Explore the real-world places that appear in Taiwan Travelogue by Shuang-zi Yang. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Keelung Harbor, Taiwan Governor-General's Office, Ximen District (Honmachi), Taipei Railway Station (Taihoku Station), Dadaocheng (Taitōtei) and 8 more.
Keelung Port — Chizuko's arrival in Taiwan
It is through Keelung Harbor that Aoyama Chizuko first sets foot on Taiwan in May 1938, having sailed from Nagasaki. The harbor marks the threshold between her known world and the island that will transform her. She arrives as an official guest of the Japanese colonial government, a status she regards with ambivalence — grateful for the passage, contemptuous of the imperial agenda that engineered it. From this port, the adventure and the heartbreak begin.
Keelung (then called Kirun under Japanese rule) was Taiwan's principal northern port throughout the colonial period from 1895 to 1945. The Japanese invested heavily in expanding its facilities to facilitate trade, troop movements, and administrative traffic between the island and the metropole. It was the arrival point for countless Japanese officials, writers, and travelers making the crossing from the home islands.
Keelung remains a major port city and ferry terminal, connecting Taiwan to outlying islands. The harbor area has been revitalized with a waterfront cultural park, night markets, and the Zhengbin Fishing Port, known for its colorful painted buildings. A rich mix of old colonial-era architecture and modern port infrastructure can still be found throughout the city.
Visit: Keelung Harbor Wharf Cultural District (landmark)
Zhongzheng District, Taipei — Seat of colonial authority
The Governor-General's Office represents everything Chizuko has been invited to perform her appreciation for — and everything she quietly refuses to serve. The official banquets organized by the colonial government are staged here in the shadow of this grand building, filled with Japanese functionaries who want her literary presence as a kind of cultural endorsement. Chizuko deflects their agenda with polite disinterest, turning her gaze instead toward the street food and real lives just beyond its imposing gates.
Completed in 1919, the Taiwan Governor-General's Office was the administrative heart of Japanese colonial rule over Taiwan. Designed in a Western neo-baroque style by architect Ueda Morizo, the red-brick building with its distinctive central tower was a deliberate symbol of imperial permanence and civilizational prestige. It served as the colonial seat of power from 1919 until Japan's defeat in 1945.
The building now serves as the Presidential Office Building of the Republic of China (Taiwan). It is a major national landmark and one of Taipei's most recognizable structures. Guided tours are available to the public on certain days and during special events.
Visit: Presidential Office Building (historic site)
Wanhua District, Taipei — Japanese commercial and cultural quarter
Chizuru guides Chizuko through the lively commercial streets of what was then known as Honmachi, the beating heart of Japanese civilian life in Taipei. Here, amid bookshops, teahouses, and covered arcades, the two women begin the careful, layered conversations about language and literature that define their relationship. Chizuko is fascinated by the way Chizuru moves between Japanese and Taiwanese, effortlessly inhabiting both tongues, belonging fully to neither colonial category.
During the Japanese colonial era, the area around present-day Ximending was known as Honmachi and served as the primary shopping and entertainment district for the Japanese settler population. It featured department stores, cinemas, restaurants, and bookshops modeled on Japanese mainland commercial culture. The area was a microcosm of colonial society's layered hierarchies.
Ximending is now one of Taipei's most vibrant youth culture and shopping districts, famous for its pedestrian mall, street art, independent boutiques, and film culture. Some Japanese-era buildings remain embedded among the modern storefronts. The Red House Theater, a Japanese-era octagonal market building, still stands as a cultural venue and landmark.
Visit: Ximending Pedestrian District & Red House Theater (landmark)
Zhongzheng District, Taipei — Hub of island-wide travel
It is from Taipei's central railway station that Chizuko and Chizuru board the trains that carry them across the island — south toward Tainan, east into the mountains, through the sugarcane fields and coastal plains that Chizuko catalogues with a novelist's hungry eye. The train compartments become spaces of enforced closeness, where conversation ripens into something more charged. Chizuko watches Chizuru's profile against the passing landscape and feels the widening of her infatuation.
Under Japanese colonial rule, the Taiwan Governor-General's Railway expanded dramatically, and Taihoku Station (present-day Taipei) became the northern terminus of the Western Trunk Line running the length of the island. Built in a grand Japanese imperial style, the station was the administrative and logistical center of colonial Taiwan's rail network, completed in its major form by the 1910s.
Taipei Main Station is one of the largest and busiest transportation hubs in East Asia, serving the Taiwan Railways Administration, the High Speed Rail, the Taipei Metro, and intercity buses. The current station building dates from 1989. Underground shopping malls extend beneath it across much of the surrounding district.
Visit: Taipei Main Station (landmark)
Datong District, Taipei — Old merchants' quarter and market streets
Chizuru brings Chizuko to Dadaocheng, Taipei's historic Taiwanese merchant quarter, where tea merchants and traditional apothecaries line the old streets. Here Chizuko tastes winter melon tea for the first time, pressing Chizuru to explain every ingredient, every preparation. The market is one of the novel's great sensory passages — Chizuko catalogues smells and textures with the fervor of a pilgrim, while Chizuru watches her with an expression that mixes amusement, tenderness, and something more guarded.
