Xinyi Plaza

This guide to Xinyi Plaza in Taipei opens in 1991, with kids fishing in muddy ponds beside half-built skyscrapers and illegally dumped trash, on ground the city once called garbage stacked like mountains. You'll hear how this same land was Qing-dynasty rice paddy watered by the old Liugong Canal, then seized by Japan's colonial government for a factory, tobacco plant, and army warehouse. It traces the decades this patch of Taipei sat forgotten before planners bet on it as a second downtown in the 1980s.