Taipei, Taiwan

Updated 2026-09-22 · 11 min read · Researched and edited by PoppaTrip

The city is the easy part. The ring around it is the trip.

Taipei sits in a basin with hills on every side, and that shape does most of the planning for you. The built-up middle is small, and five metro lines across 118 stations reach nearly everything a visitor wants. A ride costs between NT$20 and NT$65, which is roughly sixty cents to two dollars. Trains start at six in the morning and the last ones finish their runs by one. You buy an EasyCard for NT$100 at any station or convenience store, tap in and out, and stop thinking about tickets for the rest of the week. The same card pays for buses, the gondola up to the tea hills, and a bottle of water at the 7-Eleven on the corner.

Arriving is the same story. The Taoyuan Airport MRT runs an express train into Taipei Main Station in about 35 minutes for NT$160, roughly five dollars, every fifteen minutes all day. Taipei Main also runs in-town check-in and bag drop for some airlines, so on the last morning you can hand over your suitcase in the city and spend the day without it. Nothing about getting into or around this city is hard, and nothing about it is expensive.

Which means the thing that decides whether a Taipei trip is good is not the city. It is the ring: the sulfur valley at Beitou, the tea ridge at Maokong, the gold-mining street at Jiufen, the carved rock coast at Yehliu, the river mouth at Tamsui. None of them is much more than an hour out. Every one of them eats a half-day at least, and two of them eat a whole one.

So plan those first and let the city fill the gaps around them. Three days of museums and night markets with a day trip bolted on at the end is the wrong shape, because the day trips are the part you will describe to people when you get home. One more thing to settle before you fix the order: check which day of the week you are doing what. Monday closes more of this city than anyone expects, and we come back to that below.

The whole city, grouped by metro line — and the day trips that leave it entirely

Taipei Metro (the operator's own name for it; most riders just say MRT) runs five lines that carry almost everywhere in this guide, and thinking in lines instead of neighborhoods makes the order of a day obvious. Station names, lines and exits below are from the operator's own site (english.metro.taipei) and each venue's own page, read September 2026; where a source disagreed with itself or I could not reach a venue's page this session, that is said plainly rather than guessed.

The red line (Tamsui-Xinyi line) is the spine, and it carries the most single-line stretches in this guide. It runs Tamsui at the northern end, down through Beitou — with a short branch to Xinbeitou for the hot springs — through Taipei Main Station and Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, and on to Taipei 101 Station and Xiangshan at the southern end. Taipei 101 Station's exit 4 opens straight into the tower's B1 food court; Xiangshan, the terminus, is the stop for Elephant Mountain — check the station's exit map for the trailhead exit. Shilin Night Market is also on this line, but the stop for it is Jiantan — check the station exit map there too — not the station actually named Shilin, which is a real walk further and the single most common wrong turn visitors make. Tamsui itself, at the far end, is both a stop and a destination.

The blue line (Bannan line) is the other one that strings several of these places together directly: Longshan Temple, then Ximen for Ximending, then Taipei Main Station, then Shandao Temple — the stop for Fu Hang Soy Milk, exit 5 — then Zhongxiao Xinsheng, one way in to Huashan 1914. Longshan Temple station sits right by the temple gate; the temple's own site would not load this session to confirm an exit number, so check the station's exit map rather than trust a number here. Ximen is also where the green line crosses, and it is the stop for Ximending; sources disagree on which numbered exit sits closest to the Red House, so check the map posted in the station rather than a number printed anywhere else.

The green line (Songshan-Xindian line) matters here for two stops: Songshan itself, for Raohe Night Market, and Beimen, for the southern end of Dihua Street — check the station exit maps at both, since the exit numbers are not confirmed on an operator or market page. It also crosses the red line at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall station, whose own page gives exit 3 as an eight-minute walk, exit 5 as nine and exit 6 as thirteen.

The orange line (Zhonghe-Xinlu line) does not carry a full stop of its own in this guide, but it interchanges at two stations that do: Daqiaotou, for the north end of Dihua Street — check the station exit map, since the exit number is not confirmed on an operator page — and Zhongxiao Xinsheng, exit 1, for Huashan 1914 — the fastest way in of its two stations, at about three minutes' walk, against five from Shandao Temple.

