6-Day Taipei Itinerary — Hot Springs, Jiufen & the Night Market Circuit

Dihua Street

📍 Datong District

The 19th-century trading street that made Taipei rich on tea and camphor. Baroque and Minnan shopfronts still sell dried scallops, mushrooms and herbs by the sack — walk it north to south.

Xiahai City God Temple

📍 61 Dihua Street Section 1

A tiny temple with an outsized reputation: its Yue Lao, the matchmaking deity, is credited with thousands of marriages a year. Buy the offering set at the counter if you want the full ritual.

Yongle Market

📍 21 Dihua Street Section 1

Fabric wholesalers upstairs, food below. The ground and second floors are where to eat — Lin He Fa oyster vermicelli and the century-old Taiwanese rice pudding stalls.

Dadaocheng Wharf

📍 Minsheng West Road, Datong District

Where the tea clippers once loaded. Now a riverside container-bar strip on the Tamsui River, and the best sunset in central Taipei if you time the last hour of light.

Taipei Confucius Temple

📍 275 Dalong Street, Datong District

Southern Fujian style, deliberately unadorned — no statues of Confucius, only name tablets, because likenesses were held to diminish him. Almost empty on a weekday afternoon.

Ningxia Night Market

📍 Ningxia Road, Datong District

Compact, food-only, and the most local of the big three. Taro balls, Liu Yu Zi fried taro cakes and the egg-yolk taro balls queue — one street, no clothing stalls, no tourist tat.

Longshan Temple

📍 211 Guangzhou Street, Wanhua District

Founded 1738 and rebuilt after Allied bombing in 1945. Come at opening for the morning chanting — several hundred people reciting the Heart Sutra in the front hall is the reason to be early.

Bopiliao Historic Block

📍 173 Kangding Road, Wanhua District

A preserved Qing-era street of arcaded shophouses, restored rather than rebuilt. Free, rarely crowded, and the clearest picture anywhere of what Taipei looked like before the Japanese period.

Ximending

📍 Wanhua District

Taiwan's first pedestrianised shopping district and still its loudest. Lunch at Ay-Chung Flour-Rice Noodle — eaten standing on the street, which is the whole point.

The Red House

📍 10 Chengdu Road, Ximending

An octagonal 1908 Japanese-built market hall, now a craft market and theatre. The cluster of bars behind it is the centre of Taipei's LGBTQ+ nightlife.

Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall

📍 21 Zhongshan South Road, Zhongzheng District

Eighty-nine steps for the eighty-nine years he lived. The hourly changing of the honour guard is the draw; the basement exhibition on Taiwan's democratisation is the more interesting half.

Nanjichang Night Market

📍 Zhonghua Road Section 2, Zhongzheng District

The night market Taipei residents name when asked which one they actually go to. Michelin-listed Songqing Zhoujia sesame-oil chicken, hidden inside a 1960s housing estate.

Beitou Hot Spring Museum

📍 2 Zhongshan Road, Beitou District

The 1913 Japanese public bathhouse that started the whole spa district — half brick Victorian, half tatami. Free entry, socks off at the door.

Beitou Thermal Valley

📍 Zhongshan Road, Beitou District

A steaming green sulphur lake at 80–90°C, the source of Beitou's water. Known locally as Hell Valley; the boardwalk gets you close enough to feel it on your face.

Taipei Public Library Beitou Branch

📍 251 Guangming Road, Beitou District

Taiwan's first green library — timber, solar roof, rainwater harvesting, built into the park like a treehouse. Silence enforced, which after Thermal Valley is welcome.

Tamsui Old Street

📍 Zhongzheng Road, Tamsui District

Forty minutes north on the same red MRT line. A-gei (fried tofu stuffed with vermicelli in fish-paste), iron eggs and giant ice creams, eaten walking along the river.

Fort San Domingo

📍 1 Lane 28 Zhongzheng Road, Tamsui District

Built by the Spanish in 1628, taken by the Dutch, then leased to the British as a consulate until 1980 — four flags on one hill. The consular residence next door is the better building.

Tamsui Fisherman's Wharf

📍 Tamsui District

Lover's Bridge and the boardwalk face due west into the Taiwan Strait, which makes this the sunset spot in greater Taipei. Ferry back to Tamsui rather than the bus.