Dadaocheng flourished from the mid-19th century as Taipei's premier trading district, built on the wealth of tea, camphor, and fabric exports. During the Japanese colonial period it remained a distinctly Taiwanese commercial and cultural enclave, distinct from the Japanese settler districts. Its nineteenth-century Baroque-style shophouses were built by wealthy Taiwanese merchants adapting Western architectural fashions.
Dadaocheng is one of Taipei's best-preserved historic neighborhoods, with many of its Qing and Japanese-era shophouses intact and now converted into tea shops, design studios, cultural spaces, and restaurants. The Dihua Street market remains active, particularly during Lunar New Year. It is a major heritage tourism destination.
Visit: Dihua Street Historic District (historic site)
Miaokou area, Keelung — Street food and braised pork rice
One of the novel's recurring pleasures is Chizuko's enormous, unselfconscious appetite, and it is at night markets like Keelung's Miaokou that this appetite finds its fullest expression. Chizuru orders braised pork rice, oyster noodles, and fishball soup, watching with delight as Chizuko devours bowl after bowl without embarrassment. Food, for Chizuko, is the truest language of the island — and Chizuru, who mediates it for her, becomes its living embodiment. These shared meals are among the most intimate moments between the two women.
Keelung's Miaokou Night Market grew up around the Dianji Temple and has been a center of local street food culture since at least the Japanese colonial era. The night market tradition across Taiwan intensified during the colonial period as urban populations grew and street food vendors clustered near temples and transportation nodes.
Keelung's Miaokou Night Market remains one of Taiwan's most famous and beloved night markets, renowned for its seafood and traditional snacks. It operates nightly and draws visitors from across Taiwan and internationally. The market's dense rows of stalls beside the temple have remained largely unchanged in character for generations.
Visit: Keelung Miaokou Night Market (landmark)
Historic southern city — Colonial Taiwan's oldest capital
Chizuko and Chizuru travel south by train to Tainan, Taiwan's oldest city and the seat of earlier Dutch and Qing Chinese rule before Japanese colonization. Chizuru serves as guide and interpreter through layers of the city's history — pointing out temples that predate Japanese rule, streets that carry the palimpsest of multiple empires. Chizuko is struck by how the colonial present sits so lightly over such a deep past, and the observation sharpens her awareness of her own position as a Japanese visitor.
Tainan was the island's capital under Dutch colonial rule (1624–1662) and remained the most important city during the Qing dynasty period. After Japanese annexation in 1895, Tainan retained cultural and historical significance even as administrative power shifted north to Taipei. The city's numerous temples, forts, and historic districts make it Taiwan's richest site of pre-Japanese history.
Tainan is widely celebrated as Taiwan's 'City of History' and 'Food Capital.' It preserves more historic temples, old streets, and colonial-era buildings than any other Taiwanese city. Major attractions include Chihkan Tower, Anping Fort, and dozens of old temples. It was elevated to a special municipality in 2010.
Visit: Tainan Historic District (historic site)
Chiayi to Alishan, central Taiwan — Mountain train journey
Chizuru arranges a journey on the Alishan Forest Railway into the high central mountains, one of the most emotionally heightened sequences in the novel. As the narrow-gauge train climbs through cypress and cedar forests into the clouds, Chizuko feels the island's vast, indifferent landscape pressing against the intimacy of their shared compartment. She reaches toward Chizuru; Chizuru gently, unreadably, recedes. The mountains here function as a metaphor for what Chizuko cannot fully access — the interior life of a colonized person.
The Alishan Forest Railway was constructed by the Japanese colonial government between 1906 and 1912, initially to harvest Taiwan's ancient cypress forests. The narrow-gauge railway climbs from approximately 30 meters elevation at Chiayi to over 2,200 meters at Alishan, passing through multiple climate zones. It was one of the engineering marvels of Japanese colonial Taiwan.
The Alishan Forest Railway continues to operate as a heritage railway and major tourist attraction, carrying visitors through spectacular mountain scenery to Alishan National Scenic Area. Service has been periodically disrupted by typhoon damage and is regularly restored. The area is famous for its sea of clouds and cherry blossoms.
Visit: Alishan National Scenic Area & Forest Railway (park)
Central Taiwan — Midpoint of the Western Trunk Line
Taichung appears in the novel as a stopover on one of Chizuko and Chizuru's train journeys along the western plain. Here, in a teahouse near the station, Chizuko attempts one of her most direct and vulnerable conversations with Chizuru — pressing her to speak about her own desires, her own sense of self beneath the role of interpreter. Chizuru deflects with characteristic elegance, redirecting the conversation toward the tea, the climate, the sugarcane visible through the window. Chizuko feels the distance between them as a kind of grief.
Taichung was planned and developed as a model colonial city by the Japanese, who laid out its grid streets and civic buildings in the early twentieth century. It became an important administrative, commercial, and cultural hub in the island's central region. The Japanese-era train station, completed in 1917, was a beautifully designed Renaissance Revival structure.
