The Most Beautiful Places in Taiwan
11 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Taiwan are Taipei 101, National Palace Museum and Yushan Main Peak. The list covers 11 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Taiwan is one of the youngest and fastest-rising landscapes on Earth. It sits where the Philippine Sea Plate drives into the Eurasian Plate, and the collision pushes its central mountains up so quickly that the island has more than two hundred peaks over 3,000 metres. Typhoon rains then cut those mountains into deep gorges, and the north-east coast drops straight into the Pacific. On the lowlands, the island's cities have produced some of the most inventive contemporary architecture in Asia.
Yushan, at about 3,950 metres, is the highest peak on the island. Taroko Gorge cuts through marble walls along the Liwu River, and nearby Qingshui Cliff runs for kilometres as a sheer wall dropping into the Pacific. On the north coast, Yehliu Geopark is a field of sandstone hoodoos and mushroom rocks, the best known of them the Queen's Head. In the same hills, Jiufen grew from a gold-mining boom into a village of stairways and teahouses, and the Remains of the 13 Levels are the terraced ruins of a copper smelter above the sea.
Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world from 2004 to 2010, is shaped like a stalk of bamboo and steadied by a giant tuned mass damper. The National Palace Museum holds one of the great collections of Chinese art, including the Jadeite Cabbage. In Taichung, Toyo Ito's opera house is built from curving walls without columns or straight lines, and Formosa Boulevard station in Kaohsiung lies beneath the Dome of Light, a vast glass artwork by Narcissus Quagliata. In Miaoli, the Longteng Broken Bridge stands as a row of brick arches left by the earthquake of 1935.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Taipei 101 | Skyscraper | |
| 2 | National Palace Museum | Museum | |
| 3 | Yushan Main Peak | Summit | |
| 4 | Jiufen | Most beautiful village | |
| 5 | Yehliu Geopark | Rock formation | |
| 6 | Taichung Metropolitan Opera House | Opera house | |
| 7 | Formosa Boulevard Station | Railway station | |
| 8 | Qingshui Cliff | Cliff | |
| 9 | Remains of the 13 Levels | Abandoned mine | |
| 10 | Taroko Gorge | Canyon | |
| 11 | Longteng Broken Bridge | Abandoned railway |
01 Taipei 101
Taiwan · 0.4 km from Taipei25.034° N 121.565° E
Image by george17168 from Pixabay The single most photographed part of Taipei 101 isn't visible from the street. Between the 87th and 92nd floors hangs a bright yellow steel sphere weighing 660 tonnes — the largest tuned mass damper ever installed in a building, and one of the few designed to be seen rather than hidden.
Did you know? During construction in March 2002 an earthquake toppled two cranes from the 56th floor, killing five people.
02 National Palace Museum
Taiwan · 7.6 km from Taipei25.102° N 121.549° E
Image by janeb13 from Pixabay Few museums hold so much of a civilisation's art in one place.
Did you know? In Taiwan the crates were first stored in a railway warehouse and a sugar mill, then hidden for over a decade in the mountain village of Beigou near Taichung.
03 Yushan Main Peak
Taiwan23.470° N 120.957° E
James Ho · CC BY-SA 2.0 Yushan, Jade Mountain, is the highest peak in Taiwan and the summit of a much wider region: at 3,952 metres it is the highest point in the western Pacific outside Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula and one of the highest island summits on Earth, ranking fourth among the world's island high points.
Did you know? About 17,000 years ago permanent ice caps on the mountain reached down to roughly 2,800 metres above sea level.
04 Jiufen
Taiwan · 11.4 km from Keelung25.107° N 121.843° E
Gregg Tavares from Stanton, California · CC BY 2.0 Jiufen clings to a steep mountainside above the north-east coast of Taiwan, a dense stack of houses, teahouses and stairways looking down to the sea.
Did you know? The Japanese Fujita company, which mined around Jiufen, was the first Japanese firm to extract gold-bearing quartz in Taiwan.
05 Yehliu Geopark
Taiwan · 9.6 km from Keelung25.214° N 121.698° E
Image by sharonang from Pixabay 7 kilometres long. Seen from above it looks like a turtle slipping into the water, and locals have long called it the Yehliu Turtle.
