— a city held between mountains and rain.
“The capital of Taiwan, set in the Taipei Basin where the Tamsui, Keelung, and Xindian rivers meet, with green hills rising on every side. Taipei 101 stands above the eastern district; the lanes around Longshan Temple still smell of incense at dawn. The light is humid and pearl-grey through much of the year. The city eats late, walks the night markets, and goes quiet only after midnight.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Taipei is the capital of Taiwan and the political and cultural centre of the island. The city sits in the Taipei Basin in the north of the island, drained by the Tamsui, Keelung, and Xindian rivers, and ringed by the Yangmingshan volcanic group to the north and the Xueshan range to the south. The metropolitan population reaches about 7 million. Founded as a walled prefectural city under Qing administration in the 1880s, Taipei has been the seat of government of the Republic of China since 1949.
Taipei 101, completed in 2004, stood as the world's tallest building for six years at 508 metres and remains the city's defining silhouette, designed by C.Y. Lee and Partners with a tuned mass damper visible on the upper floors. Older Taipei is held by Longshan Temple in the Wanhua district, founded in 1738 by Han settlers from Fujian, and by the white walls and blue tile of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, opened in 1980 on the site of a former barracks.
The city is reached through Taoyuan International Airport, about 40 kilometres west of the centre, with a direct MRT line running into Taipei Main Station in 36 minutes. The city's MRT and a dense bus grid reach most of the basin. The night markets, Shilin in Shilin District and Raohe in Songshan, open in the early evening and run past midnight. The cooler months, November through March, are the practical season; the summer carries typhoons and high humidity from June through September.