Dadaocheng's growth was accelerated by violence elsewhere. In 1853, a major conflict in nearby Wanhua drove an influx of displaced merchants and settlers northward along the riverbank. They arrived in a district already positioned for trade -- the Tamsui River connected Dadaocheng to the sea, and the mid-19th century tea boom was creating fortunes. By 1867, foreign traders had entered the market. Within five years, five British firms operated out of Twatutia, as Westerners spelled the name, transforming the district into an international commercial hub. When Taiwan's first railroad station was completed in Dadaocheng in October 1891, linking the neighborhood to Keelung, the district's position as the island's economic nerve center was secure.

Japanese colonial rule reshaped Dadaocheng without destroying it. The neighborhood became Daitōtei, the second most populous settlement in Taiwan after Tainan, with a population of thirty to forty thousand. European settlers clustered along the Tamsui River waterfront. The Japanese built one of Taiwan's first movie theaters here -- the Eraku-za, whose interior mimicked the Imperial Theater in Tokyo and included a cafe, a gymnasium, and dressing rooms. The district also served as a venue for the 1935 Taiwan Exposition, a colonial-era showcase marking forty years of Japanese rule. A branch rail line from Taipei to Tamsui opened in 1901 with a stop at Daitotei Station, though it closed to passenger service by 1916 and shut down entirely by 1937, a casualty of the automobile age.

After World War II, the most famous street in Dadaocheng was renamed Dihua Street -- a reference to the city then known as Dihua, now Urumqi in Xinjiang. The renaming was part of a broader pattern of the Republic of China government stamping mainland geography onto Taiwan's urban landscape. But the street's character proved more durable than its name. Dihua Street is the oldest street in Taipei, with sections dating to the Dutch colonial period in the 1600s, and it remains the center of the dried goods trade that has defined the neighborhood for generations. In the weeks before Lunar New Year, 750,000 people crowd the narrow street to buy ingredients for the holiday. Shops that have operated here for decades sell medicinal herbs, dried seafood, fabrics, and the incense materials that keep the neighborhood's temples fragrant.

Dadaocheng carries heavier memories too. The neighborhood was the epicenter of the February 28 Incident of 1947, a mass uprising against the Kuomintang government that was brutally suppressed and resulted in the deaths of thousands of Taiwanese civilians. The event was officially taboo for decades under martial law, but Dadaocheng's residents never forgot. The Taipei Xia-Hai City God Temple on Dihua Street, dedicated to the Cheng Huang deity, hosts an annual festival on the 13th day of the fifth lunar month that draws enormous crowds -- a celebration of continuity in a district whose history includes both prosperity and trauma. Dadaocheng's streets still carry the layered names of their successive rulers: Hokkien underneath, Japanese overlaid, Mandarin on top. The buildings tell the same story in brick.