Taichung holds Taiwan's only national fine arts museum, I. M. Pei's 1963 Luce Chapel, and a 160-year-old family opera stage in Wufeng. Between them sit dormitory blocks turned studios and a Japanese-era literature quarter still lived in.
Taiwan's only national museum for modern and contemporary art, in a low stone-clad 1988 building along the Calligraphy Greenway. Twenty-four galleries rotate Taiwanese ink painting, video and large installation. Tuesday to Friday 09:00–17:00, weekends until 18:00, closed Mondays.
A block of 1960s government auditors' dormitories rescued from demolition and handed to young designers. Two-storey terraces now hold ceramics studios, letterpress workshops, leather ateliers and a weekend craft market in the central courtyard.
I. M. Pei and Chen Chi-kwan's 1963 chapel on the Tunghai campus: four warped concrete shells clad in yellow glazed tiles, leaning together and split by a glass seam that runs the full ridge. A national historic monument and Taiwan's best-known modernist building.
A pedestrian lane of low Mediterranean-styled shophouses laid out beside Tunghai in the 1990s as a planned artists' quarter. Independent galleries, a music box workshop, secondhand bookshops and small studios sit along the sloping street.
Taiwan's first national museum, opened in stages from 1986, spanning six halls including a Chinese Science Hall on ancient astronomy and agriculture, a full Botanical Garden greenhouse and an IMAX Space Theater. Open 09:00–17:00, closed Mondays.
Six restored 1932 Japanese police dormitories in wood and stucco, reopened in 2016 as a museum of Taichung writing. Rooms cover Taiwanese-language poetry, martial arts novelist Wolong Sheng, and the banyan-shaded old garden between the buildings.
The city's main civic arts venue in Nantun, with a 600-seat performance hall, seven exhibition galleries showing local painters and calligraphers on rotating three-week runs, and a reference library of Taichung art catalogues. Open 09:00–21:00.
The city's 1600-seat proscenium theatre beside the old prefectural district, opened in 1989 and the home stage for the Taichung Chamber Orchestra plus visiting Taiwanese opera and dance troupes. Box office opens two hours before curtain.
The compound of one of Taiwan's two great gentry clans, built from 1858 in Fujianese style and painstakingly rebuilt after the 1999 earthquake. Includes the Gongbaodi residence and the Dahua Hall stage, the island's oldest surviving private opera stage.
A hexagonal 1917 Japanese-era market hall whose six wings radiate from a central well. Century-old stalls still sell mahua fritters, ba-wan dumplings and Fuzhou-style pork buns to the same families, under original iron trusses.
A 1976 temple built in Song dynasty rather than the usual Ming style, with a Dacheng Hall of bracketed timber, ritual bronze vessels and the ceremonial Lingxing Gate. The autumn Confucius birthday rites are performed here with eight-row Yi dance.
Taichung's oldest temple, founded 1726 for the sea goddess Mazu, anchoring a lane of Qing-era shophouses, an ox-cart smithy and a traditional pastry maker. The temple's Ma Zu Culture Hall keeps costumes from its 250-year-old opera troupe.