Notes on a self-governing island

A brief guide to Taiwan

Taiwan is the likely flashpoint for a catastrophic Sino-American conflict that would destroy the world economy, even if it didn’t go nuclear. But what’s it actually like?

The New Taiwan: Taipei 臺北

Taipei, located near the northern tip of the island, has many charms, but the perpetually hot, humid, and wet weather is not one of them. This is kryptonite to a certain sort of Englishman abroad, and on arrival I strongly recommend you acquire plenty of breathable clothing as soon as possible.

Nor is Taipei a beautiful city. The portside neighbourhood of Dadaocheng 大稻埕 is the city’s oldest district, and retains some old-world charm in its grand nineteenth-century shopping streets; the pier plaza itself is a good place to chill with a cold beer. Xinyi 信義 has the same cold, steel-and-glass chic as every other international city’s central business district, though the Taipei 101 — formerly the world’s tallest building — is genuinely impressive. The Taipei World Trade Centre, on the other hand, more evokes ‘monstrous English leisure centre’.

Taipei from above, left, and below, right.

Most of the rest of the city is a mix of grey postwar blocks of varying sizes, with residential areas dominated by narrow alleys of five-floor apartment buildings. Post-1949 urbanisation and economic growth and the influx of over a million Nationalist mainlanders (waishengren 外省人, versus the pre-1949 Taiwanese benshengren 本省人, nb. that both groups are ethnically Han Chinese, the former from all over the country, the latter more specifically of the Hoklo and Hakka subgroups) put a premium on building fast, not pretty. That said, the shabbiness here has a certain charm, thanks to the houseproud Taiwanese keeping their streets clean and balconies green, plus the ubiquitous billboards for family microbusinesses adding much-needed colour.

The lack of parks will also stick out to a Londoner, though as Taipei is surrounded on three sides by lush hills it feels churlish to complain. I particularly recommend taking a gondola to the tea-growing hills of Maokong 猫空 for scenic hikes and traditional teas, oolong 烏龍 and tieguanyin 鐵觀音 being the staples there. Slightly further out in the hills to the northeast is the picturesque town of Jiufen 九份. While claims that it was the inspiration for Miyazaki’s Spirited Away are merely a marketing ploy, you could certainly believe it, and it is well worth a trip to enjoy tea with a view of the rolling green hills.

The city is remarkably compact compared to London or Seoul (let alone Tokyo), with Taipei proper being what lies between the west bank of the Tamsui River and the mountains to the north and east of the city. Everything beyond is commuter belt ‘New Taipei’, and of no real interest to the tourist. Ximending 西門町 is a colourful shopping district in the west (think Tokyo’s Harajuku), popular with teenagers, sexual minorities, and pro-Taiwanese independence demonstrators. The Da’an 大安 university district hosts several of Taiwan’s leading institutions, including the most prestigious, National Taiwan University, and plenty of spots for food, drink, and coffee, the latter particularly of the Instagram-friendly variety — the civilising trends of coffee snobbery and female taste know no limit! The aforementioned Xinyi is where the youth go clubbing once they’ve graduated and have money in their pockets; less my scene, but a rooftop brewpub with views of the 101 has its charms. To the north, adjoining the Yuanshan Expo Centre, is Maji Square: food court and breakdancing hotspot by day, bars and clubs for the foreigners and foreigner-curious by night (much better than it sounds — Haku in particular was fun). Maji is also home to the staunchly named ‘Three Lions’ pub, should homesickness ever get the better of you. Homesick Japanese, on the other hand, should head to central-west Taipei’s Japantown in Zhongshan 中山 for authentic Japanese eel and the familiar mumbling of drunken salarymen. Like all East Asians, the Taiwanese love karaoke (KTV), and you can find bars and private rooms for it all over the city.

While some Taiwanese drink — at least enough to sustain the aforementioned bars — drinking is not really part of the culture in the same way as it is in Britain. Many of my local friends were either complete lightweights or entirely teetotal, contrasting strongly with the Koreans, who have pushed through their genetic handicap to take their place among the great drinking peoples.

