When Taiwan was handed over from Japan to China in 1945, there were no mosques on the island. Chinese Muslims who arrived with the Nationalist government had nowhere to pray. In December 1947, the Chinese Muslim Association in Nanjing appointed three men -- Chang Zichun, Wang Jingzhai, and Zheng Houren -- to establish a branch in Taiwan. They raised money and converted a Japanese-style house on Lishui Street in Da'an District into a 992-square-meter prayer area. By August 1948, Muslims from mainland China were praying there. But as the Kuomintang government relocated to Taiwan and brought thousands more Chinese Muslims with it, the makeshift mosque was overwhelmed. The congregation needed a building designed for worship, not repurposed from it.

The new mosque was a diplomatic production. General Bai Chongxi, director-general of the Chinese Muslim Association, and Foreign Minister George Yeh proposed the construction. The architect was Yang Cho-cheng, whose portfolio would come to include some of Taiwan's most iconic buildings: the Grand Hotel Taipei, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, and the National Theater and Concert Hall. Yang designed the mosque in an Islamic architectural style blending Taiwanese and Central Asian materials, with Neo-Byzantine onion-shaped spires topping the minarets. Funding came from across the Muslim world: the Shah of Iran and the King of Jordan contributed, the Kuomintang government provided a loan, and the Bank of Taiwan extended credit. ROC Vice President Chen Cheng led the inauguration ceremony on April 13, 1960. The congregation eventually repaid half the bank loan before the government forgave the rest.

In 1999, the mosque faced destruction. A cement company declared ownership of the land beneath it and attempted to dismantle the building to reclaim the site. The threat was existential -- not just to a structure, but to a community's anchor. Legislators and the Taipei City Government under Mayor Ma Ying-jeou intervened, designating the mosque a historic building on June 29, 1999. The designation did more than protect the physical structure; it affirmed that Taiwan's cultural heritage included Islamic architecture alongside its Buddhist temples and Confucian halls. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia had visited the mosque in 1971. King Hussein of Jordan and Malaysian Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman had prayed here. The building had hosted decades of international diplomacy -- losing it to a land dispute would have erased a chapter of Taiwan's cosmopolitan history.

Today the mosque serves a congregation that has shifted dramatically from its origins. Where the first worshippers were Chinese Muslims who fled the mainland, the community now includes tens of thousands of Indonesian migrant workers -- a fact acknowledged publicly by Mayor Ma in 2001, when he visited during Eid al-Fitr and noted that 20,000 of Taipei's 36,000 foreign workers were Indonesian. The mosque holds Arabic language courses, Quran study, and Hadith teaching on weekends, filling the gap left by the absence of any formal Islamic educational institution in Taiwan. It also hosts interfaith dialogues between Islam and Confucianism, Catholicism, and Buddhism -- conversations that would have been unimaginable when the mosque was founded, but that now reflect the pragmatic pluralism of a city where a verdigris dome and a Buddhist pagoda can share the same skyline.