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Fri, October 23
3 articlesYang Yung-wei
2021 Tokyo Olympics judo 60kg silver medalist, the first Olympic judo medalist in Taiwan's history, and world number one in November of the same year.
Chou Tien-chen: Taiwan's Badminton Ace, Reaching the Heights of World No. 2
The first Taiwanese men's singles player to reach world number two and the first to defeat Lin Dan. From a low point of ten consecutive losses after joining the national team and becoming a Christian following an appendicitis perforation, to being diagnosed with early-stage colon cancer at age 34 in 2023—returning to international competition just days after surgery and enduring a year-long slump before reaching the Olympic quarterfinals the following year. Chou Tien-chen does not rely on overwhelming talent, but uses a "grinding" style of defensive rallies to steadily raise the ceiling for Taiwanese badminton.
Brigitte Lin
Born in 1954 and raised in a military dependents' village, she was discovered by talent scout Yang Chi in Ximending in 1972; after being cast in the adaptation of Qiong Yao's *Window*, she became the goddess of the Qiong Yao film era with her pure image, forming classic on-screen pairings with Qin Han and Qin Xianglin that captivated the Chinese-speaking world. In 1992, she redefined martial arts cinema with her subversive portrayal of Dongfang Bubai, spanning two distinct eras of film.
Wed, October 21
9 articlesFrom "Dog Killing Island" to Zero Culling: Forty Years of Redemption in Taiwan's Animal Protection
In the 1990s, Taiwan was internationally known as the "Dog Killing Island" due to cruel treatment of stray dogs, leading even Japanese airports to display boycott signs. From the enactment of the Animal Protection Act in 1998 to comprehensive zero culling in 2017, this is a social movement redefining the value of life.
Culinary Class Wars in Taiwan: A Netflix Korean Variety Show Subjecting Seven Consumer Industries to Taste Stress Tests within 16 Months
In September 2024, the premiere week of Netflix's "Culinary Class Wars" captured the top viewership in Taiwan. Over the following 16 months, nine Korean chefs from the show extended their reach into seven seemingly unrelated consumer industries—including convenience store ready-to-eat meals, bubble tea, fast food chains, five-star hotel buffets, delivery platforms, Korean food chains, and even the Galaxy Z foldable phone—through collaborations, guest appearances, and endorsements. Notably, the bubble tea brand "Shi-Sheng" (十盛), endorsed by Kim Tae-seong, closed on 2025-12-26 after 20 months, serving as Taiwan's first reverse test of "Korean variety show chef endorsements."
Agricultural Technology and Precision Agriculture
With less than 10,000 square kilometers of land, Taiwan has developed high-value products like orchids, pineapple custard apples, and high-mountain tea through long-term breeding since Iso Yong-ji, the "Father of Indica Rice," securing a key position in international markets. By integrating IoT and new technologies, Taiwan is moving toward smart agriculture, replacing extensive farming with precision and labor with technology to validate its unique global niche.
Taiwan Enterprises: TSMC
Morris Chang, who left Texas Instruments at 54 and founded TSMC at 56, survived three major displacements and lived in six cities during his first eighteen years. Thirty-eight years later, on March 3, 2025, U.S. President Trump pointed to TSMC's successor, C.C. Wei, at the White House and said: "He is the most important man in this room." In the first quarter of 2026, TSMC's quarterly revenue reached $35.9 billion. On an island prone to typhoons and facing water and power shortages, it has built the heart of humanity's digital civilization—but as this heart grows larger, whether the island can bear its cost becomes increasingly uncertain.
Rayark: A Musical Empire Built on Aesthetics, and Its Fourteen Years of Cracks
In 2012, six young graduates from NTU's College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science pooled NT$30 million to create Cytus, which hit number one on charts in 14 countries within a month. Fourteen years later, they have the Deemo animation, eleven years of undelivered Project Polyphony animations, Sdorica entering maintenance mode in February 2026, and the decision to cut staff following the 2020 ICE Morse code incident to protect their Chinese market. Aesthetics allowed Rayark to be seen by the world, but also caused it to stumble in every field outside of music.
Chen Hsing-yu: From the Pressed President’s Daughter to Dr. Chen in a Tainan Clinic
From being pursued by media in New York in 2009 to opening a dental clinic in Tainan in 2016, how did Chen Hsing-yu return her life to the profession of dentistry under the gaze of a political family?
