Keelung Mayor’s Residence

Built in 1932 for Matsuura Shinpei (松浦新平), branch manager of the Keelung office of a Japanese construction company, this high-end Japanese wooden residence overlooks the harbour. It was requisitioned by the ROC government in the post-war era and repurposed for use as the Keelung mayoral residence. Following the death of Mayor Lin Fanwang (林番王) in office in 1965, his widow Zhu Feng’e (朱鳳娥) refused to vacate the house, and was only evicted in 1975 after remarrying and emigrating to the United States. The residence was listed as a city monument in 2006 and reopened to the public in January 2014 after a difficult restoration project that preserved only about a third of the original timber.