A Century-Old Japanese-Era Residence Museum & A Heritage Stroll Through the Old Streets

Text by MOOK Scenic Spots' Christopher, compiled and reported

Taoyuan’s Daxi District holds a 200-year snapshot of history, featuring a long-standing woodworking industry, Japanese colonial cultural relics, and local community-based temple associations. The Daxi Wooden Art Ecomuseum, which preserves and documents all of this, was born out of the concept of safeguarding cultural heritage and integrating with the local community. Focusing on two core themes—Daxi’s wooden art industry and everyday life of its residents—it promotes contemporary wooden art lifestyle aesthetics. The museum grows together with local residents, transforming the entire Daxi area into an open-air, fenceless ecological museum.

The woodworking industry began to take root in Daxi in the 1810s. After 200 years of development, the area remains home to numerous woodworking shops and timber mills, making it one of Taiwan’s key hubs for the wooden art industry today. In 1901, the Daxi Branch Office was established here, along with a complex of police dormitories, forming a unique police living quarter that witnessed the century-long development of policing in Daxi since the Japanese colonial period.