Daily life in Taipei during the 1960s

A grounded look at a growing Taiwanese capital where apartment blocks, shop-houses, wet markets, buses, scooters, schools, small factories, and martial-law-era public life shaped ordinary routines.

Taipei in the 1960s was expanding from a compact provincial city into the administrative and commercial center of a rapidly industrializing Taiwan. The city passed one million residents early in the decade, became a special municipality in 1967, and absorbed nearby districts such as Shilin, Beitou, Neihu, Nangang, Jingmei, and Muzha in 1968. Daily life mixed older Japanese-era streets, temple neighborhoods, market lanes, military dependents' villages, and new reinforced-concrete buildings with the demands of export-led growth. Residents moved through a city without a metro system, relying on buses, bicycles, pedicabs in some settings, taxis, walking, and a rising number of motorcycles and scooters.

Housing and Living Spaces

Housing in 1960s Taipei ranged from older wooden houses and Japanese-era residences to shop-houses, military dependents' villages, rented rooms, dormitories, illegal hillside settlements, and new concrete walk-up apartments. Many families lived in dense neighborhoods where ground floors held shops, workshops, clinics, noodle stalls, or storage while upper floors held bedrooms and living space. A typical urban household used rooms flexibly: one room could serve as a sitting room, sleeping area, children's study space, and place for receiving relatives. Kitchens were compact, bathrooms could be basic, and balconies or rooftop areas were used for laundry, water tanks, potted plants, repairs, and storage. In older areas, shared taps, narrow lanes, drainage ditches, public toilets, and communal courtyards still shaped domestic routines.

The city grew faster than housing supply. Migrants from central and southern Taiwan, civil servants, soldiers' families, students, apprentices, and young workers all needed rooms near schools, offices, factories, markets, and bus routes. Some households rented subdivided spaces from relatives or landlords, while others added informal extensions to rooftops, alleys, and back courtyards. Military dependents' villages housed mainlander families in modest compounds where neighbors shared language, food habits, and employment ties to the state. Other districts mixed Taiwanese-speaking families, Hakka migrants, students, shopkeepers, temple communities, and market workers. Privacy was limited, but proximity made daily life practical: children were watched by neighbors, food could be bought nearby, and small debts or favors moved through familiar lanes.

New concrete apartments represented modernity but not always spaciousness. They offered stronger materials, tiled surfaces, electric lights, piped water where available, and a sense of urban advancement, yet many still required careful management of heat, humidity, mosquitoes, and storage. Families bought folding tables, wooden cabinets, mosquito nets, plastic basins, enamelware, rice bins, shoe racks, and metal window grilles to make limited space work. The home was tied closely to the street. A person might hear vendors calling, temple music, school bells, bus horns, radios, sewing machines, and neighbors' conversations throughout the day. Housing therefore combined private aspiration with public density, making the household part of a larger neighborhood system of markets, repairs, gossip, childcare, worship, and work.

Food and Daily Meals

Meals in 1960s Taipei reflected Taiwanese, mainland Chinese, Hakka, Japanese-influenced, and local urban habits. Rice remained central when budgets allowed, with sweet potatoes, noodles, wheat buns, and porridge used to stretch meals or fit different family backgrounds. Everyday dishes included stir-fried greens, cabbage, water spinach, bamboo shoots, radish, tofu, eggs, pork, fish, dried shrimp, pickled vegetables, soy sauce, rice wine, garlic, scallions, and soup. Breakfast might come from a soy milk stall selling hot soy milk, fried dough, steamed buns, rice rolls, or scallion pancakes. Lunch for students and workers could be a boxed meal, noodles, rice with braised pork, dumplings, or food bought near a school, office, market, or bus stop.

Most households relied on wet markets and street vendors rather than large supermarkets. Markets supplied vegetables from nearby farms, pork, poultry, river and coastal fish, tofu, noodles, fruit, tea, spices, charcoal, and prepared foods. Shopping was frequent because refrigerators were not yet universal, kitchens were small, and many families preferred fresh ingredients. Regular vendors mattered: they offered credit, saved better produce, trimmed meat to order, shared cooking advice, and passed along news. Women usually carried much of this labor, comparing prices in the morning, preparing lunch before children returned from school, and planning evening dishes around fuel, cash, and leftovers. Food storage used rice tins, ceramic jars, bamboo baskets, enamel pots, and later more plastic containers as manufactured goods became common.

