Finance History | 臺灣銀行總行, 重慶南路, Taipei, 1938 — The Bank That Issued Two Countries' Money From One Building

Eight granite columns, two storeys high, across the front of a three-storey block on 重慶南路. The walls and the columns are the original stone, and they have been through more monetary regimes than most central banks manage.

The Japanese Diet passed the Bank of Taiwan Act in 1897. The bank opened in 1899 and functioned as the colony's central bank, issuing the currency, financing the sugar and camphor industries, and later funding the southward expansion of Japanese commercial interests into Southeast Asia.

Its first headquarters, built in 1903, was red brick with a pitched roof, and some of its stone came from the walls of the Taipei city gate district as they were pulled down. Termites got into the timber.

Work on the replacement began in 1934 on the western part of the site. The architect was 西村好時, a Tokyo Imperial University graduate who specialised in bank buildings and had designed the head office of Dai-Ichi Bank and the central bank of Manchuria; the contractor was 大倉土木, now Taisei.

Sources give the completion as 1937, 1938 and 1939. Taipei's monument register records 1938, and that is the date used here.

American bombing during the Taipei air raid damaged the building. The roof was rebuilt after the war and the bank reopened on 20 May 1946, the same day the handover ceremony was held inside it.

What happened here on 15 June 1949 is the reason this address belongs in a finance collection rather than an architecture one.

The old Taiwan dollar, 舊臺幣, had collapsed under the inflation of the late 1940s. On that date the government designated this bank to issue a new currency, 新臺幣, and set the conversion at 40,000 old dollars to one new one.

Naming the unit is not pedantry here. A figure in Taiwan dollars from May 1949 and the same figure from July 1949 differ by a factor of forty thousand, and any account that gives a number without saying which currency it is in has told you nothing.

The bank had also been made the sole designated foreign exchange bank two months earlier, so the institution that issued the new money also controlled access to the old world's.

The building became a Taipei municipal monument on 4 May 1998 and the protected portion is still a working banking hall.

That is worth knowing before you visit. This is an operating bank, so the thing to look at is the colonnade from the pavement, and the interior is a place of business rather than an exhibit.

Cover photo: 玄史生, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Coordinates 25.041589, 121.512726, resolved by Nominatim to 重慶南路一段120號, the address in the monument register. Accurate to about 20 m. Coordinates from 國家文化記憶庫 were not used, as they carry documented errors of 300 m and more.