The Flow of the City

(As published in Fare Magazine Issue 16 in February of 2025)

The Tamsui River was a welcome sight for the passengers of vessels that had just braved the notorious “Black Water Ditch”, i.e. the Taiwan Strait, from their native China in the 1700s. Qing-Dynasty-era arrivals established settlements along the eastern shore, driving away the original indigenous inhabitants from the marsh-filled basin. With them they brought not only stones from China as ballast for their ships, but also the gods of their hometowns to see them to safety.

They soon found that this new (to them) land, with its typhoons and earthquakes bringing about shifts in its landscape even as their arrival brought cultural ones, demanded a greater allowance for change; those who survived the voyage had to adapt in order to survive. The traditional hierarchies of life in China had to be reevaluated to deal with the practicalities of life here. 

The arrivals constructed temples for the old gods who had accompanied them, one of the most famous being Longshan Temple in Monga, an area named for the vessels of indigenous traders that lined the river’s shores nearby, later renamed “Wanhua” (“10,000 Fortunes”) by the Japanese to class up the joint. The temple, built in 1738, was damaged and rebuilt several times over the centuries, though the Bodhisattva Statue at its center remained miraculously intact despite typhoons, earthquakes and even the bombs of Allied aircraft hitting the temple during WWII.

Getting Along with Beauty

According to local lore, a fortune teller proclaimed that, due to the existence of a geomantic energy point not far from the river called “Beauty’s Cave”, a pond should be created there so that the “beauty” could look at her reflection, thus appeasing the spirit and creating fortune for the area…until the greed of local developers resulted in the pond being filled in so that more buildings could be built. But the area’s flow had been breached; almost immediately fires began to break out in the area, and, with no water to fight them, the damage was considerable. The fortune tellers pointed out that of course fires were breaking out; the beauty had no water. A fountain was built in front of the temple and the fires ceased to be a problem*. 

The extremes of Taiwan’s climate necessitated yet another adaptation in local architecture; in order to provide shelter from the brutally hot sun and incessant rains, the front of the first-floor portions of buildings were left open to the street and adjacent buildings, resulting in streets lined with arcades that allowed pedestrians to mingle with shop owners, staff and others, allowing for the flow of the wind while avoiding the sun and rain. For security, traditional Chinese houses usually faced inward, little strongholds with the rooms surrounding a central courtyard and the exterior walls sporting only tiny windows, if any. With open arcades, the streets mirrored not so much a private pool but a river, allowing for a flow of interaction between the public and private, official and personal, between the currents of change and impermanence of the shifting shoreline. The more subtle gradations of familiarity/security proved more effective in dealing with life in Taiwan than solid walls.

This modus operandi came about for more reasons than one, as life in Taiwan -far from the rules and stability of any nominal authorities- necessitated a certain pragmatic adaptability as settlers also brought with them their ancestral feuds and grievances, resulting in turbulent times and often violent conflicts that mostly went ignored by the Qing government in distant Beijing. This, along with the fact that deforestation along the Tamsui’s tributaries, the Xindian, Keelung and Dahan rivers, resulted in tonnes of silt running down from the surrounding mountains, hampering navigation and forcing settlements further downstream where larger vessels could still dock. 

One such group settled northward in the Dadaocheng area, where rows of long shops offloaded wares from the river in the back of their establishments to process and sell from storefronts along the illustrious centre of culture that was Dihua Street. In an attempt to consolidate the two conflicting regions, an official walled city was built in between the two districts of Monga and Dadaocheng, forming the city of Taipei. The walls, built using the ballast stones from the arrivals’ vessels, featured not the usual four but five gates because a certain wealthy businessman feared for his safety while sharing the South Gate with a rival group, so he had another “Little South Gate” built closer to the river. Aside from the Tianhou Temple, the Martial and Literary Arts Temples, government offices and a couple of business districts, the area enclosed within the massive walls was largely empty grassland riddled with streams and marshes. 

A New Direction

Thanks to a treaty signed by two far-off governments, Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, and the new rulers decided that the city walls stood in the way of their ideas for the city’s development. They tore down all the walls but faced such a backlash after demolishing the West Gate that they decided to leave the other four gates, which stand to this day.