The brown line (Wenhu line) has exactly one job in this guide: it ends at Taipei Zoo station, and the Maokong Gondola's own platform is about 350 meters on foot from there. Nothing else on this list sits on this line.

And three of the best days here are not on the metro at all, which is worth saying outright rather than forcing a line onto them. Jiufen and Shifen are both reached by Taiwan Railway — the national rail operator, a separate system from the city metro — out to Ruifang, then a bus for Jiufen or the Pingxi branch train for Shifen. Yehliu is a Kuo-Kuang bus straight from the terminal beside Taipei Main Station, no train at all. Build those days around the bus and train timetables, not the MRT map.

Six in the morning at a temple that has been rebuilt more than once, on the blue line

Take the blue line to Longshan Temple station; the gate is about two minutes down Guangzhou Street, and the temple's own site would not load this session to confirm which exit is closest, so check the station's exit map. Longshan Temple opens at six and holds three chanting sessions a day, the first running from six to a quarter to seven. Go to that one. It is free, it is a working temple rather than an exhibit, and at that hour the courtyard belongs to people who came on their way to work. The temple was founded in 1738 by settlers from Fujian, in the district then called Bangka and now called Wanhua. It is dedicated to Guanyin, but the rear hall is a row of shrines to entirely different gods: Mazu for the sea, Wenchang for examinations, Guan Yu, Hua Tuo for medicine, and Yue Lao, who is in the business of matching people up.

What you actually watch is the divination. People kneel with a pair of red crescent-shaped wooden blocks, ask a question, and drop them on the stone; the way they land is the answer, and a wrong combination means ask again. The clatter goes on continuously under the chanting and the incense. Almost nothing you are standing in is original, incidentally. The temple was hit by American bombers on 31 May 1945 during the Taihoku air raid, which took out the main building and the left corridor along with a great deal that could not be replaced, and it was rebuilt after the war. In this city, 1738 is a date for the institution, not for the woodwork.

A mile and a half north, the street to walk is Dihua. The nearest stop for the north end is Daqiaotou station on the orange line; for the south end it's Beimen station on the green line — check each station's exit map, since the exit numbers are not confirmed on an operator page. This is Dadaocheng, the district that grew rich on tea after the port at Tamsui opened to foreign trade, and the shophouse fronts along it are a straightforward record of who was making money and when: southern Fujianese work, then Western, then full baroque plasterwork above the shop signs. It still trades what it always traded, which is the pleasure of it. Sacks of dried mushrooms and scallops, cured sausage hanging in rows, medicinal herbs weighed out by hand, and tea sold by people who will let you taste three before you decide. Halfway along is the Xiahai City God Temple, built in 1856 and barely bigger than a room, whose Yue Lao is the famous one people fly in to petition. In the weeks before Lunar New Year the whole street turns into the biggest holiday market in Taipei and you will not be able to move.

Ximending, in the afternoon, is the other kind of old. The one building to look at is the Red House, put up in 1908 as the first government-built public market in Taiwan, an octagonal red-brick hall that has since been a bookstore, a cinema and a theater, with a run of bars along the square behind it. The rest is a pedestrian grid of chain stores, arcades, tattoo parlors and teenagers, loud after dark and busy with street performers. It is worth an hour. We would not give it more than that, and it is not a reason to come to Taipei. Ximen station, where the blue line and the green line cross, sits right at the district's edge; sources disagree on which exit is closest to the Red House, so check the exit map posted in the station rather than trust a number here.

A 37-second elevator, and the hill you climb to look back at it — one stop on the red line

Taipei 101 is 508 meters and held the title of tallest building in the world from its opening at the end of 2004 until the Burj Khalifa took it. The tower itself is fine. The elevator is the thing worth paying for: Toshiba built it to run at 1,010 meters a minute, it covers the fifth floor to the 89th in 37 seconds, and it took the Guinness record on 16 December 2004. Your ears will tell you when it starts. A ticket is NT$600, about nineteen dollars, and gets you the enclosed decks on 88 and 89 and the open-air one on 91. The metro stop, on the red line, is named Taipei 101 Station; exit 4 opens straight into the tower's B1 food court, the shortest way in of any exit.

