New Taipei City Culture

New Taipei’s culture is layered: indigenous, Fujianese, Japanese and industrial.

Sky lanterns

The tian deng of the Pingxi valley began as a signal: villages in this remote coal country used them to tell people hiding in the hills from bandits that it was safe to return. They became a new year custom, then a wish-writing ritual, and are now released year round — a paper-and-wire balloon lifted by a burning fuel cell, with hopes brushed onto its sides.

Yingge ceramics

Potters from Fujian settled here around 1805 because of the local clay and coal, and the town has made pottery ever since — industrial ware, then studio ceramics. The ceramics museum and Old Street are the centre of it.

Atayal traditions

Backstrap weaving in red and white geometric bands, which carried clan meaning, and the facial tattoos that marked adulthood, banned under Japanese rule and now remembered rather than practised.

Temple culture

Folk religion is vigorous: Sanxia’s Zushi temple, rebuilt from 1947 over decades with hand-carved stone by an artist-director, is among the finest in Taiwan.

Tea

The hills here grew the tea that made northern Taiwan wealthy in the nineteenth century, exported through Tamsui as oolong. Pinglin, in the mountains south-east of Taipei, still produces Baozhong, and the tea houses of Jiufen — where you are served leaves, a pot and hot water and left to brew for an afternoon — are the best place to understand how it is drunk here.

Cinema

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films made these landscapes internationally familiar.