New Taipei City historical timeline

This region was northern Taiwan’s gateway long before Taipei existed.

Before

Ketagalan people occupied the coast and basin, and Atayal communities the mountains. Both remain, and place names across the area are indigenous in origin.

European forts

The Spanish built a fort at Tamsui in 1628 to control the north of the island; the Dutch took it in 1642 and rebuilt it, and the local name Hongmaocheng, the fort of the red-haired, records them. The British later leased it as a consulate, which is why a Victorian residence stands beside a seventeenth-century Iberian fort.

Qing and trade

Han settlement from Fujian accelerated from the eighteenth century, with camphor, tea and coal moving through Tamsui, which became a treaty port in 1860.

Japanese period

From 1895 Japan industrialised the region, and the gold and copper at Jinguashi and the coal of the Pingxi valley were worked intensively. Jiufen boomed into a town of theatres and tea houses, and the Pingxi branch railway was built to carry coal.

The Thirteen Levels

The copper smelter built into the hillside at Jinguashi during the Japanese period stepped down the slope in thirteen terraces, processing ore from the mines above. It closed in 1987 and the concrete ruin is still there, floodlit at night and visible from the coast road — along with the yellow-stained Golden Waterfall and the discoloured sea below it, both consequences of the mineralised rock.

Since 1945

The mines closed through the 1970s and 80s and the towns emptied. A 1989 film, A City of Sadness, shot in Jiufen, brought visitors back. The lowland districts meanwhile absorbed millions of people, and the municipality was renamed and upgraded in 2010.