The Presidential Office Building Permanent Exhibition

The signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 ceded Taiwan to Japan. To consolidate Japanese rule, and because the former Qing Dynasty Taiwan Provincial Administration Compound that housed the temporary Governor-General's Office was destroyed by a fire in 1905, plans were made to construct a new office building.

As a result, in 1906 Japan held its first major architectural design competition, which was only open to Japanese architects. Because the first-prize design resembled the Peace Palace in The Hague and was also deemed technically inadequate, second-prize winner Nagano Uheiji's design was adopted. Due to design execution issues, the task of revising Nagano's original design, including modifying the interior structure and raising the central tower to its current height, fell to Moriyama Matsunosuke, an architect from the Governor-General's Office civil engineering department who had also participated in the original competition. Upon completion, the building became the tallest in Taiwan at that time.