Taiwan food and culture in 12 days: night markets, tea country and Tainan
Taiwan eats better for the money than anywhere else in Asia, and it does it in public. The night market is not a tourist attraction here, it is where people have dinner, and the best stalls have been run by the same family for three generations and sell exactly one thing.
- Duration
- 12 days
- Pace
- Moderate
- Hotel changes
- 4
- Best months
- Oct, Nov, Dec, Mar, Apr
- From
- $2,340 per person
The other half of the story is tea. Taiwan’s high mountain oolong is among the best tea produced anywhere, the growing regions sit between 3,300 and 8,200 feet (1,000 and 2,500 m), and a tasting with a grower is two hours and six infusions rather than a shop with a counter.
This route follows both from Taipei down the island to Tainan, which is the oldest city and the place Taiwanese people go when they want to eat properly.
Twelve days, four hotel changes, high speed rail on the flat and a private car in the hills, and five sessions where a specialist is with you.
Who it suits: people who plan trips around what they will eat, tea drinkers, and anyone who found a standard Taiwan itinerary short on substance.
Your specialist: Asaf Zamshtein, our Southeast Asia and China specialist, with our Taiwanese partner team on the ground.
Day by day
Taipei, days 1 to 4
Day 1: Arrive Taipei. Transfer from Taoyuan, about 40 minutes. Nothing scheduled. Dinner at Ningxia night market, which is the oldest and smallest of the good ones: oyster omelette, taro balls, and a stall selling nothing but sesame oil chicken since the 1950s.
Day 2: Dadaocheng, the merchant city. A guided morning in the old trading quarter on the Tamsui river: Dihua Street, where the dried goods shops sell scallops, mushrooms, medicinal roots and birds’ nests out of open sacks, the tea merchants, and Xiahai City God Temple, which is small, extremely busy and mostly concerned with matchmaking.
Lunch on the street. Afternoon free. Evening at Raohe, for pepper buns straight off the wall of a clay oven and a queue that moves faster than it looks.
Day 3: The museum, and beef noodles. The National Palace Museum with a specialist guide, two and a half hours, which is the right length. Then a beef noodle soup comparison in the afternoon, because it is the national dish and the argument about clear broth against braised is genuinely a serious one. Two bowls, two shops, twenty minutes apart.
Evening free, or Longshan Temple at dusk and the Huaxi Street area around it.
Day 4: Maokong and Pinglin. Tea day one. The gondola up over the hills south of the city to Maokong, where Tieguanyin has been grown since the nineteenth century, and a wooden tea house on the ridge. Then over to Pinglin in the afternoon, an hour away, for Baozhong, which is barely oxidised and tastes like nothing else: a tasting with a grower and a walk through the terraces.
Taichung and the tea hills, days 5 to 8
Day 5: To Taichung. Fifty minutes by high speed rail. Miyahara, a former Japanese-era eye clinic now selling ice cream out of a room that looks like a library. The Second Market for lunch. Chun Shui Tang in the afternoon, where bubble tea was invented in the 1980s and where they will show you how it is shaken.
Evening at Fengjia night market, which is the largest in Taiwan and is a student market: cheaper, louder and more experimental than Taipei’s.
Day 6: Lugu and Dongding. By car into the hills of Nantou, about two hours. Dongding oolong is one of the classic Taiwanese teas and Lugu is where it comes from. A full morning on a farm: picking if the season allows, withering, the bruising and rolling that makes an oolong an oolong, the roasting that distinguishes Dongding from everything else, and a long tasting.
Afternoon on to Sun Moon Lake. Lakeside room. The lake is beautiful and it is very busy, and the evening after the coaches leave is the reason we stay overnight.
Day 7: Sun Moon Lake, then up. Out early on a bicycle along the western shore before the day trippers arrive, which is a genuinely lovely hour. Then the Thao village at Ita Thao, and a black tea plantation, because Sun Moon Lake grows Ruby 18, a hybrid of Burmese and native Taiwanese stock that tastes of mint and cinnamon and is unlike any other black tea.
