Exploring Chungshan North Road
At the Intersection of History, Fashion, and Fine Dining

Tree-lined Chungshan North Road is not only one of Taipei’s main thoroughfares, but also runs past numerous interesting shops, restaurants, and landmarks.

No matter what Taiwanese town or city you may find yourself in, there are certain street names that all share in common. In big cities and small towns, the largest street, or at least the most bustling, will almost certainly be named using the honorific of Dr. Sun Yat-sen (Chungshan Road) or of Chiang Kai-shek (Chungcheng Road). These days the commemorative significance of these names is not especially important, but they remain key indicators for travelers of where to find treasures.

Opening a map of Taipei, you can see that Chungshan Road cleaves Taipei into eastern and western halves. Most of the main east-west thoroughfares in the city, from Tienmu Road in the north, through Mintsu, Minchuan, Minsheng, Nanking, Chang-an, and Chunghsiao roads as you get farther south, start their numbering systems at Chungshan Road. For example, Nanking East Road starts at Chungshan and the numbers go up as you head farther east, while Nanking West Road begins at the other side of Chungshan, and its numbers go up as you head west. Chungshan Road is therefore at the core of the city’s central nervous system. To the north, Chungshan Road connects to Tienmu, a modern and cosmopolitan suburb with a large foreign community, while to the south it goes to the East Gate, at the heart of the very oldest parts of downtown Taipei, from where you can see the political epicenter of the country-the Presidential Palace.

Chungshan Road, which is divided into North and South sections at Chunghsiao Road, runs past a number of Taipei’s major landmarks, including (from north to south), the Grand Hotel, the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi skyscraper, the Presidential Palace, and the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. Except for the Presidential Palace, which is open to the public only on special occasions, the other locations are among Taipei’s major tourist attractions. The Grand Hotel and the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi building are famous for the high-elevation panoramic views they offer of the metropolitan area.

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