Food has a correspondingly larger role in social activity, and Taipei is not lacking on this front. Wandering around the night markets — locals tend to prefer the markets of Ningxia or Raohe, Shilin being too touristy — is the natural place to try Taiwanese classics like stinky tofu (choudoufu 臭豆腐, get the fried version), braised pork rice (luroufan 滷肉飯), and Taiwanese fried chicken (jipai 鷄排). Hotpot is a communal activity by definition, as is rechao 熱炒 (literally, ‘hot-fry’): cheap and casual venues serving stir-fried dishes where you help yourself to beer from the fridge and pour each other rounds. Small, family-run eateries are everywhere and are excellent, serving classic dishes from all over China and Taiwan; this partly another legacy of waishengren émigrés who turned to the flavours of home to make a living in exile. More formal sit-down restaurants are excellent too — Din Tai Fung being the most successful, and rightly so (Din Tai Fung’s founder was an émigré hailing from Shanxi province in the north of China). Taipei doesn’t lack for international cuisine, but unless at the insistence of a date, why pay double for an okay Italian dinner or Aussie brunch when the local fare is so good?

Getting around all of this is a breeze on Taipei’s excellent public transport: the metro is as good as you’d expect, while the buses are blisteringly quick, owing to aggressively punctual drivers and Taipei’s wide roads and boulevards. That said, these same roads do make Taipei rather inconvenient for pedestrians, so make good use of the cheap and ubiquitous rental ‘Youbikes’ and local taxis.

Incidentally, I theorise that the city’s unfriendliness to pedestrians may be behind the local taste for dog prams. Taibeiren opt for smaller dogs, like the Maltese, which better fit their apartments; and, uncomfortable letting them roam Taipei on their own four paws, instead choose to escort them in prams, with all the coddling and displacement parenting that implies. If ‘bad urbanism’ makes Americans fat, it might make Taiwanese childless. I’d ban imports of both the dogs and the dog prams until Taiwan’s TFR, currently an abysmal 0.87, clears 1.3.

Although Taiwanese from other regions complain that the taibeiren are cold or aloof — something many will have noticed seems to be said of every capital city’s inhabitants, from Seoul to Moscow, Bucharest to London — I found them to be universally friendly. A Chinese-British friend’s experience echoed my own: ‘they’re like Chinese, but polite’. Aunties at food stalls were happy to chat — one even attempted to set me up with a niece — and all seemed pleased to learn I was British; as in East Asia more generally, the Taiwanese are instinctively Anglophile, and Britain’s cultural stock remains (perhaps undeservedly) high. I didn’t meet any Hong Kongers in Taiwan, but I am told they have a natural affinity with the Taiwanese as fellow ‘Chinese but different’, with Hong Kongers immediately warming to exchange students when they hear the soft Taiwanese accent. There was a corresponding wariness of Mainland China among my friends, and this is reflected in official visa policy, capping entry permits for Mainland Chinese coming across the Strait (though it should be noted that Chinese nationals who are resident overseas can visit freely, and that China also restricts Taiwan-bound exit permits for its own reasons).

Japan, and especially Korea, are probably the ‘cool’ countries at the moment in Taiwan, with their music, fashion and TV setting trends. That said, Taiwan is clearly no slouch in the cultural sphere: Taiwanese musicians like Jay Chou and Jolin Tsai have reigned as King and Queen of Chinese pop (to say nothing of the late great Teresa Teng), and a quick scan of Spotify’s ‘Mandopop Hits’ Top 10 yields six Taiwanese acts, with one further act based in Taiwan. I’m told Taiwan has a rich film culture, though I imagine it is currently suffering from the pressure to serve CCP censor-approved slop for the irresistibly large Mainland Chinese market. In any case, the contrast with culturally stunted Singapore, another economically successful and Chinese-dominated state, is clear.

As you’d perhaps expect, some of Taipei’s most interesting sights are legacies of the Chinese Civil War and the Kuomintang’s flight to Taiwan. The National Palace Museum to the north exhibits a wealth of pieces spanning five-thousand years of Chinese history, saved from Communist destruction when the Kuomintang (KMT) ‘selflessly’ took the contents of China’s palaces, temples, and museums with them into exile. The curation is not particularly inspired, but it is blessedly apolitical, and the objects speak for themselves.

