Taoyuan Activities Beyond the Airport
Land at Taoyuan International Airport and most travelers do exactly one thing: race for the Purple Line to Taipei. That skips the point. Stick around and Taoyuan City hands you 2,800-year-old cypress trees, a Baroque-fronted old street built on the camphor trade, and an aquarium good enough to make you forget you’re 40 minutes from a runway.
Daxi Old Street: not a Taipei knockoff
Start in Daxi District, where Heping Road and Zhongshan Road are lined with early-1900s shophouses that fuse Baroque pediments and Corinthian columns with Chinese phoenix and lotus carvings. Wander past artisan woodcraft stalls, braise-warm slabs of Daxi dried tofu tossed in garlic soy paste, and hand-pulled peanut brittle rolled hot in front of you. Bring NT$ cash. Vendors here mostly do not run card machines.
Lalashan’s ancient giants (plan a full day)
Deep in Fuxing District, roughly 2.5 to 3 hours by car from downtown Taoyuan on winding mountain roads, Lalashan National Forest Recreation Area protects 24 numbered ancient red cypress and hinoki trees, one of them over 2,800 years old. The 3.7km loop trail through moss and giant ferns stays shaded and cool even in summer. Do not treat this as a side trip between lunch and dinner. Budget the whole day, or book a mountain guesthouse and stay over.
Xiaowulai’s glass-floor thrill (skip Tuesdays)
Xiaowulai Scenic Area packs a glass-bottomed skywalk 70 meters above a roaring waterfall, a wind-balanced rock formation, and forest trails into one gorge. It closes every Tuesday for maintenance, so build your route around that before committing a day to it.
Xpark: book ahead on weekends
Down in Qingpu near the high-speed rail station, Xpark Aquarium runs an 8-meter Formosa tank with manta rays and zebra sharks, plus Magellanic penguins swimming through overhead tunnels. Adult tickets run around NT$550. Weekend and public-holiday capacity fills fast and walk-ins get turned away at the door, so reserve online first.
Night markets and the Cihu statues
Zhongli Tourist Night Market and Taoyuan Night Market cover the usual scallion pancakes, fried sweet potato balls, and stinky tofu. For something odder, Cihu in Daxi holds over 200 relocated bronze statues of Chiang Kai-shek in a lakeside park, plus a changing-of-the-guard ceremony.
Verdict: if your itinerary treats Taoyuan as a place you fly through rather than a place you visit, you’re skipping mountain scenery most Taipei day-trippers never see. For the shrines, bridges, and reservoir views packed into this municipality, see our Taoyuan sightseeing guide .
One concrete tip before you go: load an EasyCard with extra credit at any 7-Eleven near the airport MRT. It works on the Purple Line, TRA trains, and the Taiwan Tourist Shuttle buses that reach Daxi and Xiaowulai, and you won’t want to hunt for a ticket machine on a mountain road.