New Taipei's culture lives outside the capital's museum district: kiln towns on the Dahan River, Dutch and British forts above the Tamsui estuary, a dance company with its own hillside theatre, and temple carvings that took fifty years to finish.
Sou Fujimoto's steel-tube 'city of art' opened on the Dahan riverbank in April 2025 — a stack of open-air terraces, hanging galleries and reed-field walkways you can wander without a ticket. Indoor halls 09:30–17:30, closed Mondays.
Two hundred metres of red-brick kiln-town shopfronts where studios sell celadon, wood-fired teaware and hand-throwing sessions from about NT$300. Eat clay-pot rice, ceramic-cup pudding and aiyu jelly between stalls; shops open 10:00–19:00.
Taiwan's first ceramics museum traces Yingge's two-century kiln history through a reconstructed coal-fired kiln, Japanese-era industrial ware and a basement of contemporary clay art. Tue–Fri 09:30–17:00, weekends to 18:00, closed Mondays.
Rebuilt from 1947 under painter Li Mei-shu, the 'Oriental Palace of Art' carries 156 hand-carved stone pillars, gilded beams and bronze doors — five decades of chisel work that is still formally unfinished. Open 04:00–22:00.
The 1644 Dutch fort, later a British consulate, keeps its brick consular residence, iron-barred cells and Victorian furniture; the whitewashed 1870 customs officers' quarters sit ten minutes uphill. 09:30–17:00, closed first Monday.
George Mackay's 1882 Oxford College — grey brick, swallowtail eaves and a cross set above a Chinese tiled roof — anchors a wooded campus that also holds the old Tamsui Girls' School and the Mackay family graves.
Rusted steel and tilted concrete wedges by Sun Teh-hung mark Taiwan's only excavated iron-working prehistoric settlement. Inside: the famous human-face clay pot, 1,800-year-old burials and smelting furnaces. 09:30–17:00, closed first Monday.
Lin Hwai-min's company rebuilt its home on a hillside above the estuary in 2015 after a fire — cedar cladding, an outdoor grass stage and rehearsal studios visible through glass walls. Grounds open free in daylight.
Ten faiths laid side by side over two floors above a Yonghe department store, with a Hall of Life Journey and precise scale models of Chartres, the Dome of the Rock and a Japanese pagoda. Tue–Sun 10:00–17:00, closed Mondays.
Taiwan's tofu capital: a 300-metre lane of 1910s arcaded shophouses where stalls fry stinky tofu over charcoal, braise black tofu in herbal stock and sell tofu ice cream. Busiest 11:00–15:00 at weekends; many stalls close by 18:00.
A Fujian-style courtyard complex in the heartland of Wenshan Baozhong tea, with roasting and rolling demonstrations, a tatami tea-ceremony room and terraced gardens dropping to the Beishi River. 09:00–17:00, closed first Monday.
Houses on stone pillars hang out over the Wazai Creek, and one stretch of the old lane is roofed by the neighbours' upper floors — the 'Bugjian Tian' street where daylight never reaches. A Japanese-era police post still stands at the end.