Tamsui

Dànshuǐ (淡水), commonly romanized as Tamsui from Hokkien, occupies the mouth of the river of the same name in northern New Taipei. The area was home to Ketagalan Indigenous people when Spanish forces built the Santo Domingo fortress in 1628; the Dutch displaced them in 1642 and rebuilt it as Fort Antonio only to withdraw in the late 1660s. After the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin opened Taiwan to foreign trade, Tamsui became the island’s largest treaty port. Customs operations began in 1862, and tea, camphor, and sulfur flowed from its wharves. In the aftermath of the Sino-French War, newly appointed Governor Liu Mingchuan built the Hobe Fort to protect the port.

The treaty port era left a lasting Western footprint. The British Merchant Warehouse, built in 1894 for the tea trade and later used by Shell for oil storage, now operates as a cultural park. The Foreign Cemetery, maintained by the Canadian Society, contains graves dating to 1867. The Japanese colonial era added infrastructure including the Climate Observatory, built in 1942 to serve the adjacent seaplane base, and the Tamsui Shrine, later converted to the New Taipei Martyrs’ Shrine. Today Tamsui’s waterfront old street draws weekend crowds from Taipei, its historic layers somewhat obscured by ongoing commercial and residential redevelopment.