Once-thriving district

Now losing its luster

Taipei's East Shopping District was only rice paddy fields and unused land in the 1950s and did not even start to take shape until the 1970s after the extension of Zhongxiao East Road further east.

The opening of Taipei's first metro line, now the Brown Line, and later the Bannan Line (Blue Line), both in the 1990s, boosted commerce in the area, with street vendors crowding alleys in the neighborhood on both weekdays and weekends.

Taipei Metro also opened an underground mall that included both shops and public art spaces between the Zhongxiao Fuxing and Zhongxiao Dunhua metro stations in 2002.

That heyday, however, has long passed.

The rise of the Xinyi business district, which is east of the East Shopping District, drew consumer traffic away from the East Shopping District, and some businesses in the Zhongxiao East Road area were forced out by high rents.

Taipei Metro ridership numbers offer a particularly jarring look at the East Shopping District's decline.

Comparing the number of passengers entering and exiting stations in Taipei's shopping districts in 2014 and 2019, the Zhongxiao Fuxing and Zhongxiao Dunhua stations saw a combined daily average drop of more than 16,000 passengers during the five-year period.

In contrast, the Xinyi business district's Taipei City Hall and Taipei 101/World Trade Center stations recorded a combined rise of over 34,000 passengers during the period, while the Ximen and Zhongshan stations in the western part of the city posted increases of 22,000 and 25,000, respectively.

According to the Ministry of the Interior's housing price website, the East Shopping District saw rents drop 40.3 percent between 2016 and 2019.

To revive the shopping district, store owners in the area have formed a business development association, and the city government has launched an EastNEXT project in 2019 to improve local infrastructure.