The Red House (Ximen Honglou)

The Red House is Taipei's great double landmark. Built in 1908 as Taiwan's first public market — an octagonal red-brick hall by Japanese-era architect Juro Kondo — it lived later lives as an opera house and cinema, fell derelict, and was restored in 2007 as a cultural centre of craft shops and theatre. What happened behind it made queer history: from the mid-2000s, the south plaza at the building's rear filled with open-air LGBTQ bars and terraces, growing into the largest concentration of openly gay venues in Taiwan. In the society that would become the first in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage (2019), the Red House quarter is where that openness is most visible — evenings here are simply out, in every sense. Visiting: the cultural centre runs Tuesday-Sunday in the daytime; the bars wake toward evening. Ximending's pedestrian sprawl surrounds it, and the 228 Peace Park — the historic meeting ground of Pai Hsien-yung's Crystal Boys — is a short MRT hop, completing Taipei's queer-history circuit.