Four Days in,
Taipei.

Four rows of single-story brick and tile houses built in 1948 for soldiers and their families, sitting in the shadow of Taipei 101. Part of it is now a small museum, part a cafe and shop, and the rest is a lawn where people picnic under the tower.

A 1,667-foot tower of eight stacked glass segments, each flaring outward like a section of bamboo. The observatory occupies the 88th, 89th and 91st floors and is the standard first look at how the city sits in its basin of green hills.

The most-visited branch of Taiwan's most famous restaurant, tucked into the basement of the Taipei 101 mall. Cooks in white masks fold dumplings behind glass, and the line snakes past them.

A 1937 tobacco factory whose long brick workshops, courtyard and boiler house have become an exhibition park, with a landscaped pond, ducks and turtles, and the flagship Eslite Spectrum store in a Toyo Ito-designed tower alongside.

A 600-foot hill at the east end of the Xinyi district, climbed by a stone stairway to a set of boulders that frame Taipei 101 across the rooftops. It is the view on every Taipei postcard, and it takes 20 sweaty minutes to earn.

A pepper bun (hujiao bing) stall at the temple end of Raohe night market: pork, scallions and a lot of white pepper inside a sesame-crusted dough, baked stuck to the inner wall of a charcoal-fired clay oven.

A single street of food stalls, about a third of a mile long, between the ornate Ciyou Temple and the Keelung River. It is compact enough to see everything in one lap and old enough that the same families have run the same stalls for decades.

Taipei's oldest temple, a courtyard complex of swallow-tail roofs, carved stone columns and constant incense in the Wanhua district. Buddhist Guanyin sits in the main hall, Taoist and folk gods fill the rear hall, and worshippers move between them without fuss.

A single block of restored shophouses on Guangzhou Street, with brick arcades, wooden shutters and painted shop signs from three eras: Qing, Japanese and postwar. Exhibition rooms inside cover the neighborhood's history, and a few old stores stand as they were left.

Taipei's youth quarter, a grid of pedestrian streets on the site of the old west gate, thick with cinemas, streetwear, tattoo parlors, arcades and street performers. The octagonal brick Red House anchors the south end.

A stand-and-eat noodle window that has fed Ximending since 1975. The bowl is mianxian, thin wheat noodles in a thickened bonito and pork broth with chunks of tender braised intestine, eaten with a spoon while standing on the sidewalk.

A white marble monument with a blue octagonal roof, 249 feet tall, at the head of a plaza the size of several city blocks, flanked by the National Theater and National Concert Hall. Inside sits a 21-foot bronze of Chiang, the general who ruled Taiwan under martial law from 1949 until his death in 1975.

A short street and a web of lanes off Xinyi Road where Taipei goes for a snack, a pot of tea and a bag of pineapple cakes. The blocks are low-rise and leafy, with Yongkang Park in the middle, and nearly every shopfront sells something to eat.

The Taipei branch of a Tainan restaurant founded in 1895, known for danzai noodles: a small bowl of thin noodles in shrimp broth with minced pork, a single shrimp, bean sprouts and a hit of black vinegar and garlic.

The hub where four rail systems meet: TRA intercity trains, the high speed rail, two MRT lines and the airport express. The main hall is a vast checkerboard-floored room under a hip roof, and the maze of malls beneath it runs for blocks.

A village whose main street is a working railway: the Pingxi Line trains squeeze between shops every hour or so, and in the gaps, visitors stand on the tracks to launch paper sky lanterns painted with wishes. Shifen station and the 1947 Jingan suspension bridge are at the west end.

A horseshoe-shaped curtain of water 66 feet high and 131 feet wide on the Keelung River, the broadest waterfall in Taiwan. A wooden path leads down through the forest to platforms at the lip and the pool.

A plain family noodle shop at the mouth of Jiufen's old street, serving hand-formed fish balls in a clear broth, dry noodles and stewed tofu at benches shared with strangers. It has fed miners, film crews and tourists for more than half a century.

A gold rush town that clings to a hillside above the Pacific, now a warren of covered lanes and stone stairways lined with tea houses, snack stalls and red paper lanterns. It's at its best in the hour after sunset, when the lanterns come on and the tour buses leave.

The most photographed building in Jiufen: a tall timber tea house on the Shuqi Road stairs, its balconies strung with red lanterns, with tables looking out over the rooftops to the ocean.

A beef noodle shop on Bade Road that has run from late morning to 3 am since 1979, known for a clear, peppery broth, beef shin and tendon, and a jar of chili beef-fat paste that regulars treat as the actual reason to come.

The museum holding the Chinese imperial collection: some 700,000 paintings, bronzes, jades, ceramics and documents, of which a few thousand are on show at a time in a palace-style building against the hills of Waishuangxi.

A busy ramen counter at the edge of Beitou Park that cooks with the neighborhood's hot spring water, a few minutes from Xinbeitou station. Pork-bone and kimchi broths, thick noodles, a line at lunch.

A 1913 public bathhouse, the largest in East Asia when it opened, restored as a free museum about the springs, the stone and the resort culture of Beitou. Stained glass over the bath, tatami upstairs and a balcony over the park.

A sulfur spring pool at the top of Beitou Park, milky green, steaming, and between 176 and 212°F at the surface. It's the source of the acidic green sulfur water piped to the baths below, and one of the most acidic hot springs on record.

Beitou's public outdoor hot spring, terraced pools of green sulfur water in a landscaped hollow of the park, where retirees, students and tourists soak side by side for NT$60.

A basement food court stall in the Shilin Market building doing the Taiwanese oyster omelet: small oysters, egg and greens bound with a sweet-potato starch batter, fried until the edges crisp and covered in a pink-red sweet chili sauce.

Taipei's biggest night market, spread over a market building and a dozen lanes around Cixian Temple, with hundreds of food stalls, clothes, games and the fried chicken cutlet that launched a franchise.