Sanxia sits at the confluence of three rivers in what is now New Taipei — a location that made it a natural hub for camphor and indigo trade in the nineteenth century. When Japan governed Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, colonial administrators modernized Taiwanese towns on a grid of public hygiene, traffic order, and architectural ambition. The arcaded shophouse — a building type already common in Southeast Asian trading ports — became the signature form of these remodeled streets. On Minquan Street, builders chose a particularly ornate version: Baroque-inflected facades with columns, decorative cornices, and arched openings that face the covered walkway below. Merchants lived above and sold below, and the arcade kept customers dry in the subtropical rain. The style was practical and proud at the same time.

Walk Minquan Street to its far end and you reach the Zushi Temple — the Qingshui Zushi Temple, dedicated to the Qingshui Zushi, a Song-dynasty Buddhist monk venerated throughout the Minnan-speaking world. The temple has been rebuilt repeatedly since the eighteenth century; the current structure, begun in 1947 under the direction of sculptor Li Mei-shu, is famous for its extraordinarily detailed decorative work. Bronze reliefs, stone carvings, and painted panels cover nearly every surface. Li Mei-shu spent decades on the project, a commitment that turned the temple into something closer to a lifetime artwork than a construction project. The combination of street and temple — commercial arcade feeding into sacred precinct — is the kind of urban sequence that takes generations to accumulate and moments to understand.

By the early 2000s, parts of Minquan Street had deteriorated or been quietly altered over the decades. The restoration effort that ran from 2004 to 2007 aimed to return the facades to their early twentieth-century appearance while establishing a management committee to maintain the street going forward. The work required negotiating with property owners, researching historical photographs, and replicating architectural details that had been lost. The result is a street that looks unified in a way it may never quite have been when it was new — every building restored to the same moment in time, which is both the strength and the slight artificiality of any heritage restoration. But walking beneath the arcades, with the red brick warm in the afternoon light, the reasoning is easy to understand.

The old street draws visitors to Sanxia but doesn't contain it. The district holds old dyeing workshops from the indigo trade era, river walks along the Sanxia River, and a hillside topography that gives the town a layered, unhurried character. Sanxia is close enough to Taipei — about 35 kilometers southwest — to attract day visitors, but not so absorbed into the metropolitan sprawl that it has lost its own logic. The pace on Minquan Street moves between the two: tourists with cameras, local residents crossing beneath the arcades on motorbikes, the temple drawing worshippers as it has for centuries. It is the kind of street that rewards slow walking more than quick photography, though it photographs beautifully regardless.