Afternoon by car up to Alishan, about three hours of climbing.
Day 8: Alishan. The little red train to Zhushan before dawn for the sunrise and the sea of clouds, which happens or does not. Then the cypress forest, some of the trees over a thousand years old, and the high mountain oolong that comes off these slopes above 3,300 feet (1,000 m) and sells for many times the price of the lowland leaf. A tasting at a farm on the way down in the afternoon.
Tainan, days 9 to 12
Day 9: Down to Tainan. Off the mountain to Chiayi, then rail south, arriving early afternoon. Tainan was the capital for two hundred years and it is the reason to come to Taiwan if you care about food.
Afternoon at Anping: Fort Zeelandia, built by the Dutch in 1624, the tree house where banyan roots have taken over a warehouse, and shrimp rolls at the harbour. Evening on Guohua Street.
Day 10: Tainan, eating properly. A full day with a food specialist, starting at six in the morning with beef soup, which is a Tainan institution and is served at dawn because the meat comes from the market that hour. Then danzai noodles, milkfish congee, coffin bread, savoury rice pudding, eel noodles and shaved ice, spread across the day with walking between them.
The walking is the history: the Confucius temple from 1665, the Grand Matsu Temple, Shennong Street, and the alley shrines that are on nobody’s map.
Day 11: Tainan, free, or Kaohsiung. Nothing scheduled. Options: a soy sauce or salt works in the flats outside the city, a half day in Kaohsiung which is thirty minutes away by rail, or a second run at the things you liked yesterday, which is what most people do.
Day 12: Departure. High speed rail from Tainan to Taoyuan airport, about an hour and three quarters door to door.
What is included
Accommodation with breakfast throughout, all rail legs in reserved seats including the high speed line, a private air-conditioned car with English-speaking driver on four days, licensed guides on five days including a food specialist in Taipei and Tainan, three tea farm visits with tastings, the Maokong gondola, the Alishan forest railway and the Zhushan sunrise train, the National Palace Museum with a specialist guide, all entrance fees on guided days, a stored-value transport card each, a day-by-day document with train numbers, and a WhatsApp group with your consultant and our partner team in Taiwan throughout.
Most meals are not included, deliberately. On a food trip you should be free to stop when you see something.
What we would change, and when
- Vegetarian? Taiwan is one of the easiest countries in Asia for it, because of a long Buddhist vegetarian tradition and a large number of dedicated restaurants. Tell us and we rebuild the market walks rather than adjusting them, and you will eat extremely well.
- Want Hakka food? Add a day at Beipu in Hsinchu county, where lei cha is a pounded tea and seed paste you grind yourself, and the cooking is sour, salty and a different cuisine entirely.
- Want indigenous cooking? Two nights in Taitung on the east coast, for Amis and Bunun food built on millet, mountain vegetables and smoked pork. It adds three days.
- Travelling around Lunar New Year? Many of the best small restaurants close for several days and the trains sell out weeks ahead. On a food trip specifically, we would move your dates and say why.
Honest notes
Night markets are crowded, hot and slow to move through, and the good ones are worse. Go at six rather than eight, eat standing up, and share everything. Anyone who tells you Shilin is the best is repeating a guidebook from fifteen years ago.
Stinky tofu smells considerably worse than it tastes and it is worth ordering once. Chicken feet, pig blood cake and century egg are all on this route and none of them is compulsory.
The tea is the part people underestimate. A serious high mountain oolong sells for a great deal of money and it is worth the two hours to understand why. It is also entirely possible to spend three hundred dollars in a tea shop without meaning to, and our guide will tell you when you are being sold to.
Alishan sunrise is a lottery with the weather and about four hundred other people in the dark. Some mornings it is one of the great sights in Asia. Some mornings it is cloud. We put you there anyway because the forest in the afternoon justifies the night on its own.
Built by Asaf Zamshtein, our Southeast Asia and China specialist, and checked with our partner team in Taiwan before it goes out.
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