The part people get wrong is the damper, so here it is accurately. A 660-metric-ton steel pendulum hangs from the 92nd floor down to the 88th, and it is visible from the 88th floor upward. You do not walk around it; you stand underneath it and look up at a sphere of welded steel plate the width of a room, hanging on cables, quietly absorbing the sway of the building above you. In a typhoon it moves enough to watch. It has been given a cartoon face and a name, which is either charming or a waste of a very serious object, depending on your temperament.

Then go and look back at it from Elephant Mountain, which is the better half of the same afternoon. Take the red line to Xiangshan, leave by exit 2, and walk about ten minutes to the trailhead. From there it is roughly 600 steps, and 20 to 30 minutes at a steady pace, to the first viewing platform. It is free and it is genuinely steep; the stairs do not let up, and in summer you will arrive wrung out. Above the platform is a cluster of large boulders, the Six Giant Rocks, which people climb one at a time to get the photograph of the tower framed against the rest of the city.

Everyone goes at sunset, so be at the top half an hour before it and expect a queue at the rocks. If you would rather have the place to yourself, go up at eight in the morning instead: the light is flatter and the view is the same view. Below, Xinyi is malls, cinemas and rooftop bars, pleasant enough to walk through and not much more, and it is where the fireworks come off the tower on New Year's Eve.

Two night markets, and the case for the smaller one — the red line, then the green

Shilin is the biggest and the one everyone has heard of. It runs from about four in the afternoon until midnight, spread across a street-level maze of stalls and games with a food court underneath, and the queues form around the same two or three things: the fried chicken cutlet the size of a face, the oyster omelet, the pepper-and-salt mushrooms. It is a good night out and it is unapologetically a tourist night out. If you have one night market in you, though, we would spend it elsewhere. The stop is Jiantan station on the red line — not the station actually named Shilin, which sits further off and is the single most common wrong turn visitors make here; check the station's exit map for the closest exit.

Raohe is one straight pedestrian street about 600 meters long with a gate at each end and the Songshan Ciyou Temple at one of them, and the shape is exactly why it is better. You cannot get lost, you cannot miss half of it, and you can walk the whole thing in an hour without eating and in three hours if you do it properly. Several of its stalls hold Michelin Bib Gourmand listings, more than any other market in the city. The one to line up for is the Fuzhou pepper bun stall right by the temple gate: minced pork and a great deal of spring onion and black pepper, sealed in dough and slapped onto the inside wall of a clay oven, handed over hot enough to be a hazard. The stop is Songshan station on the green line, with the market gate and the temple across the street — check the station exit map, since the exit number is not confirmed on an operator or market page.

Bring cash, in small notes. Night market stalls are a cash business almost without exception, your EasyCard will work at the convenience store on the corner and nowhere on the street itself, and a NT$1,000 note is awkward at a stall. Tipping is not done and nobody will expect it.

The counterweight to all this is breakfast, which in Taipei is its own institution and almost over by the time visitors get up. Fu Hang Soy Milk, on the second floor of the Huashan Market building, is the one worth setting an alarm for: hot or cold soy milk, flaky sesame flatbread, fried dough sticks, rice rolls. It opens at 5:30 and runs to 12:30 or until it sells out, Tuesday through Sunday, closed Monday, five minutes from Shandao Temple station by exit 5. The queue can run from fifteen minutes to well over an hour, and it moves. And since someone always asks: the original Din Tai Fung started life in 1958 as a shop selling cooking oil, and only turned into a dumpling house in 1972.

The white hall, the museum, and the Monday problem — the red line, a bus, and the blue

The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall is a white marble block under a blue octagonal roof at the top of 89 steps, one for each year of his life, with the National Theater and the National Concert Hall facing each other across the plaza below. The changing of the honor guard is the reason most people time their visit, and the important thing is that it is no longer where the guidebooks say it is. On 15 July 2024 the ceremony was moved out of the statue chamber upstairs and down onto Liberty Square in the open air. The Ministry of Culture said plainly that it did not want the state performing a ritual around a statue of an authoritarian leader. It now runs on the hour from nine until five, takes about ten minutes, involves three soldiers and a great deal of very slow rifle drill, and is canceled when it rains. The station, where the red line and the green line cross, is named Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall; its own page gives exit 3 as an eight-minute walk, exit 5 as nine minutes and exit 6 as thirteen, or Dongmen station on the orange line, also eight minutes from exit 3.

