Crescent Over Cathay

Taoyuan International → Taipei

Afternoon Arrival: Meet-and-greet at Taoyuan International Airport. Private coach transfer to central Taipei (approx. 45 min). Check-in and rest.

Taipei Grand Mosque — Maghrib Prayer: The mosque that has anchored Muslim life in Taiwan since 1960.

Welcome Dinner & Journey Opening: Group dinner at a halal restaurant near the mosque. Introductions and journey intentions for the rihla ahead.

Overnight: Taipei 

Taipei Grand Mosque | Da'an Forest Park | Yongkang Street

Guided walk-through of Taipei Grand Mosque before the crowds. Completed in 1960 on land the Republic of China government granted the Chinese Muslim Association, it is Taiwan's largest and most historically significant mosque. Our scholar reads the building: the dome and minarets in Ottoman-influenced form, the mihrab, the calligraphy, and the story of how a displaced community persuaded a government to fund a house of Allah.

Da'an Forest Park a five-minute walk. Quiet decompression, tea, reflection circle.

Yongkang Street for halal dessert and Taiwanese snacks. Optional: Taipei 101 observation deck at dusk — the building maintains a designated Muslim prayer room, itself worth pointing out to the group.

Overnight: Taipei

Liuzhangli Muslim Cemetery | Xinyi

Liuzhangli Muslim Cemetery Established in the 1950s by Muslim soldiers and refugees who needed ground to bury their dead correctly, this is the only Islamic cemetery in the district and among the most important Muslim heritage sites in Taiwan.

The gates and archways carry Islamic architectural elements. The headstones carry Arabic calligraphy and Qur'anic verses alongside Chinese characters: the visual signature of a community that was fully Chinese and fully Muslim and never saw a contradiction in it.

Within the grounds sits the Bai Rongyintang section, commissioned in 1963 and containing the tomb of General Bai Chongxi (1893–1966) — Hui Muslim, celebrated commander of the war against Japan, and the Republic of China's first Defence Minister. The site holds official heritage designation.

Return to Xinyi District. Light lunch. Free time for rest.

Evening — Optional Raohe or Shilin Night Market walk with a halal-mapped route — the group sees Taiwanese street food culture with clear guidance on what is and is not permissible.

Overnight: Taipei

Museum of World Religions | Hua Xin Burmese Muslim Street

Museum of World Religions, One of very few museums on earth built specifically to present the world's faiths side by side with dignity rather than as curiosities. The Islam gallery, the Pilgrimage Corridor, and the architectural models of sacred buildings give the group a comparative frame.

Hua Xin Street known locally as Burma Street. Ten minutes from the museum. This is the heart of the itinerary's living heritage. When Yunnanese and Burmese Chinese families — many of them Muslim — resettled in Taiwan from the 1960s onward, they clustered here. The street runs on Burmese and Yunnanese Muslim cuisine: mohinga, tea leaf salad, flatbreads, milk tea, Yunnanese noodles. Shop signage is in Burmese. It feels, correctly, like it belongs somewhere else.

Return to Taipei. Free.

Overnight: Taipei

National Palace Museum, Roughly 700,000 artefacts of Chinese imperial civilisation, evacuated from Beijing ahead of the war and the revolution. 

We walk the group through the Islamic thread inside Chinese civilisation: blue-and-white porcelain that owes its cobalt to Persian trade, Ming-era pieces bearing Arabic and Persian inscriptions, Yuan dynasty objects reflecting Muslim administrators and astronomers in imperial service, and the enormous cross-pollination of the Silk Road. Muslims were not adjacent to Chinese history; they were inside it.

Grand Hotel Taipei exterior and terrace for the view.

Farewell-to-Taipei dinner. Halal hotpot

Longgang Mosque | Zhongli → Hong Kong

Depart Taipei for Zhongli District, Taoyuan

Longgang Mosque 

This is the closing chapter of Taiwan's Muslim story and the reason the whole tour coheres.

In the 1950s and early 60s, the Kuomintang relocated thousands of anti-communist guerrillas and their families from the Yunnan–Burma border region to Taiwan. The overwhelming majority were Muslim. They were settled into military dependants' villages around Longgang — and had nowhere to pray. In 1964 they began raising funds themselves; the Chinese Muslim Association and the Saudi government contributed the rest. The original mosque opened in 1967, built by a group of thirty men. The present structure dates from 1989.

