Dihua Street in Taipei City does not have the high profile of the city’s other landmark attractions such as Taipei 101, the National Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall or the Shilin Night Market. If you stop and ask for directions to the street, however, just about anyone you ask can point you in the right direction. One reason for that is the New Year Street Bazaar that opens three weeks before the Lunar New Year arrives and sees thousands of people swarming into the narrow street to purchase traditional holiday necessities like Chinese medicinal herbs, fabric, fruit and candy. Another reason for Dihua Street’s popularity is that a stroll down its 800-meter length is like walking into Taipei’s past. It is one of the oldest streets in Taiwan and its historic buildings exhibit the architectural styles of previous Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and Japanese colonial occupants. Various plans have been launched to preserve the old buildings over the past several decades. Not all of them have been successful and the process is ongoing, but the fact remains that there are few places in Taiwan that ooze history as much as Dihua Street.
Dihua Street lies in an area of Datong District known as Dadaocheng, where farmers began cultivating rice in the 18th century near the banks of the Danshui River. At that time, the farmers were mostly Chinese immigrants who sailed across the Taiwan Strait and arrived at several natural harbors in Taiwan including Monga, which is known today as Taipei’s Wanhua District. Most of the new settlers lived in Monga and farmed in nearby Dadaocheng, which means big rice-drying field in Mandarin.
A stone historical marker at Dadaocheng Wharf marks early settlements along the Danshui and Keelung rivers, including those in Dadaocheng and nearby Monga, the present day Wanhua. (Photo by Chang Su-ching)
Disputes arose among different groups of the Chinese settlers in Taiwan, however. In 1853, immigrants from Huian, Jinjiang and Nanan in Fujian province ambushed their neighbors who hailed from Tongan, also in Fujian, and forced them to move to Dadaocheng, where the defeated party began building the settlement that eventually gave birth to Dihua Street. Later, in a twist of fate, the accumulation of silt in the harbor at Monga led most vessels to dock at a new wharf at Dadaocheng, which went on to become the most prominent commercial port in the northern part of Taiwan. “Dihua Street took center stage in 1887,” says Yeh Lun-hui, a retired curator of the Customs Museum in Dadaocheng. “That was a time when the tea trade accounted for more than 90 percent of Taiwan’s total exports. Dihua Street was the focus of Dadaocheng’s commercial activities and led the area’s development.”
A few of the buildings that still stand along Dihua Street were constructed from 1850 to 1895, the earliest days of Taipei’s settlement. The influence of immigrants from China can also be seen today in the street’s surviving southern Fujian-style single-story homes. Then, when Taiwan was a colony of Japan (1895–1945), wealthy Japanese businessmen built homes along the street, with some in the Japanese baroque revival style and others exhibiting modernist influences. “Dihua Street’s architecture reflects the different phases of Taiwan’s history,” says Wang Chun-hsiung, an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at Tamkang University in New Taipei City. “That’s why we have a class that uses the living examples on Dihua Street to introduce architecture to art students.”
To date, the Taipei City Government’s Department of Civil Affairs has designated 77 buildings along Dihua Street as historic sites. Among them is the building that houses the Shiye Tzou Co., a vendor of traditional Chinese herbs. The building, which is currently being renovated, features layered bricks on its façade and a beautifully jagged parapet on the top. Meanwhile, the building housing the Qian Yuan Firm, which has been in business for more than 100 years, exhibits a modernist stucco front and an oeil-de-boeuf, (bull’s eye) window with an original stone casing carved to resemble ginseng roots, reflecting the company’s status as one of Taipei’s oldest Chinese herbal pharmacies.
Xiahai Temple on Dihua Street was built in 1859 and features the typical red tiles and dragon-shaped roof decorations of traditional temples of the era. (Photo Courtesy of Urban Redevelopment Office, Taipei City Government)
Dihua Street also features religious architecture such as the Taipei Xiahai Temple, which houses the renowned City God shrine. When the Tongan immigrants were driven from Monga, they took the statue of the City God with them to Dadaocheng. The statue of the deity was housed in a private bakery until Su Fei-ran, a Qing dynasty navy general in command of thousands of marine troops in Taiwan, donated a plot of land for a temple. Construction of the Xiahai Temple was completed in 1859. Over time, the 46-ping (around 150-square-meter) building has also become the home of statues of Confucius and the grey-bearded Matchmaker.
