Who ruled Taipei?

Taipei lies in a basin in the far north of Taiwan, where the Keelung and Xindian rivers join to form the Tamsui River, which flows a short distance to the sea. Hills and mountains enclose the basin on most sides. River boats could reach the coast from here, and that access to trade, together with fertile farmland, drew settlers. Taipei is a young city by East Asian standards: it was a cluster of trading towns in the eighteenth century, a walled prefectural seat only from the 1880s, and its rise has been driven by a sequence of rulers, from the Qing dynasty and Japan to the government of the Republic of China.

Before the eighteenth century the basin was home to the Ketagalan, one of the lowland Indigenous peoples of Taiwan, who lived in villages along the rivers. In the seventeenth century the Spanish held forts at Keelung and Tamsui on the nearby coast from 1626, until the Dutch drove them out in 1642. Neither colony settled the basin itself. After the Qing dynasty annexed western Taiwan in 1683, settlers from southern Fujian began farming the basin in 1709 under official licences, gradually displacing the Ketagalan from their lands.

The first town to grow was Bangka (Monga), a river port in today's Wanhua district, whose Lungshan Temple was founded in 1738. When Tamsui was opened to foreign trade in the 1860s, a second riverside town, Dadaocheng, boomed on the export of tea and camphor, with Western merchant houses along its wharves. In 1875 the Qing created a new prefecture of Taipei and built an administrative town between the two, enclosed by a stone wall completed in 1884. When Taiwan became a separate Qing province in 1885, its first governor, Liu Mingchuan, made Taipei the provincial seat and gave it electric lighting and a railway to Keelung.

After the Qing defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895 handed Taiwan to the Empire of Japan. The colonial government made the city, renamed Taihoku, its capital. It pulled down the Qing walls, leaving some of the gates, and laid out broad boulevards, sewers and parks. The Governor-General's Office, completed in 1919, still stands and today houses the Presidential Office. By 1945 Taihoku was a modern city of several hundred thousand people.

After Japan's surrender in 1945, Taiwan came under the administration of the Republic of China. Tension between the new authorities and the local population erupted in the February 28 Incident of 1947, which began in Taipei and was followed by a violent crackdown across the island. In December 1949, after losing the Chinese Civil War on the mainland to the Chinese Communist Party, the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek moved to Taipei, which it declared the provisional capital of the Republic of China. Under martial law, which lasted until 1987, the city grew rapidly with industry and American aid, passing a million people in the early 1960s; it became a special municipality in 1967, and after democratic reforms its first elected mayor took office in 1994.

The status of Taiwan remains disputed. The government of the Republic of China sits in Taipei and administers Taiwan and several nearby islands, while the People's Republic of China claims Taiwan as part of its territory. In 2024 the Republic of China had formal diplomatic relations with about a dozen states, though many others maintain unofficial ties. Taipei today has about 2.5 million inhabitants, within a metropolitan area of around seven million, and is the island's main political, financial and technological centre.