Ximending
"Ximending is the sound of Taipei's teenagers deciding what the city gets to look like next."
Taipei's pedestrian youth quarter, all neon, karaoke, and streetwear, where the city stops being polite.
Lia spotted the theatre first — an old cinema with a hand-painted mural still visible above a newer, brighter sign — and said it looked like Tokyo’s Shibuya had been left out in the rain for a decade and grown something stranger in the gaps. That is roughly right. Ximending is Taipei’s only fully pedestrianized shopping district, six blocks of narrow lanes where the crowd does not so much walk as pour.
The Streets That Never Slow Down
We arrived on a Saturday evening, which I would now call a mistake if it had not also been the point. The main crossing outside Exit 6 of the MRT was a wall of people: teenagers in secondhand denim, buskers with amplifiers propped against parking meters, a woman selling grilled squid from a cart wedged between two phone-case kiosks. Every surface had a screen or a poster on it. The noise did not let up until well past midnight.
We ducked into a narrow alley off Hanzhong Street looking for shade from the noise and found instead a row of secondhand record shops, the kind with hand-lettered signs and owners who clearly did not care whether you bought anything. I found a pressing of a Taiwanese folk album from the seventies for the equivalent of four euros. The owner played me thirty seconds of it on a turntable that looked older than either of us, nodded once, and went back to his newspaper.
Red House and What Came Before the Crowds
Away from the main strip sits the Red House, an octagonal brick market building from the Japanese colonial period that has survived fires, wars, and at least two attempts to demolish it. It now houses small design studios and a weekend creative market, and on the plaza outside it, drag performers and street musicians take turns with a single microphone stand. It is one of the few spots in Ximending that rewards standing still.
We ate dinner at a stall specializing in braised pork over rice that had queues stretching around the corner regardless of the hour, then finished the night at a karaoke box on the fourth floor of a building whose lower three floors were entirely given over to bubble tea shops. Lia sang something in French that the machine did not recognize. The staff applauded anyway.
When to go: Ximending runs at full volume every night of the week, but weekend evenings (Friday and Saturday) bring out street performers and pop-up markets you will not see midweek. October through April keeps the heat manageable for an evening spent mostly outdoors.