Taipei, Taiwan

Taipei, officially known as Taipei City, is the capital city and a special municipality of Taiwan. Sitting at the northern tip of the island, Taipei City is an enclave of the municipality of New Taipei City. It is about 25 km southwest of the northern port city Keelung. Most of the city is located on the Taipei Basin, an ancient lakebed bounded by the two relatively narrow valleys of the Keelung and Xindian rivers, which join to form the Tamsui River along the city’s western border. Formerly known as Taipeh-fu during Qing era and Taihoku under Japanese rule, Taipei became the capital of the Taiwan Province as part of the Republic of China in 1945 and recently has been the capital of the ROC since 1949, when the Kuomintang lost the mainland to the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. The city proper is home to an estimated population of 2,704,810 in 2015, forming the core part of the Taipei–Keelung metropolitan area which includes the nearby cities of New Taipei and Keelung with a population of 7,047,559, the 40th most-populous urban area in the world—roughly one-third of Taiwanese citizens live in the metro district.