New Taipei and Xizhi: the city around the capital

New Taipei wraps around Taipei like a ring of old mining towns, river suburbs and coastline. Xizhi, on the Keelung River, shows its everyday commuter side.

3 December 2025Tân Bắc, Đài Loan3 min read0 viewsTaiwan

City lights and a pink sky over Xizhi, New Taipei

On a map, New Taipei looks like a ring with a hole in the middle: Taipei sits inside it, and Keelung touches its northeastern edge. It was Taipei County until 2010, when it became a special municipality, and it is now the most populous city in Taiwan. For visitors it is less a single city than a collection of very different places that share a name.

A ring of towns

To the northwest, Tamsui sits where the Tamsui River meets the sea. It became a treaty port in the 19th century, and Fort San Domingo, first built by the Spanish in the 17th century, still stands above the water. On the northeast coast, the old gold-mining towns of Jiufen and Jinguashi cling to steep hillsides. Inland, Pingxi is known for its sky lanterns and small branch railway, Yingge for ceramics, Sanxia for its ornate Zushi Temple and old street, and Wulai for hot springs and Atayal culture.

Xizhi

Xizhi lies east of Taipei along the Keelung River, on the railway towards Keelung. It is a good example of the everyday New Taipei that most residents know: apartment towers, offices and shopping streets, linked to the capital by train and highway, with green hills close behind. Many people who work in Taipei live in districts like this, where housing is generally more affordable than in the city itself.

Light trails of traffic on a city avenue at night, black and white

How it fits together

New Taipei and Taipei work as a single metropolitan area. The MRT crosses the boundary again and again, and one EasyCard works across both cities as well as on local trains. That makes New Taipei the easiest way to reach the countryside around the capital: within an hour of central Taipei you can be on a mountain trail, a beach on the north coast or a quiet old street.

Seasons

The north of the island is wetter than the south, especially in winter, when the northeast monsoon brings drizzle to the coast and the hills around Jiufen often disappear into cloud. Autumn tends to be clearest. Spring brings blossoms to the hills, and summer is the season for the beaches of the north coast, although typhoons can interrupt plans.

A scooter riding down a narrow alley lined with shops and signs

If Taipei is the face of northern Taiwan, New Taipei is the rest of the body: less polished, more varied, and closer to how people actually live.

Photos: hugo_ob, fishopen770, 4601460 on Pixabay, used under the Pixabay Content License. These are not my photographs.

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