Taipei, a city best eaten after dark

Taipei fills a green basin ringed by volcanic ridges, and the city reads best from above: ride the elevator up Taipei 101 at dusk, or climb the twenty minutes of stone steps on Elephant Mountain to watch the tower turn gold over the Xinyi blocks. At street level the pace changes completely. Longshan Temple in Wanhua stays thick with incense and the murmur of evening chanting, while two streets away the herb sellers of Qingcao Lane weigh out bundles of bitter greens. North of the river, Dadaocheng's Dihua Street keeps its Qing-era shophouse facades, its sacks of dried scallop and Chinese medicine, and a growing row of small tea rooms and design studios tucked behind the old columns.

Eating is why most travellers stay longer than planned. Shilin is the biggest night market and the loudest; Raohe Street, narrower and walkable end to end, opens with a queue for black-pepper buns baked against the wall of a clay oven. Order beef noodle soup in a tiled shop in Zhongshan, xiao long bao steamed to order, an oyster omelette off a griddle, and a cup of the bubble tea Taiwan gave the world. Yongkang Street does the sit-down version of all of it, dumpling houses and mango shaved ice side by side.

Leave half a day of breathing room too. The gondola to Maokong climbs over tea terraces to hillside houses pouring local baozhong; Beitou is a short metro ride into sulphur steam, public hot-spring baths and a wooden Japanese-era bathhouse museum; and Yangmingshan turns to calla lilies in spring and silvergrass in autumn. Taipei is easy, generous and endlessly snackable — a very good first chapter before the rest of Taiwan.