The Palace Museum might have dodged the Taiwanese culture wars, but recent history is, naturally, much more politically fraught. The central district of Zhongzheng hosts government offices and the Presidential residence, but is dominated by the enormous Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall (Chiang is also the district’s namesake, ‘Zhongzheng’ being another of his many adopted names). The hall is an impressive monument informed by classic Chinese motifs, boasting a beautiful deep-blue tiled roof and a gigantic seated statue of Chiang, always flanked by two Republic of China army guardsmen.

Chiang Kai-Shek (1887-1975) sits uneasily in modern Taiwan: born and raised on the mainland, President of not ‘Taiwan’, but (supposedly) all of China, and military dictator of a country that feels less and less defined by its ‘Chinese-ness’, and more and more defined by its separate democratic system. Kuomintang partisans are on the back foot, often seeming either unable or unwilling to make pro-Chiang — rather than merely anti-anti-Chiang — arguments. And though Chiang has yet to Fall, the square in which the memorial hall stands has — pointedly — been renamed ‘Freedom Square’, while the hall itself hosted an exhibition titled ‘The Spirit of Freedom vs the Dictator’ in 2022. Nearby on hip Yongkang street, I saw a Chiang bust defaced with ‘228’: a reference to the ‘2/28 Incident’, the Kuomintang’s massacre of tens of thousands of anti-government protestors in 1947; this massacre inaugurated Taiwan’s martial law era, which lasted thirty-eight years.

The colossal Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall, left, and the KMT Revolutionary Martyrs Memorial Shrine, right.

Those interested can see these history wars play out at the far less famous Chiang Ching-Kuo Chi Hai Cultural Park. Chiang Ching-Kuo (1910-88) was Chiang Kai-Shek’s son, and served as the President of the Republic of China from 1978 to 1988. The Cultural Park is a recent project by his foundation and an allied Christian charity organisation (both Chiangs were pious Christians). It’s clearly intended to defend his legacy: the displays humanise Ching-Kuo with his loving marriage to his Belarusian wife (they met while prisoners of Stalin); praises him for finally integrating Eastern Taiwan by tunnelling through the central mountains; and emphasises his role in ending martial law and beginning democratisation (less is said of his earlier position in the police state). Amusingly, the centre has a café with Instagram-friendly aesthetics and a pleasant view over the park, seeking to make fashionable couples and young women unwitting conscripts in this latest front of Taiwan’s history wars.

Just down the road is the KMT Revolutionary Martyrs Memorial Shrine, dedicated to those who died in the wars against the warlords, the Japanese, and the Communists. Though in a classic Chinese monumental style — much like Chiang Senior’s memorial — it felt far more aged and neglected (I was one of only three visitors, all foreign). It’s a bit out of the way, but one can’t help but see this as another manifestation of the increasing divergence between the self-conception of most Taiwanese and their state’s official status as the ‘Republic of China’: 64.3% of Taiwanese nationals describe themselves only as ‘Taiwanese’, double the number who say ‘Chinese and Taiwanese’. After all, if you identify as only Taiwanese, two of the three villains listed here probably don’t seem especially villainous. The Japanese, whose annexation of Taiwan in 1895 was responsible for cutting the island off politically from the rest of China some fifty years before the Kuomintang’s retreat, are often viewed positively by supporters of Taiwanese independence; as such, one’s opinion of Japan is now an important signal of which side you take in the Taiwanese culture wars. The warlords — hated by the Kuomintang for effectively balkanising the mainland — seem completely irrelevant to contemporary Taiwan, especially given that supporters of Taiwanese independence are themselves opponents of the ‘One China’ that the warlords were so hated for blocking.

Cap off your Chiang Kai-Shek memorial tour with a visit to the Grand Hotel, built in a genuinely unique Chinese palatial style to host and impress diplomats and dignitaries visiting his embattled regime. The buffet there is good too.

The Old Taiwan: Tainan 臺南

By far the best way to reach Tainan is a bullet train from the palatial Taipei Main Station (also host to one of Taipei’s few homeless hotspots, an odd contrast in what is otherwise a typically orderly East Asian city). Taiwan’s bullet train network was largely built by the Japanese, and the experience is as pleasant as you’d therefore expect; the bullet train remains by far the most pleasant way to travel anywhere, in any country.

