditional palace architecture, and its galleries were designed to show chronological and thematic continuities across dynasties.

Official National Palace Museum website →

Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall

The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall sits on a formal memorial island framed by broad plazas, museum buildings, and tree-lined promenades. Designed by architect Yang Cho-cheng, the white-walled main hall rises beneath a blue tile roof and flanked staircases that lead to the seated bronze statue of Chiang Kai-shek.

Visitors first notice the scale and classical symmetry of the complex, which reads as a civic square as much as an enclosed monument.

Inside the main hall, an hourly changing of the guard provides a choreographed, ceremonial experience often timed by visitors. The exhibition spaces around the plaza present historical material about Taiwan’s twentieth-century political changes alongside rotating cultural programs.

Official Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall website →

Raohe Street Night Market

Raohe Street Night Market is a densely packed, roughly 600-meter-long pedestrian market that begins at the lantern-lit gate near Songshan Ciyou Temple. The market runs along Raohe Street and ends toward the neighborhood’s main roads, creating a continuous sequence of food stalls, souvenir booths, and small shops.

Its proximity to Songshan Railway Station and several metro stops makes it one of Taipei’s most accessible evening markets.

Visitors encounter a sensory sequence: the smell of grilling, the sight of cooks assembling snacks, and the steady hum of bargaining and conversation. The market is particularly known for its concentrated street-food offerings, where small vendors focus on single specialties that are prepared to order.

Official Raohe Street Night Market website →

Elephant Mountain (Xiangshan) Hike

Xiangshan, commonly called Elephant Mountain, is a short, steep urban hike prized for its close-up views of Taipei 101 and the central skyline. The main trail is a paved stairway that rises directly from near Xiangshan MRT (Exit 2), and it funnels hikers toward a sequence of viewing platforms.

Those platforms are intentionally sited on terraces and rocky outcrops that frame Taipei 101 at photographic distance, making the trail one of the city’s most reliable vantage points for sunset and night panoramas.

The route is compact but physically demanding, with a series of stone steps and short climbs rather than a long, level walk.

Official Elephant Mountain (Xiangshan) Hike website →

Longshan Temple (Wanhua)

Longshan Temple in Wanhua (also spelled Lungshan) is one of Taipei’s oldest and most actively used religious sites, founded by Fujianese settlers in the late 1730s. The temple sits in the historic Monga neighborhood and combines multiple halls, richly carved woodwork, and crowded ritual space.

Visitors encounter layered devotional practice: incense altars, deity statues led by Guanyin, and worshippers making offerings, all within a building complex that reads as both parish temple and civic landmark.

Architecturally, the temple shows classical multi-hall Chinese temple planning, with a front hall, middle main hall, and rear sanctuaries arranged on a central axis.

Dihua Street / Dadaocheng historic district

Dihua Street forms the spine of the larger Dadaocheng historic district, one of Taipei’s earliest commercial neighborhoods. The street developed around the Dadaocheng Wharf and became a logistics hub for tea, textiles, and Chinese medicinal goods during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Visitors walk past continuous rows of narrow shophouses whose facades, lazy verandas, and recessed doorways still reveal layered trade functions and merchant life.

A visit is primarily a sensory experience of material culture and everyday commerce. Long-established shops specialize in dried goods, loose-leaf tea, herbal medicine, fabrics, and packaging supplies used for traditional festivals.

Stallkeepers often demonstrate skillful wrapping, sampling, or mortar-and-pestle grinding, which helps explain how goods were prepared and sold historically in the neighborhood.

Official Dihua Street / Dadaocheng historic district website →

Songshan Cultural and Creative Park

Songshan Cultural and Creative Park occupies the converted complex of Taiwan’s first modern tobacco factory, built in 1937. The site retains industrial structures—warehouse volumes, a chimney, and large interior halls—that anchor its identity as an adaptive-reuse cultural campus.

The park was designated a municipal historic site and redeveloped to host design exhibitions, studios, and public programming while keeping visible traces of its factory past.

Visitors encounter a mix of curated galleries, hands-on maker spaces, and rotating fairs that emphasize design, craft, and entrepreneurship. Large exhibition halls accommodate national design shows, product launches, and themed festivals; smaller rooms host workshops and incubator studios where emerging makers work and sell.

Official Songshan Cultural and Creative Park website →