🇹🇼 Taiwan
Taipei
Taipei is the capital and largest city of Taiwan (population 2.6 million city, 7 million metropolitan area), situated in the Taipei Basin at the northern end of Taiwan island, at the confluence of the Danshui and Jilong rivers, enclosed by volcanic mountains (Yangmingshan National Park) and 25 minutes from the Pacific coast. The city is the political, cultural and economic capital of the Republic of China — the state that retreated to Taiwan in 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party won the Chinese Civil War and the Kuomintang (KMT) government under Chiang Kai-shek withdrew with 1.2 million mainland Chinese soldiers, bureaucrats and their families, bringing the entire contents of the Palace Museum in Beijing (the most important collection of Chinese imperial art in existence — 700,000 objects spanning 7,000 years of Chinese history) to Taiwan for safekeeping; the National Palace Museum in Taipei thus holds the finest collection of Chinese civilisation artefacts in the world, with more Chinese imperial treasures than the Forbidden City in Beijing itself. Taipei is defined by the collision and synthesis of indigenous Taiwanese (Han Taiwanese and the 16 official indigenous peoples), mainland Chinese (the 1949 refugees and their cultural institutions), and Japanese colonial culture (Taiwan was a Japanese colony 1895-1945; the Japanese influence is visible in the city planning, the architecture, the food culture (Japanese cuisine has the deepest roots in Taiwan of any non-Chinese food culture), and the cultural aesthetics). Taipei 101 (the 508-metre skyscraper that was the world's tallest building from 2004-2010) rises above the Xinyi business district; the Shilin Night Market (the largest and most visited night market in the world, drawing 100,000+ visitors nightly) is in the northern Shilin District; the Longshan Temple (the most important folk religion temple in Taipei, built 1738) anchors the traditional Wanhua (Bangka) neighbourhood — the oldest district of the city, established by Han settlers in the early 18th century.