“The Xiahai City God Temple is an area landmark,” a shopkeeper living next door to the temple says. “Many of our forefathers have experienced different stages of its development. The deity has enhanced the cohesion of the neighborhood; without it, early immigrants couldn’t have endured the hardships they experienced in a foreign land.”
Famous as the temple is, many visitors, especially foreign ones, are perplexed at its restricted space, particularly when compared with much larger sanctuaries such as Taipei’s Longshan Temple, Hsing Tian Kong and Confucius Temple. Xiahai’s small space, however, mirrors the predicament Dihua Street faced in the 1970s, as the street began to feel more and more cramped in comparison with the spacious commercial developments rising elsewhere in Taipei City. In 1977, against the background of such modernization, a number of Dihua Street landlords began to negotiate with the Taipei City Government over broadening the “obsolete” passage from 7.8 meters to 20 meters. The width of the street had been dictated by Qing authorities, which governed Taiwan from 1683 to 1895. Qing magistrates in Taiwan set the ideal width of city streets at 7.8 meters, or 4.5 bu in the traditional Chinese measurement system, as that span was thought ideal for commercial activities and use by community residents. Dihua Street’s width remained the same during the subsequent Japanese colonial era, even as new architectural styles were introduced along both sides.
In 1977, the landlords’ goals centered mainly on enlarging the street’s commercial area and improving access for fire control vehicles. After consulting with the owners, the Taipei City Government introduced a plan that same year that called for razing the buildings on both sides of the street, deeming them of insufficient cultural value to be worth preserving. After the city announced the plan, landlords naturally hesitated to spend money on maintaining buildings that were scheduled for demolition.
Most people in Taipei are familiar with Dihua Street because of the New Year Street Bazaar, which is held before the Lunar New Year holiday each year. (Photo by Chang Su-ching)
Under the plan, the city was required to begin purchasing land along Dihua Street by August 1988. The purchases were going to be expensive, however, as the city would need to compensate landlords who would lose a significant amount of their property to the widened street. Meanwhile, opposition to the demolition of the old buildings was rising, with some activists arguing that the price—the irrevocable loss of the street’s history—was too high. Taiwan was modernizing quickly at the time, and the controversy over Dihua Street reflected a wider and increasingly heated debate over the desire to maximize commercial profits versus the preservation of the past.
Some of the project’s opponents came from the cultural and academic community. Alice Chiu, who is now the secretary-general of the Institute of Historical Resources Management, was one of the leading participants in the movement to preserve Dihua Street. “I protested not by displaying banners or taking to the street,” she says. “I worked with the media and tried to serve those who were concerned. Whenever I knew a group of around 30 cultural activists or history buffs was going to visit the area, I took them on a tour of the buildings along Dihua Street and collected their signatures to petition against widening it.”
Growing Resistance
With resistance to the demolition of the old buildings along Dihua Street growing, in 1983 the Taipei City Government’s Urban Planning Commission began reviewing land zoning in the Datong District. As a result, planners began looking at development throughout Dadaocheng instead of just focusing on Dihua Street.
The ornate design and detailed carving of Dihua Street’s baroque buildings were introduced during the Japanese colonial era. (Photo Courtesy of Urban Redevelopment Office, Taipei City Government)
Taiwan’s headlong rush to modernization, meanwhile, was affecting far more than just the island’s built environment. One of the most profound social changes came in 1987 with the lifting of martial law. As the state’s grip on society loosened, nongovernmental organizations and social groups sprang up to promote a diversity of causes. One of the earliest of those groups, Yaoshan Culture Foundation, was established in 1986 to preserve the buildings along Dihua Street. “Martial law ended in July [1987]. We started the campaign—‘I Love Dihua Street’—in August,” recalls Alice Chiu, who was then chairwoman of the foundation. “Looking back, the United Daily News even supported us by printing a series of extensive stories on our effort to protect Dihua Street. We spent a long time advocating the idea of historic preservation. We had to stick to it, push and push.”
After the lifting of martial law and with the August 1988 deadline for the city to begin purchasing land along Dihua Street drawing nearer, activists redoubled their efforts to have the 1977 plan suspended. Chiu and numerous other academics, planners and civic group members launched a petition expressing strong disapproval of the plan that drew more than 10,000 signatories, an extremely high number for the time.