Taichung is now Taiwan's third-largest city. The old Japanese-era train station has been preserved as a heritage landmark beside the new elevated station. The city is known for its cultural institutions, bubble tea culture (often credited as its invention), and the National Museum of Natural Science.
Visit: Taichung City Cultural Heritage Site (Old Station) (historic site)
Northern Taipei coast — Colonial-era port town and evening walks
Chizuru takes Chizuko on a day trip to Tamsui, the old northern port at the mouth of the river, where the light off the water is famous at dusk. Walking along the waterfront, Chizuko reaches for Chizuru's hand; the gesture is not refused but not quite accepted. In Tamsui, where so many former colonial powers — Spanish, Dutch, British, Japanese — have left their marks in forts and buildings, the novel meditates on the sediment of empire and the impossibility of untangled intimacy between colonizer and colonized.
Tamsui has one of the richest colonial histories of any Taiwanese town, having been a Spanish fort site from 1628, a Dutch trading post, a British treaty port, and finally a significant node in Japanese colonial Taiwan. Its historic churches, forts, and old streets accumulated the architectural traces of each successive power. The red-brick Fort San Domingo (originally Dutch, later British consular residence) is its most iconic landmark.
Tamsui is a popular day-trip destination from Taipei, accessible by metro. The waterfront promenade, old streets, and historic sites including Fort San Domingo and the former British Consulate are open to visitors. The town is also famous for its iron eggs, fish balls, and other traditional snacks.
Visit: Fort San Domingo & Tamsui Historic Buildings (historic site)
Northeastern mountains above Ruifang — Hillside village
Chizuko and Chizuru make an excursion to the steep hillside villages of the northeastern coast, where the old gold-mining settlements cling to the cliffs above the sea. The narrow stone staircases, teahouses suspended over the valley, and the ever-present sound of wind and water create one of the novel's most atmospheric settings. Here Chizuko confesses, as directly as she ever does, that she has grown to love Chizuru — and Chizuru, looking out at the grey Pacific, does not answer for a long time.
Jiufen and the surrounding northeastern mountain area boomed as a gold-mining district in the late nineteenth century, and the Japanese colonial government administered its mines intensively. The steep hillside townscape developed organically around the mining operations, producing the distinctive vertical architecture of stone steps, narrow lanes, and stacked teahouses that define the area.
Jiufen is one of Taiwan's most celebrated and photographed heritage towns, famous for its red lanterns, teahouses with views of the Pacific, and stone stairway streets. It draws millions of visitors annually and is often cited as an inspiration for visual artists. The old teahouses and snack stalls remain active.
Visit: Jiufen Old Street (historic site)
Kyushu, Japan — Chizuko's origin and the novel's absent home
Nagasaki is not a scene we witness directly in Taiwan Travelogue, but it haunts the novel as the origin point of Chizuko's journey and the site to which she will eventually return. It is where she is already a novelist with a name and an identity; it is the shore she left behind when she sailed for Taiwan. After the heartbreaking separation from Chizuru, the distance back to Nagasaki — back to her own language, her own culture — becomes the measure of all that was lost and all she failed to understand.
Nagasaki was historically Japan's only sanctioned port for foreign trade during the Edo period's policy of maritime restriction, making it the most cosmopolitan and internationally exposed city in Japan for centuries. By 1938 it was a major industrial and shipping city, home to the Mitsubishi shipyards. It would be destroyed by an atomic bomb on August 9, 1945.
Nagasaki is a vibrant city of approximately 400,000 people, known for its unique Sino-Portuguese-Dutch-Japanese cultural heritage, its atomic bomb memorials and Peace Park, Dejima (the reconstructed Dutch trading post), and its hilly streetcar-crossed cityscape.
Visit: Nagasaki Peace Park & Atomic Bomb Museum (museum)
Zhongzheng District, Taipei — Colonial-era city gates and administrative core
Walking near the remaining old city gates of Taipei, Chizuru explains to Chizuko the layers of the city's naming — how streets and districts carry Japanese names laid over Taiwanese names laid over older Qing Chinese names, each empire renaming what the last had named. This becomes one of the novel's central philosophical passages, as Chizuko the novelist grasps that language itself is the primary instrument of colonial power, and that Chizuru lives inside that instrument every day, translating not just words but selves.
The city wall of Taipei (then called Taihoku under Japanese rule) was largely demolished by the Japanese colonial government in the early twentieth century to accommodate modern urban planning. Of the original five gates, only the North Gate (Beimen) survived intact, preserving its original Fujian-style architecture. It stands as the sole remaining complete Qing-dynasty gate of the city.
Beimen (North Gate) is a designated national monument and one of Taipei's most important historic sites. It stands amid modern roads and flyovers in the Zhongzheng District and is freely viewable as a public landmark. Nearby is the Zhongzheng District's concentration of Japanese colonial-era administrative buildings.
Visit: Taipei North Gate (Beimen) National Monument (monument)
More by Shuang-zi Yang: All Shuang-zi Yang books