Architecture History | Hsinchu Railway Station — The 1913 Clock Tower Preserved in Daily Use

On 31 March 1913, passengers approaching Hsinchu Station met a broad masonry front gathered beneath stepped gables, round windows, semicircular arches, and a central clock tower capped by a metal-clad roof and finial.

This was not the city’s first railway building: a modest station had served the Qing-era line completed from Keelung to Hsinchu in 1893, and the Japanese colonial administration moved and rebuilt railway facilities before the island’s western trunk line was completed in 1908.

The fourth-generation station answered the traffic and representational demands of that expanded network, with the main waiting hall organized around the clock tower and lower wings accommodating ticketing and other passenger functions.

The Taiwan Governor-General’s Railway Department commissioned the work, and its contracted architectural adviser Matsugasaki Tsumunaga, a Japanese architect trained in Berlin, is recorded as the designer; assigning the whole project to his personal vision alone, however, would erase the railway department, engineers, builders, and station workers who made and operated it.

The building combined reinforced brick masonry with steel roof and platform structures assembled with riveted connections, while its stepped gables, oculi, arched openings, restrained surface patterns, and tower drew on German architectural currents that official heritage documentation relates to early twentieth-century Jugendstil rather than to a single generic “European” style.

Its monumental front also belonged to colonial rule: independent research on the station district shows that rail infrastructure first served military and transport needs, then helped draw industry, commerce, housing, and new street patterns toward the station, a transformation shaped by both government planning and development that exceeded planners’ intentions.

The 1913 fabric did not remain untouched, and a 1928 office extension and later repairs became part of the working complex rather than evidence that every visible element is original.

Designation as a national monument in 1998 shifted the building from replaceable transport property to protected heritage, and a 2020 boundary revision explicitly included the 1913 and 1928 station portions, surviving sections of the first and second platforms, and the front arcade with its cast-iron columns, old roof framing, and stone steps.

Hsinchu Station still performs its original public function: Taiwan Railway Corporation lists it as an operating station at 445, Section 2, Zhonghua Road, and the preserved facade remains the entrance to daily passenger movement rather than a detached museum object.

Visitors can responsibly observe the exterior and use authorized passenger areas during railway service, while operational rooms, tracks, and heritage fabric remain subject to station rules; the 2008 photograph records the surviving station in use, not its exact 1913 appearance.

Photo: Nils Öberg, 20 March 2008, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.