Su Beng: A Dumpling Shop That Funded Forty Years of Taiwan's Revolution
Su Beng, born Shi Chao-hui, once did underground intelligence work for the CCP in China but became disillusioned after witnessing land reform massacres; he returned to Taiwan to plot Chiang Kai-shek's assassination, failed, and smuggled himself to Japan. In Tokyo's Ikebukuro he opened a noodle shop called "Shin-Chin-Mi," selling dumplings by day and writing Taiwanese history by night, using the shop's income to fund forty years of the independence movement and producing the seminal *Taiwan's 400-Year History* that awakened Taiwanese national consciousness.
Taiwanese "Handy Dishes": The Meaning, Origin, and Signature Cuisine of Banquet Culture
_Tshiú-lōo-tshài_ (handy dishes) means "signature cuisine." In Neimen, Kaohsiung—where loamy soil cannot grow crops but instead raised the densest group of caterers in Taiwan—a single company hosted 25,000 banquets a year during its golden age. The final broth from one pot could take four to eight hours to perfect, and the entire village knew if it was good or not the next day.
The Little Tigers: Bought Melodies, Filled with Our Own Youth
In 1988, a Chinese Television Agency (CTV) talent show sought three boys to accompany the girl group Little Cats; the result was an idol group covering Japanese songs and imitating Japan's Shonentai. From selling 200,000 copies in five days to being chased by fans from Taipei to Kaohsiung, and finally crossing the Strait in 1991: almost all parts were imported, yet Taiwan remembered it as the most solid generation of youth. The three most popular bodies later crossed the Strait as well.
Sat, October 10
159 articlesThe Formosa Incident
A military trial that was supposed to completely collapse the opposition movement unexpectedly became the most powerful propaganda film for Taiwan's democracy due to its broadcast.
The Mudan Incident: A Clash of Civilizations and the Awakening of Sovereignty in the Stone Ridge Gorge
In 1874, a military action triggered by a maritime disaster made the Stone Ridge Gorge in southern Taiwan the focal point of modern East Asian affairs. This was not only a test case for the expansion of the Japanese Empire but also a turning point for the Qing court, shifting from peripheral defense to active governance.
The Bamboo Hat: A Couple Next to Longdu Junior High Weave Sixty Years of Curved Bamboo into One Hat
In 2017, Lin Rong-chun, in his eighties, was still splitting bamboo strips in Meinong, Kaohsiung; in 2014, Grandma Chen Lien-chin in Lung-chi, Tainan, made one hat an hour at age eighty-six; in 2016, Hsü Kuei-chu in Fuli, Hualian, sold one for only 150 NTD; in the 2022 Hakka TV documentary 'Chuan, Chuan', Wu Chin-yun and Hsu Pao-mei in Miaoli had been making them for fifty years. In its heyday, every household in Xianglin, Hsinchu, piled up curved bamboo; in Lung-chi, Taoyuan, thirty households produced a hundred hats a day—today, most masters who can make rough-work bamboo hats are over seventy, and after the 2024 increase in compensation for prohibiting logging on Indigenous reserved lands to 60,000 NTD per hectare, even the supply chain for harvesting curved bamboo is breaking. The bamboo hat hasn't disappeared from the fields; what has disappeared are the hands that could tuck bamboo leaves into the bamboo strip skeleton and secure them circle by circle with cotton thread.
The Ghost Festival: From the Fear of Solitary Souls to a Collective Reconciliation on an Island
In Taiwan, the Ghost Festival is more than just reverence for spirits; it is a survival record of colonization, conflict, and ethnic integration. From the bloody reconciliation in Keelung to the extreme 'Ghost Seizing' (Qianggu) in Toudeng, this festival reveals how Taiwanese people transformed fear into a social treaty of peace.
Taiwan Church News: A Newspaper That Has Lived 140 Years, and the Day It Was Confiscated
In 1885, the British Presbyterian missionary Thomas Barclay printed Taiwan's first newspaper in Tainan, using Romanized vernacular script. It was suspended by the Japanese government, banned from using its mother tongue by the Kuomintang, and in 1987 had an entire press run seized by the Garrison Command for reporting on the 228 Incident. Every time it was suppressed, it came back. In 2025, it turned 140 years old — and its supplement was running columns on generative AI.
