"Doesn't anyone notice how filthy Shilin Night Market is?" asks veteran journalist Chang Tien-wan on her blog, voicing a thought many have had.
"The ground underfoot is sticky. Your nose is assaulted by horrible smells when you get near the toilets. You often hear startled tourists shouting about spotting rats playing hide and seek. There are cockroaches everywhere."
Zhang notes that Shilin Night Market, Taipei's biggest "tourist night market" has few signs in English or Japanese, much less vendors who can talk about their products in either of those languages. If we really want tourists to appreciate the charm of Taiwan's night markets, why haven't we cleaned them up a bit?
Zhang's blogpost was made in reference to a specific building: the Shilin Temporary Market. A vegetable market in the early part of the day, it attracts dry-goods and snack vendors in the afternoon. The 2002 demolition of an older market brought stallkeepers here en masse. They were originally supposed to move to a new market on Jihe Road, but revisions to the plans for that market have delayed its completion until 2011.
This collection of old stalls hawking both vegetables and snacks was the predecessor to the night market. From the late Qing Dynasty through the 1960s, Shilin was at the heart of the distribution of agricultural goods in Taipei, a market for vegetables, fish, meat, and flowers. Surrounded by crude brick structures, the market sprawled across several streets and included a dozen-odd food stalls in front of the Cixian Temple. Local residents used to visit these for late-night snacks before the market closed at 9 p.m. As more and more vendors set up shop in front of the temple, some even began erecting their own temporary structures.
With the construction of Soochow University, the Chinese Culture University, and Ming Chuan University, the Shilin Night Market, which sits beside an important transit hub, became even busier.
In 1970, the city government assumed oversight of small vendors. In Shilin, it put a roof up over the brick structures and divided the area into more than 500 stalls for vendors. It then held a lottery for the available spaces, creating morning and afternoon slots for each. Vendors whose names were drawn had the right to use a designated space, a right that could be inherited by a lineal relative. But the city continued to hold the rights to the land itself and to the structure. The limited space inside the vegetable market resulted in vendors of hot foods simply registering with the police and continuing to do business without a license at their original locations.
When people today speak of Shilin Night Market, they typically mean the 20,000-square-meter area bounded by Wenlin Road, Dadong Road, Jihe Road, and Anping Street. Comprised of more than 1,000 street vendors and more than 300 storefronts, the market attracts 15-20,000 people daily and is Taiwan's top night market.
Night markets are pedestrian areas, but some motorcyclists nonetheless ride right in, making shopping uncomfortable.