The Japanese, seeking to create a “model colony”, sought a new direction for the city - literally. Turning away from the river, they reoriented public buildings, constructing a grand, massive governor's palace facing east, away from China and towards the rising sun that was the symbol of Japan. The new rulers extended and developed the island’s railways, reservoirs, ports, mines and other industries, even cultivating coffee to export to Japan via an extensive network of ferry routes, all while relentlessly driving Taiwan’s indigenous inhabitants further into the mountains. All the latest trends from Tokyo made their way to the Dadaocheng district, including music and literature, and the first Western restaurant, and Japanese entrepreneurs built wooden tea houses along the river for patrons to enjoy the cool breeze wafting off the water. City administrators also decreed that the arcades lining the streets would be considered public space.

The stones of the old city walls were again reused to pave the courtyards of temples and other public spaces. The Japanese demolished Tianhou Temple and replaced it with the city’s first modern park, though temple detritus such as door stops and temple beams provide seats for park visitors to this day. Likewise, all of the Taoist God statues were banished to the storerooms in the back of the temples, which now, according to Japanese tradition, were to be mainly Buddhist. The old gods may have been banished, but they were not gone, as street performances by theatre troops roamed the country, setting up near temples to entertain the gods as well as the people under their protection with performances by both live actors and puppets.

Walls Go Up

After a half century of rule, the Japanese left after losing WWII; the Kuomintang (KMT) swept in after losing the civil war in China, instituting martial law after the bloody 2/28 Massacre of 1947. The new rulers set out to change not only the course of the river, but the entire island, promoting industrial development on all levels in its goal of returning to China. Factories of all sizes spread everywhere, while waterways were considered suspect due to the potential for military conflict with the newly founded People’s Republic. Massive infrastructure projects such as highways and tunnels made travel easier, and as the streams and canals of Taipei were filled in and paved over, hundreds of thousands of scooters began to flow through the streets of the city, mimicking the river as well as the arcades in that scooters, in addition to being convenient, affordable transportation for entire families, also allow for a far more connected experience with the city than the isolation of enclosed cars, which were the domain of factory bosses and high-level politicians and designed to keep the city out. On a scooter one cannot help but be immersed in the flow, one moment flying down the road and the next chatting with folks at the market. Scooters are water; cars are mud.

Flood control measures included not only constructing huge walls between the city and the river that birthed it, but dumping the waste of thousands of factories and households directly into the formerly pristine waters. The army corps of engineers even blew up promontories that had impeded the river’s flow in order to allow floodwaters to escape the basin more quickly, which then allowed salt water to flow upstream, altering the ecology of the river and the types of aquatic life that was able to survive the onslaught of waste from the city’s burgeoning industries. Cut off from the river by towering walls, the western part of the city fell into disrepair as development pushed further eastwards, including high-end department stores, hotels and eventually a new city hall. The arcades, as well as their natural extension, the night markets, remained busy with the undercurrents flowing despite efforts to control them.

Temples had brought the old Taoist gods back out of storage, but people had become so accustomed to praying to the Buddhist gods they simply added them all to the mix; there was no religious conflict as might have happened elsewhere; people just prayed to both. Temples in Taiwan are nothing like the hushed strictness of Western places of worship; nobody tiptoes around here. Rather, the often raucous atmospheres play a vital role in their communities as a kind of one-stop shop for various needs in life both secular and divine, accommodating the flow of life as much as the river. Need help with a test? There’s a god for that. Need help with romantic issues? Another god for that. Matters at work? Family problems? Health issues? It’s over here. For as blockages in society create discord, blockages of the flow of blood or other fluids in Western medicine or the flow of Qi in traditional Chinese medicine, are seen as the cause of illness. 

Enter a tiny, dark alley next to Longshan Temple, and breathe in the bouquet of earthy fresh aromas wafting from the towering rows of plant products in the shops, each one seemingly a portal to another world; this is Herb Alley, which dates from before Western medicine was prevalent, battling epidemics and diseases both local and brought in by successive waves of immigrants from China over the decades, serving the medicinal and other health needs of the community before large hospitals became the standard and Taiwan’s popular National Health Insurance program was initiated. In Herb Alley there’s no need to take a number and wait; simply explain your symptoms to the boss, and a concoction will be whipped up to treat what ails you.

For decades after the KMT took over, the river became a kind of theoretical presence in the hearts and minds of the city’s denizens, hidden behind walls like many things forbidden under martial law and the government’s urge for control. The waters had become too foul to swim in or fish from. Armed military police patrolled the bridges that provided the streams of scooters and buses crossing to and from work each day their only glimpses of the river itself. The economy boomed while the environment suffered.