Eating outside was ordinary, not only recreational. Noodle stands, rice shops, tea houses, bakeries, breakfast stalls, temple-front vendors, and night markets served students, office clerks, factory workers, soldiers, shoppers, and families on errands. Modern night markets grew in dense postwar cities to serve workers and migrants who needed inexpensive food and goods after dark, and by the 1960s mass-produced shoes, toys, garments, and household items joined snacks and prepared meals. Taipei residents might buy oyster omelets, stinky tofu, beef noodles, meatball soup, shaved ice, fruit, roasted corn, braised snacks, or simple rice dishes in crowded lanes. Festive meals for Lunar New Year, weddings, temple events, and family banquets were richer, but ordinary eating depended on thrift, freshness, convenience, and the ability of small vendors to turn the street into an extension of the kitchen.

Work and Labor

Work in 1960s Taipei reflected Taiwan's shift from import substitution toward export-oriented industrial growth. The city itself held government ministries, banks, trading companies, schools, hospitals, printers, newspapers, shops, transport firms, restaurants, construction offices, repair businesses, and many small workshops. Export factories and subcontracting networks in Taipei and the surrounding county produced garments, shoes, plastics, toys, food products, electrical goods, and simple electronics. Some workers commuted to industrial districts outside the central city, while Taipei offices handled orders, accounts, customs documents, shipping arrangements, credit, and communication with Japanese, American, and overseas Chinese buyers. The formal city economy depended on clerks, typists, accountants, teachers, nurses, drivers, mechanics, salesmen, civil servants, police, cooks, porters, and repair workers.

Small family businesses were central. A ground-floor shop might sell groceries, fabric, hardware, medicines, books, stationery, or spare parts while family members lived behind or above it. Tailors, shoemakers, print shops, metal workshops, bicycle and scooter repair stands, food stalls, and noodle shops blurred the line between home and workplace. Children helped after school by sweeping, delivering goods, watching siblings, wrapping products, or keeping simple accounts. Women worked in factories, offices, schools, hospitals, markets, beauty salons, tailoring, food vending, and home-based piecework, while also handling cooking, shopping, laundry, childcare, elder care, and household budgeting. The wage of a daughter or son often supported siblings' schooling or remittances to rural parents.

The workday was shaped by commuting and school schedules. Buses were crowded, traffic was slower on narrow streets, and many people walked long distances before or after transit. Scooters and motorcycles grew more visible because they were cheaper and more flexible than cars, useful for deliveries, sales calls, school pickups, and family visits. Office work relied on typewriters, carbon paper, rubber stamps, telephones, abacuses, calculators in better-equipped offices, ledgers, and filing cabinets. Factory and workshop labor used sewing machines, presses, soldering irons, molds, hand tools, scales, and assembly benches. Schoolwork was treated as a family's investment: uniforms, entrance exams, notebooks, cram lessons where affordable, and evening study gave children a demanding labor of their own. The 1960s economy offered mobility, but it required long hours, discipline, and the coordination of paid and unpaid family work.

Social Structure

Taipei's social structure in the 1960s was shaped by occupation, education, family origin, language, housing, gender, and access to state or business networks. Senior officials, military officers, professionals, university teachers, doctors, successful merchants, bankers, and factory owners held clear advantages. A growing middle layer included civil servants, teachers, nurses, clerks, technicians, shopkeepers, police, drivers, postal workers, and employees of trading or manufacturing firms. Working-class households included factory workers, market vendors, construction laborers, porters, cooks, domestic workers, apprentices, and recent migrants in rented rooms or informal housing. Education was one of the main routes to social mobility, so school reputation, exam results, and the ability to keep children studying carried heavy family meaning.

Family background remained visible in daily interaction. Taipei included benshengren families rooted in Taiwan before 1945, waishengren families who arrived from mainland China after 1945, Hakka residents, Indigenous students and workers from other parts of Taiwan, Japanese-speaking older people educated before 1945, and small numbers of foreign missionaries, businesspeople, advisers, and teachers. Mandarin dominated schools, government, radio, and official paperwork, while Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, mainland regional languages, Japanese phrases, and local accents remained common in homes, markets, churches, temples, and workshops. These language patterns affected friendship, marriage, hiring, political caution, and neighborhood trust, though daily business often required practical multilingual understanding.