The National Palace Museum holds one of the largest collections of Chinese imperial art anywhere, and the usual one-line version of how it got here is wrong in a way that is worth correcting. The crates left the Forbidden City between 6 February and 15 May 1933, ahead of the Japanese army, not at the end of the civil war, and they then spent more than a decade being moved around inland China. Only in the last months of the war between the Nationalists and the Communists, between December 1948 and February 1949, did 2,972 of those crates cross to Taiwan. That was around a fifth of what had gone south in the first place. The museum now counts roughly 699,000 pieces and can show about one percent of them at a time.

Practically: NT$350, about eleven dollars, open Tuesday to Sunday from nine to five, closed Monday apart from a published list of exception Mondays on the museum's own site. The museum sits off the metro network itself: its own transportation page names Shilin station on the red line, then the R30 bus straight to the Exhibition Hall I entrance, about fifteen minutes — a direct read of that page failed this session on a certificate error, so check the station's exit map rather than a number here. Give it three hours minimum. And check before you go whether the jadeite cabbage is actually in Taipei — it rotates with the museum's southern branch down in Chiayi, a couple of hours south, and people do turn up for it on a day it is not there.

Which brings us to Monday, because the National Palace Museum is not the only thing shut. The Maokong gondola closes on Mondays for maintenance, except on national holidays and the first Monday of the month. Beitou's Thermal Valley is closed. So is the Beitou Hot Spring Museum. So is Fu Hang Soy Milk. A Monday in Taipei needs planning around, and the answer to it is Huashan 1914, which opened in 1914 as the Taihoku Winery, made drinks here until the operation moved out in 1987, sat empty for a decade and reopened as a creative park at the end of 2005. The red-brick sheds and the pipework were left more or less as they were and filled with galleries, an art-house cinema, design shops and a rotating program of small exhibitions. The grounds are open at any hour and the shops run from about eleven in the morning to ten at night. It sits by Zhongxiao Xinsheng station, exit 1, where the blue line and the orange line cross, or Shandao Temple station, exit 6, on the blue line alone.

Sulfur in the north, tea on the ridge in the south — the red line's Xinbeitou branch, then the brown line

Beitou is up the red line to the north, where you change at Beitou station for a single stop on the short branch line to Xinbeitou, and you smell it before you see it. The Thermal Valley is a pool of pale green-blue water in a hollow, so hot that the whole basin sits under steam and the far side disappears. It runs to around 100 degrees Celsius, which is why the fence is there and why the local name translates as Hell Valley. It costs nothing, it is open Tuesday to Sunday from nine to five, and it is closed on Mondays. Look, do not soak.

The soaking happens on the streets around it. The Hot Spring Museum, free and also closed Mondays, was built in 1913 as a public bathhouse and was once the largest in East Asia; the ground floor is the old bath itself, drained, with its arched windows intact, and you go round in slippers. The bathing model here is worth understanding before you arrive, because it is not the Japanese one: what most places rent you is a private room by the hour, with its own hot and cold pools, rather than a communal floor you share. Several of them are open through the night. We wrote up the round-the-clock end of that in a separate piece on bathhouses you can sleep in.

For the opposite of all this, go south. The Maokong gondola leaves from beside Taipei Zoo station and climbs 4.03 kilometers over four stations in about twelve minutes, swinging around two corners on the way up and over a ridge of tea terraces and temple roofs. A single ride bought at the machine is NT$180, about six dollars, and NT$50 more puts you in a crystal cabin with a glass floor. It runs nine to nine on weekdays and nine to ten on holidays, and it is closed on Mondays for maintenance except on national holidays and the first Monday of the month. Taipei Zoo station is the southern terminus of the brown line, and the gondola's own platform is about 350 meters on foot from the exit.

At the top is Maokong, a scatter of teahouses along a ridge road above Muzha, which is the tea district that gives Muzha Tieguanyin its name: a heavily roasted oolong, darker and more toasted than most people expect an oolong to be. The teahouses serve it by the pot with a flask of hot water and no hurry at all, several have terraces facing the city, and the thing to do is go up in the late afternoon and come down after dark, when Taipei 101 is lit up in the middle of a basin full of lights. It is the best two hours in this city for the money.

