Dihua Street

The commercial center of Dadaocheng (大稻埕) in Datong, Taipei, settled in the 1850s by Tong’an (同安) migrants driven out of nearby Wanhua, who built the first shops here along with Xiahai Chenghuang Temple. It grew into the city’s main wholesale market for dried goods, tea, Chinese medicine, and textiles, and the prosperity of the 1920s and 1930s left it lined with modernist and Baroque Revival shophouses alongside older Minnan-style buildings. A road widening scheme approved in 1977 would have levelled the entire street, but a citizens’ campaign launched in 1988 secured its preservation in 1995, and since 1996 it has hosted an enormous Lunar New Year market.