Public life operated under martial law, which remained in force throughout the decade. Most residents organized their days around work, school, worship, markets, and family duties rather than overt politics, but censorship, surveillance, party-state institutions, school discipline, and caution about public speech formed part of the social atmosphere. Neighborhood offices, police stations, schools, military units, and workplaces connected households to the state. At the same time, temples, churches, lineage ties, hometown associations, alumni groups, markets, and kin networks provided practical support. Gender roles were changing but still unequal: girls' education expanded, women earned wages, and urban fashion changed, yet daughters-in-law, mothers, and grandmothers carried much of the domestic work. Status was read through apartment location, occupation, schooling, language, clothing, manners, consumer goods, and a family's ability to appear orderly in a crowded and competitive city.

Tools and Technology

Everyday technology in 1960s Taipei mixed older hand skills with new consumer goods. Homes used charcoal or gas stoves, rice cookers in better-off households, thermos bottles, enamel basins, bamboo baskets, cleavers, woks, steamers, sewing kits, mosquito nets, electric fans, radios, black-and-white televisions for families who could afford them, and refrigerators only gradually. Public telephones, handwritten address books, letters, telegrams, and workplace phones carried messages before private telephones became common. Laundry involved plastic or metal basins, scrubbing boards, rooftop lines, and careful timing around rain and humidity. Repair culture was strong because shoes, watches, radios, umbrellas, bicycles, sewing machines, and appliances were expected to last.

Transport tools shaped the city as much as household appliances. Buses, bicycles, taxis, handcarts, delivery trucks, trains, ferries on river routes in limited settings, and motorcycles carried people and goods through streets that were becoming more congested. Offices used typewriters, duplicators, stamps, ledgers, filing cabinets, adding machines, and abacuses. Schools used blackboards, chalk, textbooks, exercise books, fountain pens or pencils, uniforms, maps, and exam papers. Workshops used sewing machines, drill presses, soldering equipment, molds, scales, cutting tables, and simple assembly tools. Technology did not remove manual labor; it changed its rhythm. Faster communication, brighter lighting, mechanized sewing, motorized delivery, and household appliances made more work possible in a day, while also raising expectations for speed, schooling, cleanliness, and income.

Clothing and Materials

Clothing in 1960s Taipei reflected work, school, climate, family respectability, and changing consumer styles. Men wore short-sleeved shirts, slacks, belts, leather shoes, sandals, work trousers, uniforms, raincoats, and business suits for formal offices. Women wore blouses, skirts, qipao in some formal or older settings, dresses, trousers, cardigans, aprons, sandals, low heels, and practical house clothes. Students were highly visible in uniforms, name tags, canvas shoes, satchels, and regulated haircuts. Market vendors, mechanics, construction workers, cooks, and factory workers dressed for heat, stains, and movement, while office workers used neat clothing to signal discipline and upward mobility.

Materials included cotton, rayon, nylon, polyester blends, denim, wool for cooler months, leather, rubber, plastic rainwear, and synthetic knits. Taiwan's expanding textile and garment industries made ready-made clothing more available, but home sewing, tailoring, hand-me-downs, and market purchases remained important. A family might buy school uniforms from a local shop, have trousers altered by a tailor, mend socks at home, and reserve better clothing for temple visits, weddings, church, banquets, or official errands. Rain gear was practical in a humid city with typhoons and sudden downpours, and washable fabrics mattered in summer heat. Clothing carried social information: a crisp school uniform suggested family investment, a white shirt suggested office work, a military uniform indicated state service, and fashionable synthetic fabrics suggested modern consumer aspiration. Even modest households spent effort keeping public clothing clean, pressed, and respectable.

Daily life in Taipei during the 1960s was shaped by compressed urban growth and careful household adaptation. The city was becoming larger, more bureaucratic, more industrial, and more connected to export markets, but ordinary routines still depended on wet markets, family labor, buses, neighborhood credit, repair shops, school discipline, and crowded living spaces. The decade's everyday history can be seen in a mother bargaining before breakfast, a student taking a packed lunch to class, a clerk stamping export papers, a worker riding a scooter through rain, and a family arranging one small room for meals, study, sleep, and visitors.

References

Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Taipei. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taipei
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Economy of Taiwan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Taiwan
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Economic history of Taiwan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Taiwan
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Night markets in Taiwan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_markets_in_Taiwan
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Martial law in Taiwan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_Taiwan