The Central Bookstore stocked selected titles from mainland China, Japan, and the West — a curated window onto a wider intellectual world at a time when Taiwan's access to that world was controlled and constrained. Its floors served as venue and meeting place, a space where the public could encounter writers like Lu Xun, whose unsparing critiques of Chinese tradition had made him a touchstone of the May Fourth Movement that swept China after 1919.

For the Taiwanese Cultural Association, which had been founded in 1921 to promote cultural education and political consciousness among Taiwanese people under Japanese rule, the bookstore was an extension of that mission in commercial form. The shop caught the attention of colonial authorities and was placed under surveillance — a fact that, rather than diminishing its importance, made plain what kind of place it was.

After Taiwan's transfer from Japanese to Republic of China administration in 1945, the bookstore resumed normal operations. It moved to its current address on Taiwan Boulevard — a building that had previously served as the store's dormitory and warehouse — and continued as a commercial and cultural anchor of central Taichung for the next five decades.

In 1998, financial difficulties forced it to close. The building then cycled through a succession of tenants that reflected the pressures of a changing commercial district: a wedding dress shop, a convenience store, a motorcycle helmet retailer. Each occupant was reasonable enough; none of them were the Central Bookstore. For nearly two decades, the circular three-story building stood as a reminder of what had been there, waiting.

In 2016, the Shang Shan Human Culture Foundation acquired the rights to the building and committed NT$20 million to restoring it. The goal was not merely renovation — it was resurrection with fidelity to what the bookstore had represented. The restoration took several years. A trial reopening came in November 2019, and the official ceremony followed on October 18, 2020, attended by Taiwan's Culture Minister Lee Yung-te.

The building itself is distinctive: a three-story circular structure on Taiwan Boulevard, a short walk northeast of Taichung Station. Its shape sets it apart from the surrounding streetscape. Inside, the restored bookstore operates again as a place to browse, to read, and to consider — much as it was designed to do nearly a century ago, by people who believed that access to ideas was worth protecting.

The Central Bookstore's story is, at its core, a story about what it means to keep a space for thought alive. It endured Japanese colonial surveillance, the upheaval of 1945, decades of commercial drift, and eventual closure — and then came back, deliberately and at considerable cost, because people decided it was worth the effort.

Taichung has changed enormously since 1927. The city that once grew tea and rice along the Taichung basin is now a major metropolitan center with an MRT system and a skyline that stretches toward the mountains. The Central Bookstore has watched all of it from its corner on Taiwan Boulevard, sometimes as a participant, sometimes as a tenant of a different kind, and now again as itself.