A few years ago I wrote about old houses  from the Japanese colonial era  (1895-1945) in Taipei . As a map from 1935 shows , Japanese Taipei was quite small compared to the present-day metropolis.      When British author Owen Rutter visited the island  in the early 1920s, Taipei had only about 170,000 inhabitants. In 1945, the population  had grown to slightly more than 270,000.       By 2016, however, Taipei City had a population of 2.7 million, while the greater metropolitan area  had around 7 million people. Obviously, during the Japanese colonial era districts that are now highly urbanized were little more than countryside.       #Vintage  #map  (1935) of #Taipei  in #Taiwan  when is was still under Japanese rule. Source: https://t.co/KLcdSe17tc  pic.twitter.com/uN6sXPMujs  — Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) October 12, 2017        It is very difficult to reconstruct the urban structure of the residential suburbs in colonial Taipei. Not much remai...