The North Gate: Where Japan Walked into Taipei, 7 June 1895

Taipei's city wall was finished in 1884 and was militarily useless within eleven years. On 17 April 1895 the Qing signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki and handed Taiwan and Penghu to Japan in perpetuity. The island had not been consulted and did not accept it. Officials and gentry in Taipei declared a Republic of Formosa on 25 May with the former governor Tang Ching-sung as president; he was on a boat to the mainland within two weeks. The soldiers he left behind stopped being an army and started looting the city.

On 7 June 1895 the Japanese column reached this gate. It did not have to fight for it. A Lukang merchant named Ku Hsien-jung 辜顯榮 had gone to Keelung on his own initiative to ask the Japanese to come and restore order — an act his descendants have been defending and his critics condemning ever since. Accounts from the time add a detail that no official record wants: an elderly woman named Chen Fa and her household climbed the wall in the middle of the chaos, lowered a bamboo ladder, and opened the gate. Ten days later the Japanese held their inauguration ceremony and the fifty years began.

The wall itself did not last. From 1900 the colonial government pulled it down along with the West Gate, filled in the moat, and paved the foundation line into the three-lane boulevards that are now Zhongxiao West Road, Zhongshan South Road, Aiguo West Road and Zhonghua Road. The gates were spared. So was the North Gate's function as a landmark, standing at the junction where the railway, the post office, the Mitsui warehouse and the Osaka Shosen building all clustered.

What nearly finished it came later. In the mid-1960s the city decided to smarten the surviving gates up for tourists and rebuilt the East, South and Little South gates as northern-Chinese palace pavilions, erasing their Fujianese originals. The North Gate escaped only because it was already scheduled for demolition to make way for an elevated expressway, so nobody bothered to redecorate it. Scholars fought the demolition and got the road curved around it instead; the ramp opened in 1978 and sat pressed against the gate for thirty-eight years. The city finally tore the ramp down on Lunar New Year's Eve 2016.

Stand in the plaza on the north side, where the barbican used to be, and look at the roof. It is a sealed brick blockhouse with slit windows, not a pretty pavilion — which is exactly why it is the only one of the five that still looks like what it was. It survived by being inconvenient twice.

Where: North Gate 臺北府城北門 (Chengen Gate 承恩門), junction of Zhongxiao West Road, Yanping South Road and Bo'ai Road, Zhongzheng District, Taipei. National historic site; open plaza, free, always accessible. Taipei Main Station is a five-minute walk.

Cover photo: National Taxation Bureau of Taipei & North Gate by Tuodvinao TK, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.