Twentieth-century mosque architecture in East Asia : the case of Taipei’s grand mosque

Abstract EN

Islam was introduced to Taiwan in two different periods via migrations of populations from the continent.

The first one occurred in the seventeenth century in the wake of Ming loyalist Zheng Chenggong’s campaign of resistance against the Qing.

The later one was in the mid-twentieth century following Chiang Kai-shek’s retreat to Taiwan after the defeat of the Nationalists in the Civil War against the Communist Party.

Taipei’s Grand Mosque was built in 1960 following the second migration of Muslim population from mainland China.

At the end of the 1950s, the Chinese Muslim Association (CMA) in Taiwan commissioned the construction of Taipei’s Grand Mosque to Chinese architect Yang Cho-cheng.

The building, inaugurated in 1960 in front of several leaders of the Muslim world, is an architectural anomaly in Taipei’s urban landscape and it has strangely been overlooked by the most relevant contemporary western literature on building mosques in non-Muslim countries.

Three important mosques were built in non-Muslim countries in the first half of the twentieth century: the Jamia Mosque in Hong Kong (1915); the Kobe Mosque (1935); and the Old Tokyo Mosque (1938) in Japan.

At first glance, Taipei’s Grand mosque is immediately recognizable to the general public as a temple of Muslim faith, because it features elements traditionally associated with mosques, such as the dome, and the two slender minarets.

For its design, the architect Yang Cho-cheng combined several Islamic architectural traditions (Umayyad, Fatimid, Safavid, and Ottoman) with new building techniques like the use of reinforced concrete.

Even if it might look like some sort of architectural pastiche, it is actually the manifesto of the foreign politics of Taiwan in the 1960s.

The following article is a detailed architectural analysis of Yang Cho-cheng’s Grand Mosque and all the factors which led to its peculiar design.