Someday or One Day | Not Just Library — The Record Shop Inside a Bathhouse

In the film, Mo Jun-jie meets Chen Yun-ru again at a second-hand record shop, an encounter that Quan-sheng quietly engineered, and he apologises for standing her up for a Wu Bai concert years earlier. The record shop was dressed inside a library. The library is inside a women's bathhouse.

That is not a joke. This building was the bathhouse of the Songshan Tobacco Factory, it is a designated municipal historic site, and the semicircular bathing pool is still in it. So are the Japanese-era patterned floor tiles and the light well overhead, which drops daylight onto the tile in a single hard column at midday.

You change into indoor shoes at the door, and then the building tells you where you are through your feet. The reading room in the old changing area is wooden floor. The bath hall is tile. Walking between them, the sound of your own steps changes and the room's echo changes with it. The reading area is a sunken pit built from stacked books with shelves around the rim, so you physically descend to sit down.

Outside on the north side, the garden occupies the bathhouse's old open light well, and the hot-water pipes from the boiler room still run underground beneath the planting.

Open ten to six, Tuesday to Sunday, closed Mondays and over Lunar New Year. A hundred NT dollars, which also covers the Taiwan Design Museum next door. No food or drink inside.

Go and stand in the middle of the old bath hall at noon, when the light well is doing its one trick. A film crew came in here and built a record shop over a room designed for two hundred women to wash after a shift, and both of those facts are more interesting than either one alone.

Location data: Taiwan Design Research Institute and Songshan Cultural and Creative Park. This is a 2022 film location, not a 2019 television series location.