General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Taipei Story

Taipei Story (青梅竹馬) is a 1985 Taiwanese drama film directed by Edward Yang (楊德昌), his second feature, about a couple whose relationship disintegrates as Taipei modernizes around them. It stars the director Hou Hsiao-hsien as Lung, a former Little League baseball player running his family's fabric business, and the singer Tsai Chin, Yang's wife at the time, as Chen, a special assistant at a construction company who pins her hopes on marriage and emigration to the United States.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	青梅竹馬 (Qingmei zhuma), an idiom from the poet Li Bai meaning "green plum, bamboo horse", an oblique reference to a couple whose love grew out of childhood games³
Director and year	Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1985, his second feature after That Day, on the Beach (1983)¹^•²
Leads	Hou Hsiao-hsien (Lung) and Tsai Chin (Chen); Hou also co-wrote the script and mortgaged his house to fund the production¹^•²
Awards	FIPRESCI Prize, 1985 Locarno Film Festival; nominated for Best Actor and Best Cinematography at the 1985 Golden Horse Awards⁴
Languages	Mandarin and Hokkien (Taiwanese)¹
Commercial result	A box-office failure; some critics equated its commercial failure with the death of the Taiwan New Cinema movement⁵
Restoration	Restored by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project at the Cineteca di Bologna/L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique and Hou Hsiao-hsien; released by Criterion as Spine #879¹
Standing	Ranked 50th in the 2011 Golden Horse Film Festival poll of the 100 Greatest Chinese-Language Films⁵

Spoilers

Story and characters

Lung is a former member of the national Little League team who now runs an old-style fabric business on Dihua Street, a traditionalist who repeatedly sacrifices himself to help old friends. Chen, his girlfriend of many years, is a special assistant at a construction company who wants to break with the past and move with the Taipei that is being built toward the future. The two struggle with the difference in their values and pin their hopes on a plan to emigrate to the United States while trying to hold the relationship together.⁶^•⁷

Chen's hopes are frustrated by her family: her father has amassed debts and needs to borrow money, and her sister has dropped out of society. As the film progresses, the characters become morally and emotionally lost and begin to drift.² The film ends with Lung, unable to find a way out of a rapidly materializing world, stabbed on a deserted street by a young man he holds nothing against; as he bleeds, he can only ponder his faded past glory.⁸

Production

The film was made in collaboration with Hou Hsiao-hsien, Yang's fellow master of the Taiwan New Cinema movement, who served as one of its screenwriters alongside Chu Tien-wen and Yang, and took the leading role in a rare on-screen acting appearance.¹ Hou mortgaged his house to fund the production costs.² The crew drew heavily on the New Cinema circle: Wu Nien-jen, Ko I-Chen, Tu Duu-chih (sound), Chu Tien-wen, and editor Liao Ching-sung were among the participants, a grouping that anticipated the later "Taiwan Film Manifesto" and the "Film Cooperative".⁹ The cellist Yo-Yo Ma performed the music, and Yang Wei-han was the cinematographer.¹

Sources list the running time differently: 110 minutes on the Criterion release, 119 minutes in several festival databases, and 120 minutes in the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute's restoration program.¹^•¹⁰^•⁶

Themes and style

The film is set in 1980s Taipei and depicts different generations and social classes trying to come to terms with Taiwan's modernization and Westernization.² Yang, who had lived abroad, knew something about cultural dislocation and the stress that arises when traditional values clash with modernity, and these ideas found expression in the film.² The city itself is pulled between American culture, symbolized by Wall Street-styled corporate offices, broadcast TV news, and Michael Jackson and Kenny Loggins music, and Japanese influence, seen in karaoke bars, neon-lit Fujifilm advertisements, and the characters' use of Japanese, while older values of family and faithfulness contend with efficiency, individualism, and financial accumulation.³

Yang's use of light and shadow is central to the film's effect: subtle changes in daylight, negative space, and shadow sketch the characters' estrangement and mirror the emotional emptiness of urban life.⁶ Critics have repeatedly compared the film to Michelangelo Antonioni; the Festival des 3 Continents calls it Taiwanese cinema's most Antonionian work, and MUBI's critical survey notes that with the films of Antonioni as his chief inspiration, Yang cultivated a new Taiwanese film style that, for the first time, was in conversation with other national cinemas.¹⁰^•¹¹

The English title is an apparent reference to Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953), a film that, like Taipei Story, explores a nation and city's marked departure from traditional values.³

Reception and legacy

Released in 1985, the film did not receive the viewers' approval its makers had hoped for.¹² As the commercial achievements of Taiwan New Cinema films declined, the environment became increasingly unfriendly to the movement's filmmakers, and some critics equated the utter commercial failure of Taipei Story with the death of the Taiwan New Cinema movement.⁵ Yang did not stop making films: his next feature, The Terrorizers (1986), won critical acclaim abroad and the Golden Horse Award for Best Film.¹³

The film's standing has since risen. It won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1985 Locarno Film Festival and screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 1993.⁴ In 2011 it ranked 50th in the Golden Horse Film Festival's poll of the 100 Greatest Chinese-Language Films, held to mark the centenary of the Republic of China.⁵ Through the World Cinema Project restoration, the film returned to circulation via the Criterion Collection (Spine #879) and the Criterion Channel, and critics today regard it as a key depiction of both a society and a relationship caught between the past and an imagined future.¹^•¹⁴

The film also functions as a visual record of 1980s Taipei. Its famous rooftop scene at the Grand Building at the corner of Zhongshan North Road and Nanjing East Road, with the red, green, and white Fujifilm neon sign, is a representative image of the era's urban Taipei, and the scenes at the heroine's family home show the old houses of Dihua Street as they then stood.¹⁵ Footage of drag racing in front of the Presidential Office Building, baseball video, a darts bar, and the large Fujifilm billboard lets viewers look back on Taipei in the 1980s.⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026