Thanks to the devotion of activists like Chiu, in September 1988 the Urban Planning Commission shelved the 1977 scheme in favor of drafting a new plan for the entire Dadaocheng area, granting Dihua Street’s old buildings another stay of execution. A major breakthrough came in November that year, when the committee agreed to designate Dihua Street as a special zone that sought to balance preservation of historic assets with residents’ interests.
The next step came in 1998, when the revised plan for the Dadaocheng area was completed. This time, however, the planners had a new tool—a mechanism called transfer of development rights (TDR)—in their arsenal. The goal of TDR is to encourage the preservation and restoration of historic properties, but it does so via a roundabout method of compensation. When property values go up, at some point it becomes more profitable for landowners to level older structures and build new ones, as was and is the case on Dihua Street. When that happens, there is no financial incentive for the landowners to preserve the old buildings. Under TDR, however, owners who preserve and restore historic buildings are then compensated with the right to develop a parcel of land of equal value in another location.
A southern Fujian-style building on Dihua Street (Photo by Chang Su-ching)
TDR got underway at Dihua Street in 2001, but with a couple of local twists. The Taipei City Government encourages owners of historic buildings to renovate them, then work with civic groups or NGOs to manage them as cultural facilities. The city then grants the owners the rights to develop an area of floor space with a value equaling the amount they forfeited by forgoing redevelopment. These rights can then be sold to developers of other real estate projects. After receiving such rights under TDR, owners retain the title to their property, but face restrictions on future development. As of the end of April 2011, development rights for 248 structures with historic architecture—representing around 30 percent of the total volume of TDR-eligible floor space along Dihua Street—had been transferred.
Today, Dihua Street has newly paved walkways and the facades of a significant number of the buildings have been restored. The street also boasts an exhibition center called URS127, short for urban regeneration station at No.127 Dihua Street, where architecture majors can display not only miniatures of renovated buildings, but also works of graphic design and photography. URS127 occupies one of the street’s 77 designated historic buildings. The owner did not seek TDR compensation, however, but generously decided to renovate it and make it available for URS127 to use. The property is now open to the public and welcomes anyone from students to scholars to share the space while working to preserve the history of Dihua Street. “The concept for URS127 includes providing a neighborhood center on the one hand and providing a lively space where young people can showcase their works on the other,” Tamkang University’s Wang Chun-hsiung says. “We expect it to bring some fresh thinking to the old street while not forgetting about its history.”
‘Sample Keeping’
The renovated facades and the feel-good story of URS127 do not mean, however, that TDR has been a complete success at Dihua Street. “In mainland China, they use the phrase ‘sample keeping,’ which means preserving the surface of classical structures without doing anything to restore the interiors and the spirit of the area,” says Xu Yan-xing, an engineer in Taipei City’s Urban Redevelopment Office. “A decade has passed. It’s time for us to re-examine TDR. It’s not sufficient that the government just revitalizes the exteriors. How to enrich the district and make it symbolize something is the critical issue.”
The rear of the building housing the Shiye Tzou Co. features an arch-filled wall built during the Qing dynasty. (Photo Chang Su-ching)
Andy Chou, owner of the Shiye Tzou Co., is a long-time Dihua Street resident who agrees with Xu’s emphasis on recovering the spirit of the past. Chou is currently operating his traditional herb business in a nearby rented building while the property he owns on Dihua Street is renovated. “Even after the renovation is completed, I plan to renew the lease for the building my business is in now,” he says. “That’s because I hope to change the old one into a hostel where my guests can learn traditional skills like textile dyeing or grinding herbs.”
Former Customs Museum curator Yeh Lun-hui has conducted the Free and Light Ramble of Dadaocheng, a walking tour, more than 300 times since 1997. After running so many tours, Yeh has earned the nickname the Taipei Stroller. It is an apt moniker, as a slow stroll is the best way to appreciate the details and soak in the ambience of Dihua Street. “Goethe said ‘I call architecture frozen music,’” Yeh says. “That inspires me. I think history is like a song; and structures with historical heritage are the most appealing notes. We are blessed to have these old buildings around. We should appreciate them, develop a relationship with them and learn to love them.”
Write to Aaron Hsu at pj1210meister@gmail.com