A man was planing in the Minchuan Old Street, which still has an old atmosphere

Man working in passage in Minchuan Old Street — Man working in Minchuan Old Street

In the Japanese lexicon, there is a rather cruel word: rougai, a derogatory term for an aging generation deemed a burden. Yet, across the sea in the Chinese-speaking world, a slight shift in characters gives us laojie—simply, "old street." It is one of the curious conveniences of a shared writing system that the same visual roots can evoke such profoundly different resonances. Pondering this linguistic divergence, I found myself strolling through the historic district of Sanxia, a town in northern Taiwan.

The streets here are lined with stately red-brick facades, architectural relics surviving from the Taisho era of Japanese colonial rule. If you look closely at their design, you notice the ground floors retreat from the street, creating a continuous, covered arcade known locally as a qilou. It is an eminently practical architectural vernacular designed to shield pedestrians from the sudden, unyielding downpours of the subtropics—a sensible design I have often encountered throughout Southeast Asia.

I drifted aimlessly through the dim, sheltered tunnels of these arcades. The town was in the throes of a sweeping, wholesale renovation, clearly laying the groundwork to rebrand itself as a prime tourist destination. Craftsmen bustled everywhere, busily preparing the historic street for its polished rebirth. Looking down the long colonnade, my eyes caught a solitary figure. A man had dragged a wooden table and some stools out into the walkway. Head bowed, he was completely absorbed in his labor, silently running a hand plane over the wood.

I stood at a distance, idly watching the craftsman at work. Ultimately, I mused, this is the inevitable fate of old streets that have fallen out of step with the modern era: they must apply a fresh coat of cosmetic nostalgia and resurrect themselves as tourist attractions simply to survive. To abandon antiquity as it is would be to invite rot and ruin; to bulldoze it all for sterile, concrete blocks would be entirely devoid of soul. In the end, recycling these aging facades into open-air heritage theme parks—a pragmatic scheme to sweep up the loose change of wandering travelers—is perhaps the soundest and healthiest survival strategy of all.

Sansia Old Street on Google Map

Comment via

日本語