Eslite Spectrum Songyan

This guide to Eslite Spectrum Songyan in Taipei starts inside the Matsuyama Tobacco Plant, opened in 1937 under Japanese colonial rule, where some fourteen hundred workers, four in five of them women, rolled cigarettes for ten-hour shifts. You'll hear how workers who scrubbed tobacco dust from their skin each day still called the place a golden rice bowl, with its own nursery, hospital and fish pond. The guide follows the factory from its busiest years to the glass tower architect Toyo Ito later raised beside it.