On New Year's Day 1979, Taiwan issued its first tourist passport. This was more than the release of a piece of paper — it was a turning point from martial-law isolation to citizen diplomacy, documenting how Taiwanese people transformed from 'foreign-exchange-wasting' sinners into world travelers.

50 citations 25 min read

💻 Technology

Submarine Cables: Visible Above the Silicon Shield, the Lifeline Invisible Below

In February 2023, two submarine cables connecting Matsu were severed within six days, plunging Lienchiang County into roughly 50 days of digital darkness. DPP Lienchiang chair Lee Wen described it: "A single LINE text message took 15 to 20 minutes to send." Taiwan's 99% of outbound internet traffic depends on 14 cables buried deep beneath the seabed, all of them international cables landing at four sites on the main island. TSMC's clean rooms are the hero shots above the silicon shield; the submarine cables are the engineer's narrative no one photographs below — they can detach 23 million people from the world without firing a single shot.

49 citations 10 min read

🎭 Culture

Taiwan's Religious Faith: An Empire of Belief That Grew from Fear

The island with the world's highest temple density and Asia's second-ranked religious freedom — its two largest faiths, the Wang Ye lords and Mazu, both trace their origins to plague and death. From 17th-century military migrants binding deity statues to their bodies to cross the Black Ditch, to a 94-point Freedom House score in 2025; from the 1953 ban on Yiguandao, its 1987 legalization as the first faith to gain legal status after martial law ended, to the four great Buddhist mountain orders and the Presbyterian Church each walking separate paths in church-state relations — Taiwan's faith is not in scriptures. It is in the incense smoke at the corner of your street.

45 citations 22 min read

🎨 Art

Postwar Taiwanese Literature: Learning to Speak the Unspeakable (1945–1987)

In August 1945, Yeh Shih-tao was twenty years old, freshly discharged from the Japanese Imperial Army, back in Tainan, staring at a blank sheet of paper — unable to write a single character of Chinese. That blank page would wait forty-two years. In between: aphasia, imprisonment, polemic, and the slow mastery of indirection. In February 1987, he published a 232-page book whose title contained only two words: 'Taiwan.'

36 citations 10 min read

🏛️ Society

The Reporter: Ten Years of Rescuing Investigative Journalism from a Commercial Line Item into a Public Good

On September 1, 2015 — Journalists' Day in Taiwan — Ho Jung-hung and Chang Tieh-chih announced the founding of The Reporter (報導者) at a press conference, with an initial NT$5 million donation from ASUS co-founder Tung Tzu-hsien. Ten years on, this nonprofit media outlet that refuses advertising, government contracts, and internal traffic metrics has grown its annual fundraising from NT$34 million to NT$52 million, earned back-to-back SOPA and Excellence in Journalism Awards, and turned investigative journalism from a commercial media line item into a public good sustained by monthly donations from strangers.

36 citations 10 min read

👥 People

Che-Yu Wu: From Pinball Machines to the White Walls of Venice, a Clockmaker Approaching the Soul with 0 and 1

A Taiwan boy obsessed with systems, starting from pinball machines, Flash animations, and biological simulators, making his way to the Venice Biennale, Art Blocks, and a trilogy of solo exhibitions at Taipei 101. In between: NFTs worth hundreds of millions, FTX wiping everything to zero overnight, and a fresh departure through Camus's absurdism. He calls himself an 'ancient clockmaker,' insisting on designing the mechanisms by hand in an era of rampant AI generation, and devotes part of his time to writing Markdown — leaving a true SSOT for Taiwan in the AI age.

32 citations 16 min read

🏠 Lifestyle

Taiwan's Transportation System: How an Island Compressed Itself into 90 Minutes

In 1946, Taiwan switched overnight from left-hand to right-hand traffic. The Central Mountain Range runs 273 km north to south, splitting 36,000 sq km of island into two halves. Sixty years later the HSR compressed 394 km into 90 minutes, and the Snow Mountain Tunnel shrank the Yilan trip from 2 hours to 40 minutes. Then came 14 million scooters jamming every intersection. This island's transportation story is its identity story.

28 citations 16 min read

🍜 Food

Taiwan Pastry Culture

From the 1877 Lukang Yuzhenzhai Phoenix Eye Cake to the 2026 Chen Yaoxun's Red Soil Egg Yolk Pastry that sold out in 30 seconds on the Tixcraft ticketing system, Taiwan's pastries carry a 150-year layered story. In between lies the square pineapple cake revolution of Yifutang during the Japanese colonial era, Fengquan's olive-shaped egg yolk pastry experiment in Fengyuan, 270 hectares of native pineapple contract farming at the foot of Bagua Mountain, the craft mutation of oil-wrapped pastry layers, and a century-old Han pastry shop standing on the same Mid-Autumn dining table as a world bread champion.

23 citations 10 min read