Just the Right Light:

Lighting Tainan’s Historic Streetscape

Cathy Teng　/　photos by Kent Chuang

October 2026

中文

Between light and shadow, the city’s stories gradually unfold.

A light comes on at the flick of a switch. Making it reveal a building’s character and a city’s stories is much harder.

Coinciding with the “Tainan 400” commemorations marking the city’s 400th anniversary in 2024, this city layered with history began asking what it should look like after dark.

Beginning in the historic streets of the old city, the Tainan 400 City Light Environment Redesigning Project (hereafter “the Lighting Project”) brings together 11 significant heritage sites through lighting design, linking monuments, historic buildings, and streets. The aim is more than simply turning the lights on for these venues, but to consider how light might help people read Tainan anew.

Establishing an order of light

“What makes Tainan appealing is that the whole city feels like a cultural space without walls. Its history isn’t something you can see only in a museum; it lives in its streets, buildings, religious practices, and daily life,” says lighting designer Nell Liao, who has worked on the Lighting Project.

This is a city where different eras mix together with everyday life. There are grand public buildings as well as small shophouses and temples tucked into alleys. Spaces of different scales call for different designs of light and shadow. As someone turns from a main road into an alley, what should catch the eye? When a person approaches a building, what should they notice first?

That is why Liao began with a clear principle: “The first thing to do in planning Tainan’s nighttime lighting was to reestablish an order of light.”

So-called “order” does not mean illuminating every important site. It means allowing some places to be bright and others dark, while points of light link buildings, streets, and alleys. The lighting leads people from one place to another and helps them discover the city’s details as they move.

Turning on a light takes only the flick of a switch. However, as lighting extends from buildings into the streets, it illuminates not only architecture, but also the shared city night.

Letting buildings speak

As one’s perspective shifts from the city to individual buildings, the lighting must follow a different logic. Buildings of different periods, styles, and materials have their own proportions, lines, and personalities; naturally, one lighting approach cannot suit them all. For example, although several structures incorporated into the Lighting Project—including the former Tainan Prefecture Council building, former Tainan He Tong Building (now home to the Tainan City Fire Museum), and former Tainan Japanese Patriotic Women’s Association Hall—all date from the period of Japanese rule, each nonetheless has a distinct architectural character. The design team’s first task was to identify the visual focal points in each building’s vertical and horizontal lines, massing, and materials, then use light to bring out its original order.

For Nell Liao, lighting design is about more than illuminating buildings. It is about finding the right relationship among light, space, and human observation.

The former Tainan He Tong Building is distinguished by its central tower and horizontally extending volumes. Smaller in scale, the former Tainan Japanese Patriotic Women’s Association Hall presents a more intimate scene through its wooden window frames, boards, and exposed aggregate concrete finish. The former Tainan Prefecture Council building has a clean and simple symmetrical façade of facing bricks, exposed aggregate concrete, and horizontal lines.

The former Tainan Japanese Patriotic Women’s Association Hall displays Japanese architectural features in its timber structure, brick walls, and latticed windows. At night, warm light rises along the façade, bringing out details in the wooden windows and brickwork and giving the building a different expression.

All three of these structures stand beside major roads, amid traffic and a jumble of streetlights and illuminated signs. Yet after dark, this additional lighting adds no sense of incoherence to the buildings. Instead, restrained washes of light draw out their existing proportions, lines, and materials, giving them a different rhythm at night.

Restored and now used as the West Central District branch of Tainan Municipal Library, the former Tainan Prefecture Council building is lit along the lines of its brick façade and window frames. The lighting highlights its proportions and keeps this historic building part of the city’s daily life after dark.

The central tower is the visual focal point of the former Tainan He Tong Building. At night, lighting traces its façade and horizontal lines, outlining a historic building that remains a Tainan landmark today.

Following the light of the gods

Traditional Chinese temples call for a different spatial language of light.

Nell Liao speaks of “the light of the gods.” In a traditional temple, the central axis runs from the entrance toward the main hall and ultimately the shrine (where the temple’s deities are positioned and worshipped). More than the framework of the space, it expresses a hierarchy. Light becomes an invisible guide: As visitors move through varying degrees of brightness and darkness, they sense both the depth of the space and the order of faith.

Traditional Chinese temples are carefully arranged around a central axis and symmetry, and the lighting follows that spatial order. Extending inward from the entrance, it draws the eye toward the shrine (where the temple’s deities are positioned and worshipped) and showcases the temple’s spatial layers.

Consider Kaiji Martial Temple on Xinmei Street, Taiwan’s first temple dedicated to Lord Guan, the deified general Guan Yu. Small in scale and close to the surrounding shophouses, it is lit along its central axis. Simple lighting gives the compact temple a quiet, solemn atmosphere, highlighting its tranquility and potency.

The Sacrificial Rites Martial Temple near Chikan Tower, by contrast, is three bays wide and three halls deep. Worshippers proceed inward from the front hall through the worship hall to the main hall, then on to the rear courtyard and Hall of Three Generations. Look closely and you will see that the light changes as you advance through the spaces.

“In the worship hall, you feel the light of the gods. As you pass through the corridor, you experience light in motion. By the time you reach the plum-tree courtyard and Liuhe Chamber at the back, the lighting becomes quieter, shaping the atmosphere,” Liao explains.

Inside the Sacrificial Rites Martial Temple, light moves with the visitor. From the “light of the gods” along the central axis to the light that guides people through successive spaces, it shifts as they proceed, sometimes focused, sometimes diffuse. The result is a unique sensory experience generated by light.

Within a single temple, light changes with the space and with each visitor’s steps, becoming an experience they can feel. For international visitors entering a Taiwanese temple for the first time, it can also be a spatial language that needs no translation.

In the rear spaces of the Sacrificial Rites Martial Temple, the light becomes more restrained. It shifts from illuminating the building to shaping the atmosphere, allowing darkness to become part of the space.

Stories brought to light

At Kaiji Ling You Temple on Chikan East Street, the light of the gods along the central axis draws the eye first. But Liao also asks us to notice the statue of Li Tieguai on the furnace (for burning paper offerings) to the right. In this isolated location, the figure is easily missed by day, but is picked out by a spotlight at night. Curious, we Google him and learn that Li Tieguai (Iron-crutch Li) is one of the Eight Immortals, who presides over temple furnaces and is revered as a protector of blacksmiths. A previously overlooked corner becomes a clue to accessing one of the temple’s stories, all because of a beam of light.

A light directed at the figure of Li Tieguai on the Kaiji Ling You Temple’s furnace for burning paper offerings picks out his features and draws attention to the story behind him.

More details inside the temple come alive under the lights. The “Thirty-Six Heavenly Generals” mural in the main hall is by Tainan painter Tsai Cao-ju, while four murals on either side of the covered passageway are by Pan Yueh-hsiung. The work of these accomplished artists was there all along; the only difference now is that at night, light shows visitors where to look.

The light reveals not only architecture but also the work that generations of artists and artisans created for the gods. These murals at Kaiji Ling You Temple are by Pan Yueh-hsiung.

Temples are woven into everyday life in the historic city of Tainan. As dusk falls, light brings familiar but easily overlooked buildings, figures, and stories back into view, connecting the temples into a cultural network.

The light has never simply been about illuminating buildings. In fact, it leaves clues for anyone who follows it into the stories ensconced in Tainan after dark.