Taipei North Gate Audio Guide

North Gate of Taipei: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to North Gate of Taipei City Wall

   Welcome to the North Gate of Taipei City Wall, known in Chinese as 臺北府城北門. Its formal name is Chengen Gate, and it stands in the Zhongzheng District, right where Zhongxiao West Road, Yanping South Road and Boai Road meet. Around you is a busy junction of a modern capital. Yet this gate was finished in 1884, when Taipei was a brand new walled prefectural city. It was the main gate of the Taipei prefectural city, and today it is a nationally designated monument, listed together with the other surviving gates of the city wall. Of the five great gates that once pierced the wall, this is the only one that still looks as it did when it was built. That makes it one of the very few Qing dynasty buildings left in the middle of the city. Over the next few minutes we will look at why Taipei needed a wall at all, how this gate was built like a small fortress, and how a city that tore down its walls came to treasure this last original gate. Let your eyes drift between the red brick, the grey stone and the traffic around it, because all three are part of the story.

2. 02

   Why Taipei Built the North Gate of Taipei City Wall

   For a long time Taipei had no wall at all. The Kangxi emperor's government followed a policy of not building walled cities here. Instead, settlers farmed the land, and the river trade made two ports prosper: Mengjia and Dadaocheng. Walls were not what made Taipei grow. Then came the Mudan incident of 1874, which pushed the Qing court to strengthen the defense of northern Taiwan by founding Taipei Prefecture. In 1875 the imperial commissioner Shen Baozhen asked for Taiwan to be divided into two prefectures, with a new one north of the Dajia River. By 1879 the prefect Chen Xingju had moved the seat of government to Taipei and was encouraging merchants and gentry to invest in houses and shops inside the planned city. The site chosen lay in open fields and marshy land between Mengjia and Dadaocheng. Construction of the wall began in 1882 and finished in 1884. It was a rectangle with a circumference of 1506 zhang, and it had five gates: East, West, South, Little South and North. Taipei's was the last walled city the Qing built in Taiwan, and this gate was the one that faced Dadaocheng.

3. 03

   A Fortress in Brick and Stone: Building the North Gate of Taipei City Wall

   Look closely at how this gate is built, because it was designed to withstand modern cannon. The base is made of andesite, a volcanic stone brought from the hills of the Beishihu area in Dazhi, and the blocks are stacked in an interlocking pattern. Above it, the gate tower is wrapped completely in red brick. That brick skin encloses the whole upper chamber and joins the base and the roof into one solid mass, which strengthens the structure. Inside, there is a second inner wall, so the command room sits within a square-in-a-square arrangement. On the front, there are two square windows and one round one, used for defense and for watching the approaches. They are smaller than usual for a city gate, and the East Gate has the same feature. Four of the five Taipei gates were closed bunker-style like this. Only the Little South Gate was not. The round arched passage has an outer arch smaller than the inner one, with a rectangular space between them where the doors closed. The doors were thick timber covered in riveted iron sheet. Above the arch on the north face are the three characters of the gate's name, together with two lines of dedication that mention the Guangxu renwu year and an auspicious day of the tenth month. The roof is the single-eave, double-ridge hip-and-gable style common in traditional Taiwanese architecture.

4. 04

   From City Wall to Traffic Island at the North Gate of Taipei City Wall

   This gate faced the mouth of the Tamsui River, so its defense mattered, and it was also the main way for people of Dadaocheng to enter and leave the city. On its north side stood a square outer enclosure, a barbican, whose arched opening deliberately did not line up with the gate's own passage. It carried a plaque with four characters meaning roughly the lock and key of a rugged frontier. When the Japanese authorities pulled the enclosure down, that plaque was left to drift away. The rest of the wall met the same fate. Its foundations were turned into three-lane tree-lined boulevards, called the Three Line Roads. This gate ended up at the junction of the northern road, today's Zhongxiao West Road, and the western one, today's Zhonghua Road, standing on a round traffic island. Nearby, the Japanese built the Railway Department building, finished in 1919, and the Taipei Post Office, finished in 1930. A railway station named Beimen, meaning North Gate, served the Tamsui line from 1915 to 1923. Then in 1978 an overpass was opened right beside the gate and hid it from view for decades. After an urban renewal push in 2015, the overpass was taken down in 2016, and an open plaza was laid out around the gate. In June 2024, the city government began restoration work on it. Before that, the gate had twice been close to demolition, and public campaigning saved it each time.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off from the North Gate of Taipei City Wall

   Before you move on, walk once around the gate and let the pieces fall into place: the grey stone base, the red brick shell, the small windows that were really lookouts, and the arch that once opened onto a road to Dadaocheng. Imagine the gate with its enclosure and its overpass, and notice how much open sky the plaza now gives it. Then look at the buildings around it, and ask yourself where the line of the old wall once ran. The boulevards that replaced it still trace its path, and the old post office is a short way off. Each one adds a chapter to the story of how Taipei grew past its walls. Keep an eye out for the other surviving gates of the old city as you travel on. Each one belongs to the same wall, and seeing them side by side shows what this gate kept and what the others lost.