Historic Taipei

Compared to European cities Taipei changes at breakneck speed. The city is almost unrecognizable from how it looked 50 years ago, let alone 80. This drawing depicts the city as it was in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, just before World War Two and the arrival of the Kuomintang brought about huge changes.

Taipei’s archival photography is pretty good unless you try to find pre-1920 imagery. A couple of large exposition events in the 1930’s were documented with aerial photos, and planes during the second war created maps and photo overviews of the city too. I used material from blogs, online archives, the physical archive in Ximen, and random Facebook pages to help build as complete an image as possible of the old city. The 1945 top-down views were the most complete however they depicted the city after widespread bombing and also only showed streets and rooftops. It’s only in the last year I have discovered there is a pre-bombing image set, which would have been very useful! There were many more photos of this area as opposed to the rest of the city, so this district was the only viably accurate one I could draw. Overall I used about 500 photos and a few maps to create this piece.

When I decided to re-create Taipei and then Tainan in the 1930’s I was driven by a few things. Firstly I’d started seeing photos of the city from that era and I was blown away by one, how very different it looked, and two, by how weirdly European it looked. Coming from a town that had barely changed since the Victorian era I was stunned by how quickly Taiwanese cities changed. I also wanted to learn a bit more about the Japanese era and how it shaped the modern cities. For a pair of cities that were ethnically quite homogenous there was a pretty wild variety of architecture during that time, from baroque, to traditional Japanese, to streamlined deco, and I became mildly obsessed with finding buildings where a bunch of these styles had melded together (like in the current Shi Tao-Ye Memorial Hall with it’s western arches and brickwork and traditional Japanese roof). Although I set the drawing roughly in the 1930’s for an exact date I usually go with just before the bombing raids in 1945. I see this as the boundary between the old and modern city, a point at which it went through great change, and the end of one era and beginning of the next. I did not intend to glorify the Japanese era city, it’s simply the furthest back good archival materials go and when a lot of currently recognizable landmarks had been built. I’ve been happy to have been contacted by families who’ve lived in Taipei and Tainan for generations and whose older members recognize many of the sites on the drawing!