Walking on the Filled-in Harbor: Five Street Foods of Tainan’s Central-West District
Beneath Guohua Street and Hai'an Road lie the riverbed ruins of the Qing Dynasty’s Five Ports; beef soup, milkfish porridge, eel noodles, and pig heart glass noodles—each dish’s timing, location, and ingredients are fossils of the survival logic left by four centuries of dockworkers.
Labor Exchange Band (交工樂隊)
In the autumn of 1998, Lin Sheng-xiang closed his Tamsui bank account — balance: NT$57 — and returned home to Meinong. Together with poet Chung Yung-feng, he began writing songs for the anti-dam movement. From 1999 to 2003, Labor Exchange Band fused Hakka eight-instrument music with modern rock across two albums that documented rural communities struggling to survive in the era of globalization — the suona horn stood at the center of a Taiwanese rock stage for the first time.
Legend of Mortal: Two People, 30% Approval, 700,000 Copies
In June 2024, two Taiwanese developers with no game-industry background launched a wuxia RPG. Within a week, the Steam approval rating fell below 30% as Chinese players bombed it with negative reviews. Twelve days later it climbed back to 70%; a month later, 94%. Six months in, sales passed 700,000 copies, and Korean and Taiwanese fans organized themselves to translate it into Japanese. The protagonist is "an outsider disciple with no main-character aura" — and so is the team that built him.
Formosan Rock Macaque: Survival Games at NSYSU, Matrilineal Power, and the Truth About Taiwan's Ten-Thousand-Year Settlers
From the absurd daily routine at NSYSU — students collecting food deliveries while armed — to Robert Swinhoe's 1862 introduction of the island's primates to Western science, the Formosan Rock Macaque is often branded a "thug." Behind the label is a strict matrilineal society that settled on Mount Chai (柴山) tens of thousands of years ago, forced to evolve a survival culture under campus expansion and human feeding.
Taiwan's Marine Ecology and Coral Reef Conservation
Surrounded by sea on all sides, Taiwan is home to rich marine ecosystems. From the coral bleaching crisis to cetacean conservation, this piece explores the protective outcomes of marine national parks and the challenges ahead.
The Ornithology of Formosa: A British Vice-Consul, 201 Latin Names, and the Mountains He Never Entered
In 1861, a 24-year-old Robert Swinhoe became Britain's first vice-consul to Taiwan. Five years later he left behind a paper that, for the first time, wrote Formosa's birds into Latin. But his bird map was traced from the coastline — and in the blank spaces of the Central Mountain Range, indigenous peoples had been calling these birds by their own names for thousands of years.
Ed Chi: The Taiwanese Man Who Taught AI to "Think Step-by-Step" by Bringing Cognitive Psychology into Machines
Ed Chi is a Research Vice President at Google DeepMind and a co-author of the Chain of Thought paper. This man, raised in Tamsui, turned Piaget's schema theory into a method for machine reasoning—a breakthrough that cost only about \$5,000 because it was never a problem of computing power.
Huang Yu-chiao: Democracy Elder
At the critical moment of the 1977 Zhongli Incident, she stood at the police station door urging the crowd not to act rashly — this 58-year-old pharmacist who had studied in Japan, later a four-term Provincial Assemblywoman and DPP founding member, has long been overlooked in historical narratives.
Kao Chun-ming
A pastor who risked his life and church for a stranger he barely knew — the faith choice behind the Kaohsiung Incident
Lee Ho-jung
Returning to Fubon with high attendance and high recognition, she embodies Korean cheerleaders in Taiwan shifting from 'guest spot' to 'fixed roster.'
Rainie Yang: From Weather-Girl Avatar to Self-Produced Ambiguous 2025
On September 9, 2025, on the exact 20th anniversary of the original release of "Ambiguous," Rainie Yang released a self-produced remake. This singer who debuted in 2000 with BMG virtual girl group 4 in Love, broke through in 2005 with "Ambiguous," hung upside down three meters above the Hong Kong Coliseum in 2012 until blood vessels burst across her face — spent twenty-five years negotiating on every stage who got to define her. Then she put her own name in the producer credit.
Fish Stick: A Name Like a Street Snack, a Sound That Hits Like Post-Hardcore
On December 31, 2019, Fish Stick released their first full-length album Antidote on the last day of the year. Three classmates from Taipei Municipal Zhongzheng Senior High School, playing together from late 2011 to 2019, shrank from five members to three, placed fourth at the 2016 Ditu Spring Wave Awards, received an invitation to perform in Shanghai — and say they're 'not preachy,' yet every song they sing is more direct than any manifesto.