Did you know? The Queen's Head is estimated to be around 4,000 years old, and it draws millions of visitors a year.
06 Taichung Metropolitan Opera House
Taiwan · 4.3 km from Taichung24.163° N 120.641° E
Fcuk1203 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The National Taichung Theater looks as if a block of honeycomb had been sliced open: its glass-and-concrete box is pierced by curving voids that run through the building, so that walls bend continuously into floors and ceilings.
Did you know? The curved concrete surfaces total about 21,640 square metres and are 400 millimetres thick, finished largely by hand.
07 Formosa Boulevard Station
Taiwan · 3.6 km from Kaohsiung22.631° N 120.302° E
Image by allanlau2000 from Pixabay Below a busy road junction in the centre of Kaohsiung, the concourse of Formosa Boulevard station opens into a round hall roofed by a vast canopy of coloured glass.
Did you know? The fire sector of the dome depicts war and ends with a phoenix rising from the ashes, its tail streaming orange-red.
08 Qingshui Cliff
Taiwan · 27.7 km from Hualien City24.219° N 121.693° E
Fred Hsu · CC BY-SA 3.0 On Taiwan's east coast, north of Hualien, the mountains do not so much meet the Pacific as fall into it.
Did you know? In 2012 a picture of the cliff appeared in newly issued passports of the People's Republic of China, prompting a protest from Taipei.
09 Remains of the 13 Levels
Taiwan · 13.4 km from Keelung25.118° N 121.865° E
Cuthbertwong · CC BY-SA 3.0 On a steep green hillside above the north-eastern coast of Taiwan, the concrete terraces of an old ore-processing plant step down the slope like the levels of a ruined fortress. Locals call the site the 13 Levels, and its stacked, roofless halls have earned it the nickname "the Potala Palace of the mines".
Did you know? An earlier smelter was built at Shuinandong in 1906 to process the enargite by dry smelting, but it shut in 1923 because costs had become too high.
10 Taroko Gorge
Taiwan · 22.9 km from Hualien City24.177° N 121.519° E
Image by falco from Pixabay Taroko is a canyon cut through marble. The Liwu River, a short and violent stream that falls from the Central Mountain Range to the Pacific in about 55 kilometres, has sawn its way down through rock that began as lime-rich sediment some 230 million years ago and was later pressed and heated into marble.
Did you know? Fourteen ancient sites near the river mouth point to settlers about 1,300 years ago who smelted iron and also mined gold.
11 Longteng Broken Bridge
Taiwan · 23.9 km from Miaoli City24.358° N 120.774° E
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain The Longteng Bridge is among the best-loved railway ruins in Taiwan: a row of red-brick piers standing in a green valley in Sanyi Township, Miaoli County, the arches that once linked them long gone. It was built in 1906 under Japanese rule to carry the railway across the valley, and completed on 30 January 1907.
Did you know? In all it ran about 165 metres across nine spans and stood some 33 metres high.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Taiwan?
- On our list, Taipei 101 ranks first, followed by National Palace Museum and Yushan Main Peak.
- Why are Taroko Gorge's walls made of marble?
- The rock began as limestone deposited on an ancient sea floor, then was transformed into marble by heat and pressure deep underground. The ongoing collision of tectonic plates has lifted it high above sea level, and the Liwu River has cut a narrow gorge through it.
- How does the damper in Taipei 101 work?
- A steel sphere weighing about 660 tonnes hangs between the 87th and 92nd floors. When wind or earthquakes make the tower sway, the pendulum moves out of phase with the building and absorbs part of the motion.
- What is the Queen's Head at Yehliu?
- It is a hoodoo in Yehliu Geopark whose eroded neck and rounded top resemble the profile of a queen wearing a crown. Wind and waves wear away the softer sandstone faster than the harder layer above, and the neck is slowly thinning.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Taiwan?
- In our collection, the places in Taiwan are most often summits (1), canyons and gorges (1), rock formations (1) and cliffs (1).
- How many places are on this list in Taiwan?
- The list covers 11 places.