On 7 December 1949 the Executive Yuan resolved that the seat of the Republic of China was now Taipei. Two days later it held its 102nd meeting there — the first on the island. The government had run out of mainland to retreat across: Nanjing in April, Guangzhou in October, Chongqing in November, Chengdu at the end. Taipei was not a strategic choice so much as the last address on the list.

The building it moved into was Japanese. Designed in a competition won by Nagano Uheiji, redrawn and built out by Moriyama Matsunosuke, it went up between 1912 and 1919 as the Office of the Governor-General of Taiwan — red brick, a central tower, deliberately taller than anything around it. In May 1945 American bombers hit it and burned out much of the interior. It sat gutted for three years. Repairs finished in 1948, and it was renamed Chieh Shou Hall 介壽館 — "celebrating longevity" — as a birthday gift to Chiang Kai-shek. The name stayed on the pediment until 2006.

So the colonial headquarters became the exile government's headquarters, with the same rooms, the same corridors, and a new set of occupants who expected to leave within a few years. That expectation is the thing most easily lost now. Nobody who unpacked in this building in 1949 thought of it as permanent. The official policy for the next two decades was recovery of the mainland; budgets, conscription and school curricula were all written on that assumption.

The numbers that arrived with the government are contested but roughly consistent: something on the order of 1.2 million soldiers, officials, families and civilians between 1945 and 1950, onto an island of about six million. With them came the National Palace Museum crates, the Central Bank's gold reserves — estimates run from three to five million taels — and, on 19 May 1949, a martial law order signed by Chen Cheng that took effect the following midnight and was not lifted for thirty-eight years and two months.

The building is open to visitors now, on set mornings, with your passport. Go and look up at the tower from Ketagalan Boulevard first. It was designed to be seen from a distance by people who were meant to understand who was in charge. It has done that job for three different governments without changing a brick.

Where: Presidential Office Building 總統府, 122 Chongqing South Road Section 1, Zhongzheng District, Taipei. Public tours on designated weekday mornings; bring photo ID.

Cover photo: Chieh Shou Hall, 1974 by kanegen, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons — the building still under its 介壽館 name.