Taipei 101 Layover: Xinyi on Foot

Xinyi puts Taipei 101, a 6.6-hectare tobacco factory from 1937 and an ornamental lake with the tower reflected in it inside a twenty-minute walk of each other, and only the tower charges anything.

The open-air terrace on Taipei 101’s 91st floor

Most of what the NT$600 ticket buys is behind glass: the 88th and 89th floors are sealed indoor decks, and the lift that gets you there covers 84 floors in 37 seconds. Two floors up, the building opens. The 91st-floor terrace is outdoors at 391 metres, a walkway around the tower shielded by a curved wall of metal louvres, and it is the part of the ticket that shuts without notice when the wind gets up or a storm comes through.

The 101st floor is a separate, dearer proposition. It stayed private for the building’s first fifteen years and now sells as Skyline 460: a mirrored, planted room on the top floor and a terrace outside it at 460 metres. Both tickets pass through an airport-style bag screening before the lift, which is where the time goes on a busy afternoon, so a pass bought in advance is worth it for the queue as much as the floor.

That screening applies to whatever you are carrying, so a suitcase goes through a scanner here as well as at the airport later.

The 1937 tobacco factory at Songshan Cultural and Creative Park

Cigarettes came off the line here until 1998, on a 6.6-hectare site laid out in 1937 as the first purpose-built tobacco plant in Taiwan and run under the Japanese colonial monopoly. The city listed it as a historic site in 2001, and what survives is the shape of an industrial campus rather than a single building: the office block, warehouses one to five, the cigarette plant and the boiler room, plus an inspection room, a machine repair shed and a nursing room.

Two things here are worth the walk over the exhibitions. One is the Baroque garden, a formal layout with a landscaped ecological pond beside it that the factory built for its workers. The other is the old public bath. Entry to the grounds costs nothing and the outdoor parts never shut; the buildings run 09:00 to 18:00, and individual galleries inside set their own hours and prices.

The pond at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall

Taipei 101 stands directly behind the hall’s yellow roof, so the tower, the roof and the water line up from the far bank of the ornamental lake in the park on its north side. The hall itself went up in 1972, a hundred years after Sun Yat-sen’s birth, with the roof sweeping up at the corners over a colonnade of square pillars.

Inside is another matter. The building closed on 26 February 2024 for work on the roof, the air conditioning and the exhibition halls, due to finish in the last quarter of 2026, and the hourly changing of the guard stopped with it and comes back when the doors do. The park, the pond and the benches stayed open the whole time, and they are free, so the closure costs you the galleries rather than the stop.

Xinyi is crossed on skywalks rather than at the lights

The malls, the trade centre and the tower base are joined to each other above the traffic rather than across it, and the ground-level alternative is Chianti Avenue, a tree-lined pedestrian strip kept clear of cars. Either route means stairs or an escalator at every crossing point, which is why fifteen minutes on a map here is usually twenty on foot.

Taipei 101 has its own metro station under the mall, about twenty minutes and one change from Taipei Main Station, where the airport line runs from a separate building 250 metres west of the railway concourse. If the free hours are long enough to leave Xinyi entirely, the wider Taipei itinerary covers the old temples and the shophouse streets on the other side of the city, and the old railway offices behind Taipei Main Station are the closer alternative if the sky over the tower has closed in.