How the Taiwanese Address System Works

Mailing letters is admittedly a long and arduous process, what with the fancy emails and instant messaging these days, but it’s still quite a necessary part of life abroad! In this post we will be looking at the (relatively) easy addressing system in Taiwan!

They follow a pretty simple format, and like all Chinese sentences, numbers, etc., it goes from larger units to smaller units. Addresses in Taiwan go something like this:

1. Start with the larger area: Municipality or County;

• Municipalities use 市 (shì​)
• Counties use 縣 (xiàn)

2. Move on to the next smaller unit:

• Larger cities have districts 區 (qū)
• There’s even small administrative units as well:
  鎮 (zhèn) Urban townships
  鄉 (xiāng) Rural townships
  里 (lǐ) Rural villages
  村 (cūn) rural villages
  鄰 (lín) Neighborhoods

3. From there, you move down to the specific streets and numbers, in order from larger to smaller (they also follow this order in the address):

• 路 (lù) Road / 街 (jiē) Street
• 段 (duàn) Section
• 巷 (xiàng) Lane
• 弄 (lòng) Alley
• 號 (hào) No.
• 樓 (lóu) Floor
• Sometimes this is followed up by 之[number] for a specific “room” or apartment.

Let’s look at an example!

10369台北市大同區大龍街275號

林莠琪 收

Which can be then broken down to:

10369 (postal code)

台北市 (municipality)

大同區 (district)

大龍街 (street)

275號 (number)

林莠琪 (name of the person receiving the letter)

收 (used to indicate “to”; literally “receive”)

Luckily the address system is pretty straightforward in Taiwan. Once you get that pattern down it’s actually super easy to translate it back to English:

Lin Youqi

No. 275, Dalong Street, Datong District

Taipei City 10369

Just reverse the structure to reflect the English way of going from the smaller unit to the larger unit.

Hope this guide will come in handy for the next letter you have to write!

For a little bit more on the administrative divisions in Taiwan, check out this article from the lovely folks at Wikipedia! And if you really love streets, here’s a list of the major roads in Taipei City, also from Wikipedia (Chinese only).

Once you have this down, check out how to address an envelope in Taiwan!