Tainan is Taiwan’s historic heart, located in the plains of the southwest of the island. It was here that Han Chinese settlers first arrived in the seventeenth century and displaced the Taiwanese aborigines, the Austronesian peoples who currently represent just 3% of the island’s population. They were followed by a procession of Dutch colonists, Chinese Ming loyalists, Manchu Qing forces to suppress them, Japanese imperialists, and finally, Nationalist exiles.

In fact, it was only with the coming of Ming loyalist general Koxinga (1624-62) that Taiwan truly joined the Chinese world, although initially as a base from which to attack China itself. One could imagine how Koxinga — who is famous for his loyalty to his Emperor (even though it meant forsaking his turncoat father), his exploits against the mighty Qing Dynasty, and his expulsion of the Dutch colonists — would be soon repurposed in a CCP-controlled Taiwan as an ‘anti-imperialist’ hero who ultimately ‘reunified’ the island with the rest of Chinese civilisation.

Several sites in Tainan remain from this period, the most famous being the Chikhan Tower, Anping Fortress, Grand Mazu, and a Confucian temple; of these, the temples are the highlight.

Mazu, of Grand Mazu, is a sea goddess in Chinese folk religion, originating in Mainland China’s Fujian province — which is located directly across the strait from Taiwan — and following the Han Chinese as they sailed to Taiwan and across the Southern Seas. Her temple here is a very beautiful example of a type that emerged all across China and Southeast Asia. Beyond the grand temple itself, Tainan is full of smaller shrines to this god and that god, punters praying for this and that favour. Tainaners also seem to enjoy festivals, and at least twice I stumbled on processions making their way through town.

Grand Mazu, left, and a shot of some of the other, smaller shrines that litter Tainan, right.

The Confucian temple, by contrast, is a site of China’s historic elite culture rather than its folk religion, founded by Koxinga when he established his Ming loyalist kingdom. Confucianism and the elite tradition surrounding it enabled China’s unrivalled historical continuity, as it permitted the continuation of Chinese culture and certain forms of governance even during periods of foreign rule, civilising and assimilating the barbarian invaders (I’d argue more successfully than the Catholic Church, which is often credited with the same in Europe). Almost all of the Conquest Dynasties, most notably the Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and the Manchu Qing Dynasty (1644–1912), chose to govern their Chinese subjects as Chinese emperors to ease their own rule. The Manchu Qing paid Confucianism all due respect, and their greatest emperors — Kangxi, Yongzheng, Qianlong — particularly so. On the temple’s ceiling hang plaques of Confucian proverbs in fine calligraphy, gifted to the temple by every reigning Qing emperor bar the last, plus the two President Chiangs; another imperial inheritance of modern China.

Not far from the Confucian temple, you can see legacies of the empire that followed. Within a five minute radius stands a budokan (martial arts hall) in the traditional Japanese style, the 1930s-retro Hayashi Department Store (almost Ghibli-esque, and a good place for souvenirs), and a former Japanese colonial bank that looks like something straight out of Fascist Italy. Beyond these historic sights, the rest of Tainan is not particularly pretty to look at: no wonder that the Taiwanese, like other East Asians, gawp when walking around a city like Florence or Vienna. Unfortunately, Tainan is far less convenient to get around than Taipei, lacking a metro despite its sprawl. Locals get by on scooters; you’ll have to make do with taxis.

However, Tainan does have excellent food, as even their rivals from Taipei would concede. The most traditional Taiwanese dishes hail from Tainan, including peddler noodles (danzaimian 擔仔麵), oyster omelette (o-a-chian 蚵仔煎), Taiwanese rice pudding (uann-kue 碗粿), and beef soup (niuroutang 牛肉湯), to name but a few. Despite nominally being savoury dishes, many of these are quite sweet; the Taiwanese generally, and Tainaners in particular, have a strong sweet tooth, a legacy of sugar production in the region. The morning market on Guohua Street and the night market on nearby Minzu Road are a cheap and authentic way to try the local fare. In terms of restaurants, Duxiaoyue 度小月 is a local stalwart that has served these classics for over a century, but for me, the real standout was Winchang Beef Soup 文章牛肉湯.