The day everybody does, and the two nobody mentions — off the metro entirely, except Tamsui on the red line

The standard day out is Jiufen and Shifen together, and it works. Take a train from Taipei Main to Ruifang, which is about 40 minutes, then bus 788 from outside the station up the hill to Jiufen — twelve minutes, NT$15 on your card. Jiufen boomed as a gold-mining town under Japanese rule and emptied out when the gold did, and what is left is a stepped hillside of alleys too narrow for cars, hung with red lanterns, with teahouses on the seaward side looking down at the water. One correction while you are there: Hayao Miyazaki has said Jiufen was not the inspiration for Spirited Away and that he had not heard of the place until the rumor started. The alleys are worth the climb anyway. Just do not arrive expecting a film set.

Shifen is back down at Ruifang and out along the Pingxi branch line, a single-track railway up a green valley. The one-day pass for the branch is NT$80, about two and a half dollars, and it is sold at Ruifang and at the small stations along the line. Shifen Old Street is built along the live track, close enough that the shopfronts have to pull their awnings in when a train comes through, and between trains people write wishes on paper lanterns in the middle of the rails and send them up. A lantern runs NT$200 to NT$350 depending on how many colors you want. The waterfall is a short walk down the valley and free to enter: 20 meters high and 40 meters wide, which is the right way round to say it, and the reason the local nickname is the Little Niagara. It opens at nine and closes at six from June to September and at five the rest of the year.

Be realistic about that day. Jiufen and Shifen in one go is a long one with two bus or train changes in the middle, and both places are at their most crowded in the block of hours when every tour arrives. If you have the time, split them and do the Pingxi line properly, getting off at more than one station.

The two people skip are worth more than their reputation. Yehliu, up the north coast, is a low cape of sandstone that the wind and sea have eaten into hundreds of mushroom-stemmed and honeycombed shapes — the Queen's Head is the famous one, and its neck is thinning measurably year by year, which is now the subject of a preservation effort. Entry is NT$120, about four dollars, and it opens at eight and closes at five, or six in summer; bus 1815 from the Kuo-Kuang terminal near Taipei Main runs every twenty minutes. And Tamsui is simply the end of the red line, 40 minutes from the middle of town for the price of a metro ride: an old street of snack stalls at the river mouth, a ferry across to Fisherman's Wharf and its Lover's Bridge, and the most reliable sunset anywhere near this city. Eat an a-gei, the local fried tofu pouch stuffed with noodles, which is better than that description.

It rains here. That changes the order, not the plan.

Taipei takes about 1,900 millimeters of rain a year across roughly 163 days of it. That is not a wet season and a dry season; it is a city where it can rain in any month, and the useful response is to keep an indoor option and an outdoor option live for every half-day rather than to try to dodge it.

Two things are worth planning around properly. The first is the plum rains of May and June, a stalled front that can sit over the island for days at a stretch and turn the hills into low cloud. The second is typhoon season, which runs roughly June to October and concentrates in July to September. A typhoon does not merely rain on you: it closes the gondola, the ferries, the coastal parks and the trails, and occasionally the city itself for a day.

What is left is a good calendar. October is the reliable month, with the rains done and the typhoon risk dropping away. March and April are pleasant with a real chance of getting wet. Winter is mild — the January mean daily low is 14.2 degrees Celsius, about 57 Fahrenheit — but the northeast monsoon makes the north of the island gray and damp for weeks, which is, admittedly, the ideal excuse to be in Beitou up to your neck in hot water. July is the one to think hard about: the mean daily high is 34.8 degrees, around 95 Fahrenheit, with humidity to match, and that is a museum-and-bathhouse month rather than a stair-climbing one.

Three last practical things. The tap water is treated to a drinkable standard and the city is full of free filtered-water stations, in metro stations and public buildings, but most households here still boil it before drinking, on account of what may be sitting in an old building's pipes and rooftop tank rather than anything wrong with the supply. Tipping is not part of the culture and no one will chase you down the street; mid-range and hotel restaurants add a 10 percent service charge to the bill, which is not a tip and is printed on the menu. And carry cash, because the markets, the small breakfast shops and a good many of the best places to eat take nothing else.

More on this: Beitou's private hot-spring rooms, and the bathhouses you can sleep in →
Before you book: how to order a day around rain, which Taipei gets in every month →
Two hours away: Tokyo, walked one neighborhood at a time →

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Researched, edited, and last updated 2026-09-22. Opening hours, ticketing and prices change — check them before you rely on them.