Nanjichang Night Market

This guide to Nanjichang Night Market in Taipei traces the ground under your feet from a Japanese army training strip in 1909 through a wartime airfield, a postwar ownership dispute between the army and air force, and even a brief run as a golf course. You'll hear how a 1963 apartment block for military families buried the runway for good, and how neighbors selling noodles and dumplings from carts outside their own doors slowly built a market nobody planned. It wasn't until 2013 that the city gave it an official name, decades after it had already been feeding the neighborhood.