It serves a community of several hundred families. The prayer hall holds 150.

Direct transfer to Taoyuan International Airport (approx. 20 min — Longgang is deliberately placed as the final Taiwan stop for exactly this reason).

Flight to Hong Kong (approx. 1 hr 45 min). Arrival, transfer, check-in.

Overnight: Hong Kong

Jamia Mosque | Sheung Wan Heritage Walk | Masjid Ammar

Jamia Mosque 

Hong Kong's first and oldest mosque. The community here began with Lascars — sailors from the Indian subcontinent who arrived in the early nineteenth century and had no permanent dwellings, gathering instead on Lower Lascar Row in Sheung Wan, an area old Hong Kong called Moro Kai. As the community grew — merchants, soldiers, policemen, prison guards from Punjab and Bombay — they needed a proper house of prayer. The original was built in the 1840s; the mosque standing today was funded in the early twentieth century by the Bombay merchant Essack Elias and designed by an architect from the community itself.

It is a declared monument under Hong Kong's Antiquities and Monuments Office and holds around 400 worshippers. Mint-green walls, arched windows, octagonal stained glass carrying Arabic phrases, trilingual stone engravings in Chinese, English and Arabic. The adjacent Residence of Muslims — free housing for community members — is itself a graded historic building.

Descend to Sheung Wan via the Mid-Levels Escalator. Walk Lascar Row and the surrounding heritage trail — the exact lanes where the first congregations gathered before any mosque existed.

Islamic Centre Canteen Hong Kong's only fully halal Cantonese restaurant, and the first halal-certified dim sum house in the city. Chicken siu mai, prawn har gow, chicken buns in place of char siu, beef samosas, halal wonton noodle soup in chicken broth. Dim sum service runs roughly 10:00 AM–3:00 PM; the ordering system is card-and-counter, which the group will enjoy. Modest dress required — you are entering a mosque building.

Tour of Masjid Ammar itself, in the same complex. Its lineage runs back to a nineteenth-century mosque built beside Hong Kong's first Muslim burial ground; it was rebuilt after the Second World War when the original plot was taken for the Aberdeen Tunnel. Dhuhr and 'Asr prayed here.

Victoria Peak by tram at sunset. Maghrib arrangements made in advance.

Overnight: Hong Kong

Happy Valley Muslim Cemetery | Victoria Harbour

Happy Valley Muslim Cemetery, granted to the Muslim community by the colonial government in 1870 and the resting place of Hong Kong's earliest Muslim families — Lascars, Punjabi policemen, Bombay merchants, and generations since.

Optional extension for groups with appetite: Cape Collinson Mosque and Muslim Cemetery in Chai Wan, built in 1963 when the community's Ho Man Tin land on the Kowloon Peninsula was reclaimed. The tombstone of General Bai Chongxi's mother-in-law stands here, bearing an inscription he wrote — a direct thread back to Day 3 in Taipei that most travelers will never have heard of.

Free time, or curated shopping in Causeway Bay.

Star Ferry crossing at dusk and the Symphony of Lights from the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade.

Group dinner at a South Asian halal restaurant in TST.

Overnight: Hong Kong

Kowloon Masjid · Tsim Sha Tsui

Free for rest or a stroll through Kowloon Park.

Kowloon Masjid & Islamic Centre, 

Hong Kong's largest mosque, standing on the site of former British army barracks — ground once occupied by Muslim soldiers of the colonial regiments. Classical Islamic design: domed upper prayer hall, four minarets rising over Nathan Road, capacity in the thousands. It sits in the middle of Hong Kong's busiest shopping street, and thousands walk past it daily without knowing what it is.

The journey ends where it began: in congregation.

 Halal lunch in Tsim Sha Tsui — the district holds Hong Kong's densest concentration of halal South Asian, Indonesian, Malay and Middle Eastern kitchens.

Free time. Optional guided shopping.

Farewell dinner. Closing reflection.

Fajr in congregation. Breakfast. Transfer to Hong Kong International Airport according to individual flight schedules.