Xiaoyoukeng Recreation Area

📍 Yangmingshan National Park, Beitou District

A post-volcanic fumarole field venting sulphur straight out of the mountainside, twenty minutes from the last city bus stop. Go first — the cloud usually closes in by midday.

Qingtiangang Grassland

📍 Yangmingshan National Park

A flat lava terrace turned into open grassland, grazed by semi-wild water buffalo left from the Japanese ranching era. The loop trail takes forty minutes and is stroller-flat.

Yangmingshan National Park

📍 Zhuzihu, Beitou District

Lunch at the Zhuzihu (Bamboo Lake) farm restaurants on the way down — mountain vegetables, free-range chicken, and calla lily fields if you are here between March and May.

National Palace Museum

📍 221 Zhishan Road Section 2, Shilin District

The imperial collection evacuated from Beijing in 1948 — nearly 700,000 objects, rotated a fraction at a time. Head straight for the jade cabbage and the Ru ware, then wander.

Shilin Official Residence

📍 60 Fulin Road, Shilin District

Chiang Kai-shek's Taipei home, opened to the public only in 1996. The rose garden and the small chapel Soong Mei-ling built are the parts worth the walk.

Shilin Night Market

📍 101 Jihe Road, Shilin District

The biggest and the most touristed, and still worth one visit. Go down to the basement food court for the oyster omelette and Hot-Star fried chicken above the crowd line.

Houtong Cat Village

📍 Ruifang District, New Taipei City

A dead coal-mining town that reinvented itself around a hundred-odd resident cats. The coal-mine museum on the far side of the footbridge is genuinely good and almost nobody crosses to it.

Shifen Waterfall

📍 Pingxi District, New Taipei City

Taiwan's widest waterfall, a 40-metre horseshoe often called the Little Niagara. Free since 2019; the suspension-bridge approach from the car park takes fifteen minutes.

Shifen Old Street

📍 Pingxi District, New Taipei City

Shops open directly onto a live railway track, and the sky-lantern releases happen between trains. Write the wish on all four sides — each colour stands for a different kind of luck.

Jiufen Old Street

📍 Jiufen, Ruifang District, New Taipei City

A gold-rush hillside town of stepped alleys and red lanterns. Eat taro balls at Ah Gan Yi and peanut ice-cream rolls on Jishan Street before the coach crowd arrives at four.

Amei Tea House

📍 20 Shishi Lane, Jiufen

The lantern-covered teahouse stacked above the valley that everyone photographs. Sit upstairs with a pot of Oriental Beauty and watch the light go over Keelung Mountain.

Keelung Miaokou Night Market

📍 Rensan Road, Ren'ai District, Keelung

A harbour night market built around Dianji Temple, numbered stall by stall. Seafood is the point: crab soup, one-bite sausage, and the nutritious sandwich at stall 58.

Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall

📍 505 Renai Road Section 4, Xinyi District

A sweeping yellow-tiled roof with Taipei 101 framed behind it — the postcard shot of modern Taipei. Honour-guard changing on the hour inside.

Taipei 101 Observatory

📍 7 Xinyi Road Section 5, Xinyi District

The 89th-floor deck and the 660-tonne golden tuned mass damper that keeps the tower still in a typhoon. Book the first slot for the clearest air of the day.

Maokong Gondola

📍 Taipei Zoo Station, Wenshan District

A 4-kilometre cable car up the tea-growing hillside. Queue for a Crystal Cabin with the glass floor — the wait is longer and the ride over the forest is worth it.

Yao Yue Teahouse

📍 Lane 40 Zhinan Road Section 3, Maokong

Brew your own Tieguanyin on a hillside terrace over the city, and order the tea-leaf dishes — tea-oil noodles, fried chicken with tea. No rush; that is the local custom here.

Xiangshan Hiking Trail

📍 Elephant Mountain, Xinyi District

Twenty minutes of stone steps for the classic Taipei 101 sunset. Climb past the first crowded platform to the Six Giant Rocks — the view is the same and the space is not.

Raohe Street Night Market

📍 Raohe Street, Songshan District

Enter under the Ciyou Temple arch and join the queue at the first stall on the right — Fuzhou pepper buns, baked against the wall of a clay oven. One straight street, easy to do end to end.