Xiluo's growth has always been inseparable from the river trade along the Zhuoshui and the commercial pulse of Yanping Old Street. Since the Qing dynasty, the street has connected the docks, markets, and shophouses into a seamless world of trade, food, and daily life. It has served as a vital regional hub for the distribution and transit of goods across central Taiwan; along its length, rice merchants, tea shops, soy sauce stores (Xiluo is particularly renowned for its traditional soy sauce brewing), and street food stalls together shaped the everyday eating landscape of Xiluo residents.

The Xiluo Ecomuseum on Yanping Old Street traces its origins to the Jie-Fa Qian-Ji Tea House, founded in 1833. As one of the neighborhood's most established tea merchants, the shop supplied generations of residents with their daily tea. Within the rhythms of old-street life, tea was more than a commodity—it accompanied snacks and sweets, weaving itself into a steady, enduring culture of eating and drinking.

Yanping Old Street still shelters a rich variety of local snacks. Rice-based dishes lead the way—wagui (literally "bowl cake," or savory rice pudding), you fan (savory glutinous rice, steamed with pork fat and dried seafood), and tian mi gao (sweet glutinous rice cake)—alongside dou cai mian (bean sprout noodles) and braised tofu, both drawing on produce from the Zhuoshui River basin. These foods appear beneath the arcaded shophouse overhangs, at storefronts, and on makeshift stalls, nestled alongside tea shops and general stores, forming a continuous thread of eating and drinking through daily life.

An Eleven-Year Community Restoration Marathon

After the 1935 Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake, Xiluo underwent urban replanning and reconstruction; Yanping Old Street took on the orderly shophouse façades visible today. Ground floors served both commerce and food preparation, while upper floors remained residential—business and domestic life thoroughly intertwined. The Jie-Fa Qian-Ji Tea House is a direct product of that era.

When the Luoyang Cultural and Educational Foundation moved in 2002, an eleven-year restoration effort began. Through community fundraising and collective labor, the gradually idled tea house was transformed into a space for exhibition, exchange, and public use. Around 2010, the third bay's second-floor rooms (the innermost section of the traditional shophouse) were opened as a heritage guesthouse, offering visitors the experience of sleeping inside a historic Yanping shophouse. In 2024, the building officially opened to the public as the Xiluo Ecomuseum—one of the few sites on Yanping Old Street that meaningfully bridges history, food culture, and contemporary civic life.

The Xiluo Ecomuseum today carries forward the old street's ethos of living and doing business under one roof. Through international volunteer camps and community programs, participants from near and far don't just restore the building—they step into the food rhythms of Yanping Old Street itself, drinking tea, eating street snacks, and talking with residents, coming to understand how Xiluo has built its own local culture through agriculture, commerce, and culinary practice.

☛　Xiluo Ecomuseum has been selected as one of the Ministry of Culture's inaugural 100 Culture Bases.