I never lived in Tainan, so saw less of the nightlife, but as a somewhat smaller (population 1.8 million, compared to Taipei’s 2.5 million) and more laid-back city, walking around can feel quiet in a way Taipei never does — I suspect real party animals will be disappointed. Nonetheless, I can vouch for Bar TCRC: it has a cosy interior, a good range of drinks, and a young and fun clientele and staff. I normally feel overcharged and uncomfortable in any place where the done thing is cocktails, but this is a happy exception. Bar Home is also meant to be good. Whichever you choose, be sure to book.

Tainan is also a good place to hear Hokkien — the dialect of Chinese originating from Fujian, and now spoken on both sides of the Taiwan Strait — in the wild, if you feel Mandarin and its mere four tones (Hokkien has seven, more than even the six of Cantonese) is getting too easy. As Taiwan’s south has remained more demographically dominated by pre-1949 benshengren, rather than the post-1949 Mandarin-speaking (and anti-‘dialect’) Nationalist exiles, elderly Southerners continue to regularly use Hokkien, and their grandchildren are more likely to speak at least a bit, unlike in Taipei. This history also continues to shape Taiwan’s politics: Tainan and the rest of the south of the island remain the Democratic Progressive Party’s — i.e., the pro-Taiwanese independence DPP, or ‘Greens’, as opposed to the anti-Taiwanese independence KMT, or ‘Blues’ — heartland.

Those interested in this history can visit the National Museum of Taiwan History, a shiny new complex an hour’s bus ride from the central station that I can only assume was some sort of Taiwanese ‘Levelling Up’ bung (‘National Museums… in the South’). I can’t say it’s worth it for the ordinary tourist — if your tastes are more traditional, try the Tainan Art Museum — but as a reflection of a new Taiwanese view of the past, it was quite interesting: solely focused on local Taiwanese culture and history, with Imperial China far in the background. The persecutions of the Japanese colonial era (1895-1945) are described dispassionately, something that would be unimaginable in either South Korea or the People’s Republic; by contrast, prominent displays describing the postwar disillusionment with the Kuomintang, owing to their corruption and brutality, the ludicrous details of Chiang Kai-Shek’s personality cult, and the suppression of ‘dialect’ in favour of the new ‘national language’ (i.e., Mandarin Chinese) all point to a historical view that sees the KMT-ROC martial law regime as merely yet another chapter of foreign domination over the island.

The Elephant in the Room 房間裏的大象

In short, Taiwan is very nice, underrated, and interesting. Taipei and Tainan, and indeed Taiwan as a whole, hold many charms for both the ordinary tourist and the experienced traveler. Friends arrived not knowing what to expect, and left singing Taiwan’s praises; others planned to stay only a few months, but still live there today. In the interest of brevity, we haven’t been able to cover the island in its entirety. Beyond Taiwan’s two great cities, I can only briefly remark on the natural beauty of the old aboriginal lands on the east coast of the island and in the mountain ranges of the island’s centre: go to Taroko Gorge and the Luye Highlands along the former, Alishan and Sun Moon Lake in the latter.

Looming over all of this, however, is the People’s Republic of China. Despite some scares, Chiang’s regime was never in any real external danger during the Cold War, owing to the extreme difficulty of invading Taiwan. This was both due to geography — the weather of the strait is treacherous, and the island itself is both mountainous and rather lacking in beaches, all of which obviously still holds true to this day — and due to the overwhelming defensive superiority of the Republic of China’s American-armed navy and air force (to say nothing of the potential for the intervention of the US Navy itself), which is something that no longer holds, thanks to the People’s Republic of China’s astonishing development and rearmament over the past three or so decades.

Ironically, things were simpler when Beijing and Taipei were merely the two headquarters of warring factions in an ongoing, if frozen, ideologically-driven civil war between two continent-sized revolutionary organisations, spanning all of Chinese civilisation and then some: both agreed with each other and with the world that there was only One China; and, while Taiwan remained a dictatorship (the first free elections in Taiwan were held in 1991), the question of what the Taiwanese (and especially the pre-1949 benshengren) themselves thought about their island’s central involvement in this grand, world-historical struggle didn’t matter. And without any threat of permanent separation through a formal declaration of Taiwanese independence under the Kuomintang — a declaration that, paradoxically, would involve the regime in Taiwan finally relinquishing their continued claims over the territory on the mainland currently occupied and governed by the People’s Republic of China — Beijing felt there was no hurry to force unification.

