Taipei Bridge Audio Guide

Taipei Bridge: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Taipei Bridge

   Welcome to Taipei Bridge, known in Chinese as 台北大橋, and informally just Taipei Qiao. Here a motor-vehicle bridge carries you across the Tamsui River, linking Taipei with Sanchong District in New Taipei City. You are standing on a border, and in the middle of the span the city line really does change from one side to the other. This guide tells the story of the crossing itself: the bridges that stood here before the present one, the floods and typhoons that wrecked them, and the neighborhoods that grew up on both banks. Details about what you will see on the deck today are best judged with your own eyes, so I will stay with the history and the setting, which are well documented. As you walk or ride, notice that the bridge is not a single structure. The main roadway has narrower companion bridges beside it, and the whole arrangement says a lot about how people here actually move around.

2. 02

   Taipei Bridge: A Crossing Born of a Railway

   The first bridge at this crossing exists because of a railway that no longer runs this way. In the 1880s, the Qing governor Liu Mingchuan secured imperial approval for a rail line from Keelung to Hsinchu, passing through the commercial quarter of Twatutia in Taipei. To carry that line over the Tamsui River, a wooden railway bridge was completed here in 1889. It did not last. A typhoon in 1897 battered it, and that was the start of a long pattern. A replacement completed in 1920 survived less than six months before the Tamsui River flooded and tore it apart. So this is a crossing with a stubborn history. Every version of Taipei Bridge has been destroyed at some point, and every time people came back and built another one, because the connection between the two banks was simply too valuable to give up.

3. 03

   Taipei Bridge and the Seven-Pillar Iron Bridge

   The bridge that really changed things arrived in 1925. It was an iron truss structure, the first at this crossing built specifically for modern vehicular traffic, and locals called it the Seven-Pillar Iron Bridge. It lasted for decades. Its effect was felt far beyond the river. The bridge had long linked the commercial entrepôts of Dalongdong and Twatutia on the Taipei side with a largely undeveloped area on the other bank that would become Sanchong. Once the crossing was easier, Sanchong's population surged. Migrants from southern Taiwan used the district as a staging ground, a cheaper place to live while they gathered the resources to move into the capital proper. Later came a bridge dated to 1969. While it was demolished and a new bridge was built, adjacent bridges that had been completed first carried all the traffic. That is a clever piece of planning, and it is one reason you see companion bridges at the site today.

4. 04

   Taipei Bridge Today: Spans for Cars, Scooters and Feet

   The present Taipei Bridge was completed in 1996. Its central span is 481.6 meters long and carries automobile traffic. Flanking it on both sides are narrower companion bridges dedicated almost entirely to motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians. That layout is a small lesson in the traffic culture of northern Taiwan, where scooters and bicycles are an everyday part of getting across the river. If you are crossing on foot, you are using one of the dedicated side bridges, and one of them carries a sign marking the border between Taipei City and what used to be Taipei County, now New Taipei City. The bridge has left its name all over the neighborhood. A market at its foot on the Taipei side, which grew into the Yanping North Road Night Market, was once called the Taipei Bridge Night Market. In the Japanese era, the bridge gave its name to a ward called Ōhashichō and to the Ōhashi public school, which survives today as Daqiao Elementary School.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off

   Taipei Bridge is the latest chapter of a crossing that has been built, wrecked and rebuilt since 1889. Each version reflects the era that made it: a railway, a typhoon-battered timber span, an iron truss for modern vehicles, and a concrete bridge with room for scooters and walkers. Before you move on, look up and down the river and think about the two banks. On one side lie the old trading quarters of Dalongdong and Twatutia, on the other Sanchong, a district that grew as people crossed here. Then wander into the streets near the foot of the bridge and see whether the name Daqiao turns up on shopfronts, schools or signs. It is a quiet way to read the bridge's story in the city around you.