What's the must-see thing in Taipei?

The National Palace Museum was established in 1925 inside Beijing's Forbidden City and relocated to a purpose-built hillside complex in Shilin during the Chinese Civil War. The Taipei building opened in 1965. Getting there takes about 30 minutes from Taipei Main Station on the MRT Red Line to Shilin station, then a 10-minute bus or NT$100 taxi up the hill. The Jadeite Cabbage, 19 centimetres of half-white, half-green stone, sits in a climate-controlled case on the third floor. The crowd inches past in single file. The Meat-Shaped Stone, a chunk of banded jasper carved to mimic a cube of braised pork belly, draws nearly the same line one room over. The ground-floor calligraphy galleries stay quieter and are honestly more rewarding if you give them 20 minutes. Audio guides rent for NT$150 at the lobby counter.

Longshan Temple in Wanhua has been standing since 1738, making it the oldest temple in Taipei. You exit the MRT at Longshan Temple station and the sandalwood incense hits you before you cross the street. Inside, smoke curls through the main hall and wooden jiaobei fortune blocks clatter against stone floors as locals toss them to ask the gods yes-or-no questions. The temple was built by Hoklo settlers from Fujian province and has been rebuilt several times, most recently after Allied air raids in 1945. No entry fee. The surrounding Wanhua district is the oldest part of Taipei, grittier than the glass-tower neighborhoods near Taipei 101. Huaxi Street Night Market sits two blocks south. It lost most of its snake-soup stalls from the 1980s but still sells solid oyster omelets for around NT$60.

Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall opened in 1980 and occupies the center of Liberty Square, with the National Theater to its left and the National Concert Hall to its right. The octagonal white hall rises 76 metres. The marble steps feel deliberately oversized. Inside, a 6.3-metre bronze statue of Chiang Kai-shek sits in a room scaled to dwarf everything, including you. The changing of the guard runs every hour from 9am to 5pm and takes about 10 minutes. Soldiers in white uniforms march in formation, boot heels clicking on polished granite. Get there before 10am on a weekday and you might have the upper hall to yourself. Free entry. Taiwan's Wild Lily student movement occupied the square in March 1990, and large-scale demonstrations have used it regularly since.

For a single-day sequence, start at the museum in Shilin while you're fresh, then ride the metro south to Longshan Temple by early afternoon, and close at CKS Memorial Hall for one of the later guard changes. The Taipei Metro runs until midnight and costs NT$20-65 per ride. Station signage is in English and Mandarin. Current July temperatures sit around 28°C with 77% humidity, so starting in the museum's air-conditioned galleries and saving the open-air temple and memorial for the afternoon tends to work better than the reverse.