Taipei Post Office Survives the 1945 Taipei Air Raid

The Taipei Post Office stands beside the North Gate of the old walled city and was the hub of Taiwan's postal and telegraph services under Japanese rule. The present building was designed by the Government-General architect Kuriyama Shunichi; construction began in April 1928 and was completed in March 1930. It is a three-story steel-framed structure faced with small light-brown tiles from the Beitou kilns and washed-stone finish. Such low-key khaki and brown tiles were known in the 1930s as 'air-defence colour' (防空色) or 'national-defence colour', meaning a protective tone hard to pick out from the air, not a blast-resistant material; the English rendering 'bombproof coloured' (防爆色 in the earlier version of this entry) appears to be a misunderstanding.

The Taipei Air Raid (臺北大空襲) of May 31, 1945 was the largest Allied bombing raid on Taiwan during the Pacific War. B-24 Liberator heavy bombers of the U.S. Fifth Air Force (117 according to English Wikipedia, 118 according to Chinese Wikipedia) struck central Taipei from approximately 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM, dropping about 3,800 bombs according to English-language accounts. The death toll is usually given as approximately 3,000 (English Wikipedia: more than 3,000), and tens of thousands were left homeless. Destruction in the colonial administrative district was extensive: the Governor-General's Office took a direct hit, burned, tilted and remained unusable until repaired in 1948 (the figure of 83% damage given earlier in this entry could not be verified in the sources consulted). The Taiwan Railway Hotel, the Bank of Taiwan, Taipei Station, Taihoku Imperial University, the High Court and Taipei First Girls' High School were damaged, the main hall and left corridor of Longshan Temple burned, and the Catholic cathedral in Horai-cho was almost completely destroyed.

The post office stood on the edge of the same administrative district. Neither the Chinese nor the English sources consulted record what specific damage it suffered in this raid; what can be confirmed is that the structure survived and remained in use after the war. Its robust steel and reinforced-concrete construction is generally regarded as one reason, but there is no evidence that the colour of its tiles had any practical effect during the attack.

After the war the building passed to the Republic of China postal service and is today the Taipei Beimen Post Office. The arched carriage porch was removed in the 1960s, a fourth floor was added in 1969, and the building was designated a historic monument on August 14, 1992. A restoration carried out from 2018 to 2021 rebuilt the original arched porch.