Tan Tiau-chun made his fortune in tea, one of the commodities that made Dadaocheng — the old commercial district along the Danshui River — the commercial heart of Japanese-era Taipei. Tea merchants in Dadaocheng were men of significant means and significant ambition, connected to trade networks that reached across Asia and into Europe. When Tan built his guest house in Zhongshan District between 1913 and 1914, he chose English Tudor style not out of eccentricity but out of a very specific colonial-era logic: Tudor architecture was fashionable among the colonial and commercial elite of East Asia in the early twentieth century, a style that signaled wealth, education, and cosmopolitan taste. The ground floor was built in brick; the upper floors in wood, with the half-timbered beams that are Tudor's most recognizable feature.

The Yuanshan Villa, as the building was originally known, served its intended purpose as a reception house for dignitaries and overseas guests in the years when Taipei was growing into a substantial colonial capital. Entertaining at this level required a building that could hold its own against the grander structures going up elsewhere in the city — the baroque colonial government buildings, the imposing police stations, the formal parks. Tan's Tudor manor offered something different: a domestic scale, English in character, with rooms designed for conversation and hospitality rather than ceremony and administration. It was a private vision of sophistication in a city that was constructing public grandeur with borrowed European styles.

The building sits today within the Taipei Expo Park in Zhongshan District, near the Keelung River, close to Yuanshan Station on the Taipei Metro. The neighborhood around it has changed completely since Tan Tiau-chun's day — the old Keelung River embankment has been redeveloped, the expo grounds have become a public park, and the Grand Hotel Taipei, with its massive Chinese palace roofline, looms to the north. In this company, the Tudor guest house manages to be both incongruous and at home. It has been a landmark in its neighborhood for more than a century, and its scale — intimate, residential, human — makes it one of the most approachable of Taipei's many heritage buildings.

The Taipei Story House — the name adopted when it became a public museum — operates as a cultural space focused on the history of Taipei and the lives of the people who made the city. Admission is NT$50, waived for visitors under 6 or over 65; the museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10:00 AM to 5:30 PM, closed Mondays. The name is fitting. In a city where most of what was built in the early twentieth century no longer stands, a building that has survived three political eras — Qing aftermath, Japanese colony, Republic of China — without fundamental alteration is a story in itself. The half-timbered upper floors, the brick arcade below, the gabled roofline: all of it is evidence of a moment in Taipei when a tea merchant could dream in Tudor, and make the dream real.