It was believed that deep cross-strait economic integration and a shared sense of ‘Chinese-ness’ would gradually bring Taiwan back into the fold, meaning that Beijing didn’t really think it needed to pursue a potentially risky invasion: due to Taiwan’s geography, an invasion (which would be the largest amphibious invasion in history) would be technically difficult for any country’s armed forces to pull off, something that is only compounded by the PLA’s lack of real combat experience (the most recent being a defeat in all but name at the hands of Vietnam in ’79). An invasion would also almost certainly be extremely costly: most obviously and directly in terms of money, materiel, and men, not to mention the indirect costs from the severe economic disruption it would cause. As such, a peaceful, gradualist reunification had many merits, even to the CCP. However, in a Taiwan that thinks itself increasingly culturally distant from the mainland, has increasingly defined itself by its separate democratic system, and that, moreover, has been able to observe the ‘One China, Two Systems’ approach fall apart in Hong Kong, this was not to be. The CCP now knows this. Looking to the future from 2024, it is hard to see how either Taiwanese sociopolitical currents or CCP strategic outlook could develop in a direction conducive to even short-term détente.

The Taiwanese are not blind to the fact that their country is in peril: even most ‘Green’ (i.e., pro-Taiwanese independence) voters are pragmatic, and don’t want to rock the boat just yet, usually telling pollsters that they support the geopolitically useful (but logically absurd) fudge that is the status quo. But alongside this pragmatism, which can be a good thing, I couldn’t help but sense fatalism and defeatism, which are certainly not. Although it is true that Taiwan has many in-built advantages which protect it against invaders, these are no longer sufficient against the new and revitalised People’s Republic. Real sacrifices, requiring real willpower, including in peacetime, are now necessary. And with Taiwanese politicians deeply divided on even the most basic of steps — such as implementing a much more serious system of conscription (Taiwan’s current system pales in comparison to other Asian countries like Singapore and South Korea, despite both countries being far less immediately threatened by their neighbours than Taiwan) — and their armed forces (and especially the army) under-equipped, under-trained, under-manned, and likely teeming with CCP agents, it’s no surprise that even instinctive Taiwanese patriots might choose to chalk it all up to the decisions of Beijing, Washington, and Fate. But nations like Israel, Poland, and Finland — and latterly, Ukraine, even if they ultimately (like Finland) lose their war with Russia, but nonetheless avoid a total collapse — show that when the odds are long, morale is what counts most; by contrast, a demoralised polity like Venice had a thousand years of history terminated with barely a whimper.

These pages (A conflict is brewing in the Far East — keep Britain out’, Volume IV (January 2024)) have already argued Britain should stay well clear of such a conflict, and, moreover, that we couldn’t meaningfully help even if we wanted to (though we could harm ourselves a great deal). Nonetheless, for the sake of the Taiwanese, we can only hope that, by making an invasion just a bit too costly and risky, a more focused Taiwan will be able to sufficiently deter China, so that Xi and his successors continue to decide ‘not yet’ and the ludicrous ‘One China’ fudge keeps the show on the road long enough for the rest of the Chinese nation to let it go.

This might be a pipe dream. Quite aside from the political roadblocks and civilian-military dysfunction in Taiwan, if you were one of the many millions of Chinese nationalists from the mainland justly proud of their motherland’s achievements, Taiwan’s continued separation — a legacy of first Japanese, then American imperialism — would quite naturally seem intolerable. A Chinese-born acquaintance long resented what she perceived to be Taiwanese haughtiness, and simply couldn’t understand why they so jealously guarded their independence and separateness from the mainland. It was only after seeing Taiwan for herself that she appreciated it was something different, and something worth preserving.

So perhaps the first step in a new Taiwanese Grand Strategy will be to grit their teeth, uncap the visas, and love-bomb the resulting tourist tsunami from the People’s Republic. If you go now, you might beat the Mainlanders to it: so what are you waiting for?