After two months of tropical heat in Malaysia and Indonesia, Melissa and I were desperate to spend the last few weeks of our Asia trip somewhere cooler. We also wanted to go somewhere we’d never been before. So we set our sights on the island of Taiwan, off the eastern coast of China, where high temperatures in April are typically in the 70s Fahrenheit rather than the 90s. It would be our first time visiting Northeast Asia (our previous Asian travels have all been in Southeast Asia).
Taiwan had been on our want-to-see list for years because of its reputation for friendly people, good food, and beautiful mountain scenery. With a predominantly Chinese population, it’s also a place to learn about Chinese culture and history that isn’t as overwhelming as the huge cities of mainland China. That sounds like our kind of place. So we bought a couple of cheap windbreakers in Penang to augment our tropical wardrobes and flew to Taiwan’s capital city, Taipei.
Our visit started traumatically. On our first morning in Taipei, as we were getting out of bed, our hotel room on the 7th floor swayed and shook for what felt like an eternity as Taiwan experienced its most powerful earthquake in 25 years (a magnitude of 7.4). No alarms went off afterward, and when we called the front desk to ask whether we should do anything, the staff member said, “No, it’s just an earthquake.” Taiwan is prone to quakes, and its buildings are engineered to withstand them. (Nearly all of the 17 fatalities from this earthquake were caused by rocks falling on roads and hiking trails in the mountains of eastern Taiwan, closer to the epicenter.)
Everything in Taipei seemed to be operating normally. So when the aftershocks died down after a few hours, I tried to calm my jittery nerves, and we set out to explore the city.
A City That Works
Taipei isn’t particularly pretty. With a few exceptions (which I talk about in the next section), it’s neither picturesque nor strikingly modern. Many of the buildings are nondescript apartment blocks from the 1950s to 1970s that look dirty and tired. But despite that, the city feels vibrant, and things seem to work very smoothly.
The subway system, for example, puts Washington D.C.’s to shame. It’s easy to use, with clear signage, lots of maps, and numbered exits. The trains arrive when the signs say they will and stop at the places indicated on the platform, where passengers patiently line up to wait for them. Riders are quiet on the trains and generally leave the priority seats open for people who need them. The plastic fare cards are easy to buy and top up, with plenty of machines in each station. And they can be used in lots of other places, such as railway trains, taxis, and convenience stores.
The sidewalks on Taipei’s main streets are wide and orderly. People park their motorbikes in neat rows and wait for a walk sign before crossing the street—things we’ve never seen in Southeast Asia, outside Singapore. There are bike rental stands on many corners, and in case you encounter an unexpected rainstorm, there are automated racks at many subway exits where you can rent an umbrella.
Taipei is a city of broad avenues and narrow alleys, which are different worlds with different atmospheres. Along the big streets, shop signs cover the first few floors of buildings and sometimes go all the way up the sides of buildings. At major intersections there are Jumbotron-size advertising screens that give the feeling of New York City’s Times Square.
Far too many of those screens (in our opinion) advertise breast implants and other cosmetic surgery for women. Even more than in the United States, it seems like there’s a lot of media pressure here on women to look stereotypically young, beautiful, and feminine. That’s reflected in things as basic as the fact that it’s hard to find any deodorants for women that don’t include whitening agents. (Do people really care about the color of their armpits?)
Between the avenues are networks of small streets and alleys that give the city more of a neighborhood feel. They’re often where the most interesting little restaurants and shops are found. Taipei has a very low crime rate. Although we don’t typically venture down alleys after dark in most cities, we never felt nervous here.
Virtually everyone in Taiwan speaks Mandarin Chinese (some also speak Taiwanese, a dialect from the southern Chinese province of Fujian that is similar to the Hokkien spoken by ethnic Chinese people in Malaysia). Some Taiwanese people, especially in the hospitality industry, understood or spoke enough English for us to get by. When we needed to communicate in Mandarin or read signs in Chinese characters, we used the Google Translate app on our phones. I was thrilled to learn about the app’s camera function, which superimposes an English translation on a sign in Chinese that you point it at. That’s useful when you’re trying to figure out what a street food stall is selling (such as “old-fashioned pig blood cake”!) or whether the sign on a door in a restaurant says “toilets” or “staff only.”
Favorite Places to See
Taipei has some beautiful and fascinating places to visit. One of the most striking is Liberty Square, a monumental plaza that contains a huge white archway, pretty gardens with small lakes, the ornate National Theater and National Concert Hall, and the austere Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. Chiang Kai-shek ruled Taiwan for more than 25 years after the Chinese communists under Mao Zedong overthrew his government on the mainland in 1949. (Chiang Kai-shek is a polarizing figure in Taiwan these days; some people see him as a ruthless dictator, and statues of him are starting to be taken down in some places.)
We visited Liberty Square on a rainy day with few tourists. Groups of Taiwanese students, who presumably had planned to rehearse in the plaza, were sheltering under the wide eaves of the National Theater playing drums and guitars and practicing drill and dance routines. Their energy gave life to the formal surroundings. Through the mist, we could glimpse another icon of the city: the Taipei 101 skyscraper, which was the world’s tallest building when it opened in 2004.
One of the things that drew us to Taipei was the chance to see some of the most beautiful art from China’s past. When Chiang Kai-shek’s government and military lost the Chinese Civil War and retreated to Taiwan, they brought with them many of the treasures that had belonged to China’s emperors over the centuries. Those objects are on display in the National Palace Museum.
Among the jade and ivory carvings, delicate ceramics, and monumental bronze vessels, the object that impressed me the most was a long painted scroll from the early 1700s showing scenes along a river during a holiday. Images from the scroll were projected on a wall-size screen, allowing viewers to see the immense amount of detail the painter had included about everyday life, from trades to clothing and from ships to ox carts. With my love of 18th-century material culture, I could have looked at it for hours!
Other favorite spots in Taipei included a trio of intricate Chinese temples in the oldest parts of the city (Lonshan, Bangka Qingshan, and Qingshui temples); peaceful Zhishan Garden next to the Palace Museum; big green Da’an Park, where scores of egrets and herons nested in trees by a lake; and Xinbeitou, an area with hot springs, a quaint Japanese-era train station, and a shady riverside park meandering among interesting buildings.
Japan ruled Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, and echoes of Japanese culture are still common here. In Taipei, visitors seek out the few Japanese-style low, wooden houses with dark tiled roofs that remain from that era, such as those at the Rongjin complex and on Qingtian Street near Da’an Park.
