The Wistaria Tea House (Ziteng Lu) occupies a 1920s Japanese-era wooden villa near National Taiwan University, draped in the old wisteria vines that give it its name. From the 1950s onward it was the gathering place of Taiwan's painters, poets and political dissidents, and in the martial-law years it was effectively the salon of the democracy movement; it is now a municipally protected historic site.
It still operates as a tea house, serving high-mountain oolongs and pu-erh by the pot in tatami rooms around a small garden. It is an unhurried, slightly formal place — reservations are wise — and one of the best surviving examples of how a Japanese house was lived in during the 20th century.