New Channels

But the flow could not be denied; the walls of martial law came down in 1987; the military patrols disappeared and democratic reforms came one by one, including everything from direct, open multi-party democratic elections to marriage equality, making Taiwan the first Asian nation to do so. The city constructed an extensive web of subways, replacing the long-vanished canals with another kind of network. Recycling programs came online as garbage trucks plied the streets with their characteristic melodies informing residents of their impending arrival, providing yet another ebb in the flow where people could connect. 

The waves of the city’s eastward development broke on the foothills of the mountains surrounding the Taipei Basin, culminating in the construction of what would be, for the greater part of a decade, the tallest building in the world: Taipei 101. 

Dominating the skyline with its sheer size and aquamarine hue, its design resembling a stalk of bamboo but also an ancient Taoist whip, and wielding not only an impressive array of electronic displays and analog fireworks shows but the world’s fastest elevators and a sophisticated earthquake-defeating counterweight system, Taipei 101 caught the city’s focus and pitched it smoothly back from whence it had originally come; a stylized turtle on the roof of the ritzy mall at its base directs its fortune-holding gaze northward, back towards the river and the mountains at the city’s northern edge.

As for the river itself, the floodgates were reopened, no longer for wares and immigrants from overseas -Taiwan’s international airports and the ports of Keelung and Kaohsiung have long since taken over those duties. Rather, the banks of the Tamsui are where local people go to exercise, play, socialize and escape the muggy confines of the city’s crowded urban warrens. Ferries for both transit and pleasure once again began to ply the waters from Dadaocheng to Guandu and beyond. Riverside temples found a new communion; one particular riverside Earth God temple that had the unfortunate habit of flooding was fitted with hydraulic stilts that raise it above the waters during typhoons. Cargo containers were placed along the river’s banks and repurposed as trendy restaurants and bars, becoming popular with young people watching the sunset reflected in the river’s waters. Riverside parks, bicycle trails, basketball and tennis courts were built; playgrounds and parks opened.  

One such park is located in the Dadaocheng District, which, after having lain dormant for decades, experienced a renaissance as young entrepreneurs opened cafes and craft shops amid the surviving traditional Chinese medicine and cloth markets. This park features basketball courts, fountains, playgrounds and an observation deck that extends out over the river, offering lovely views. What lies underneath this park, however, is even more impressive, as well as the reason riverside activities are a more pleasant prospect than before: a vast sewage treatment plant that filters out the city’s waste before the water is released into the river. The waste is then sent north to the huge Beitou Waste Incineration complex that treats the waste before burning it in a manner so clean that the complex has become somewhat of a resort, not only featuring a large swimming pool heated by the incineration process but tennis and basketball courts, a nursery, environmental education classes and a revolving gourmet restaurant perched atop the towering 150-meter-high chimney featuring panoramic views. In the river below, speed boats pull water skiiers up and down the water. 

Neighborhoods near the old riverbanks have been coming back to life after decades of neglect, not just in the now-trendy Dadaocheng district but all up and down the river. Developers have been constructing more high-rise apartments and malls near the river as well, most notably a pair of skyscrapers located just next door to Taipei Main Station, which contains a nexus of transportation lines from the city’s modern metro system to commuter trains, the airport express, and the bullet trains that whisk passengers down to the southern port city of Kaohsiung in just an hour and a half. 

One Taiwanese company looked at the masses of ICE scooters polluting the city’s air and decided a change was needed there too: Gogoro implemented a battery-switching system for its electric scooters that made charging times and range anxiety irrelevant. More and more of the city’s buses are electric as well. A public bicycle-rental service called YouBike added last-mile convenience to the already-extensive metro system. Cards and electronic payment systems are replacing paper currency. Even temples have begun to cut down on the use of paper “ghost money,” traditionally used to pay respects to ancestors and gods, in order to reduce pollution, and the sight of massive incense and ghost money burners has become rarer at the city’s major temples, though the practice is still widespread by smaller businesses and temples.

A river is not just water; it is the flow. Taipei is the ongoing flux of its history, character and people. As the city reassesses its balance of preservation and renewal, Taipei is renewing its relationship with the river that spawned it all those centuries ago. The way society flows here meant that Taiwan barely underwent any shutdowns during the pandemic, resulting in one of the most effective responses in the world. Tourism came roaring back afterwards, skyrocketing to even higher levels than before.

Today you can sip coffee on an arcade by the ornate Japanese-era post office facing the North Gate, beyond which the riders of electric scooters wait at a traffic light in the same spot visiting Qing officials waited to gain entrance to the old walled city. Not far away, just outside the gates, the Tamsui River flows sedately past. 

*As of a 2026 renovation of the park, the entire fountain has vanished from the surface level; it remains to be seen how the Goddess will take this development.