Dr. Miyahara was born in Chiran, Kagoshima Prefecture on December 13, 1874. A graduate of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Institute of Infectious Diseases in Japan, he was a man of serious credentials who built a distinguished medical career before arriving in Taiwan. In 1927, he opened a clinic in Taichung on the banks of what is now called the Lu River (Lyu-Chuan Canal). At the time it was the largest eye clinic in the city — a four-story building at a prominent corner, visible proof of both Taichung's growing prosperity and the ambitions of the Japanese colonial period that shaped so much of the city's built fabric. Miyahara ran his clinic until 1945, when Japan's occupation of Taiwan ended and he returned home, leaving the building behind.

The building's post-Miyahara decades read like a compressed history of a city in flux. After the clinic closed, the structure passed to a government bureau that eventually traded it to local businessman Zhang Ruizhen in exchange for funding on a new facility; the bureau moved out in 1959. Zhang struggled to manage his new acquisition: the building cycled through a remarkable variety of tenants, including a clinic for sexually transmitted infections, a cram school, a dumpling restaurant, a hairdresser, and two taxi and bus dispatch companies. After disputes with tenants became unmanageable, Zhang evicted them all in 1964. The newspaper Taiwan Daily occupied the building as an office from 1970. Then the earthquakes came — the catastrophic 1999 Jiji earthquake caused heavy damage, and Typhoon Kalmaegi hit again in 2008. By then the building was in ruins and empty.

Taichung's Dawncake group — a confectionery brand known locally as Risheng, 日出 — saw something in the ruin that a green sale banner was trying to erase. Their renovation preserved the original brick facade and the building's qilou, the traditional covered walkway at street level, while adding two new glass-encased floors above in a style that evokes a mansard roof. The result is architecturally layered in a way that feels intentional: old brick at eye level, modern glass above, and inside, an atrium stacked with bookshelves of elaborate gift boxes that visitors have compared, with some justification, to the library scenes in the Harry Potter films. The ground floor sells ice cream in flavors piled high alongside exquisitely packaged pineapple cakes and other Taiwanese sweets. Miyahara Ice Cream is widely cited as one of the earliest successful urban renewal projects in Taichung's Central District.

The second floor is a different experience entirely. Moon Pavilion — the Taiwanese cuisine restaurant occupying the upper level — earned a Bib Gourmand designation in the Michelin Guide, the award Michelin gives to restaurants offering exceptional value. It's a notable distinction for a dining room inside what is essentially a tourist attraction, and it suggests that the Dawncake group built something with more than novelty behind it. The restoration's success also catalyzed a second project: the nearby Fourth Credit Union, a former bank building, was refurbished in a similar manner by the same group. Taken together, the two projects helped establish that Taichung's older downtown could be revived through careful preservation rather than demolition — a lesson the city is still absorbing.