Zun: From a Middle School Room to Dual Million-Subscriber Channels, an Adulting Record
Zun started streaming games in the second year of middle school, became Taiwan's youngest millionaire YouTuber at 19, and later pushed his secondary channel past the million mark. Spanning fourteen calendar years, this record documents his process of growing up while facing creative burdens, family storms, and sponsorship missteps.
From Golden Horse Awards to Hanwha Exercises: The Collective Rite of Passage and Survival Drill for Taiwanese Men
From 1945 onward, Taiwan's military service has shifted from a three-year term to four months, and then back to a one-year system in 2024. This collective memory, involving millions of people, is more than just the command phrase 'one two three four five six seven eight nine zero'; it represents the island's survival tension within a gray zone.
Taipei's Rat Problem: From the 1896 Governor-General's Plague Order to the 2026 Dax'an Hantavirus Case
In January 2026, a septuagenarian man in Dax'an District died of hantavirus, marking Taiwan's first fatality in 25 years. But the story's true turning point was the 'ban on household kitchen waste for pig feeding' implemented that same month—when pigs stopped eating kitchen waste, rats began eating Taipei.
Za School: Free Exhibition Founded with Blown Savings, Vice President Opens It 11 Years Later
On May 9-10, 2015, Su Yang-chih used 1.5 million TWD in profit from his design company to host the 'Not So Obedient Education Festival,' ultimately losing 7 million TWD. Eleven years later, Za School moved into the Taipei Flower Expo Park to co-host IDEC, and rebranded as 'EDit' to move into the Taoyuan Convention and Exhibition Center. This is a Taiwanese case study of an exhibition that started as a free rebellion and grew into Asia's largest education expo. The most interesting aspect is not that it grew large, but whether the 'not so obedient' spirit remained intact after that growth.
Hi-Life: From Guangquan Red to United Green—The Soul of Taiwan's 'Third Superstore' Rises Up
How did Hi-Life, as Taiwan's sole superstore with purely local roots, carve out its identity amidst the pressure from 7-ELEVEN and FamilyMart through pioneering 'New Year's Eve meal pre-orders' and 'digital transformation'? How will this major ownership shift in 2023 change the DNA of this 35-year-old establishment?
NET: From Export Overstock to the National Wardrobe—The Story of Taiwan's Most Mysterious Local Apparel Brand
Established in 1991, NET began with export overstock from Keelung's 'Housewife Market.' For thirty years, it has survived amidst the pressure of fast fashion. It is not only the local apparel brand with the most stores across Taiwan, but also a commercial legend embodying warmth for Taiwanese people due to its continuous 15 years of 'store donations' and the recent property rights dispute at Keelung East Coast Plaza.
School Cooperatives in Taiwan: The Vanishing Democratic Experiment Behind the Pork Bun
In 1989, NTU student body president Lo Wen-chia led a sit-in at the campus welfare shop, demanding it be restructured into a teacher-and-student-owned cooperative. A year later, the Ministry of Education made it national policy, and at peak there were over 5,000 cooperative shops across Taiwan campuses. Three decades on, the cooperatives at flagship schools like Jianguo High and Jingmei Girls High are switching off their lights — squeezed out by food-delivery platforms, food bans, and the demographic cliff. This piece asks: when the NT$10 share certificate disappears, what Taiwan loses is not just the smell of steamed pork buns, but an unfinished lesson in civic and labor education.
Thirty Years of Taiwan’s Online Communities: Recovering URLs, Losing Photos, and the History of Displacement
From the Beauty Island BBS to Threads, Taiwanese people have collectively moved every few years, leaving the previous generation’s memories behind the power switch that was turned off. The thirty-year migration history appears to be a clean line of platform evolution, but at its core, it is a history of displacement over 'whose land this is'—the places with the highest stickiness have the lowest data sovereignty.
Island Historiography of Taiwan: How a Repeatedly Governed Island Invented Its Own Subjectivity
The "Taiwanese Island Historiography" (臺灣島史觀) reclaims Taiwan from the timelines of external regimes, asking instead how people on this island lived, migrated, were governed, survived, and reconstructed their memories. It does not portray Taiwan as a uniquely special island by birth, but reminds us that identity grows out of shared living, shared suffering, and shared burdens; the protagonists of Taiwanese history should not always be merely the regimes that passed through.
Taiwan and North Korea: From Fourth Largest Export Destination to a Gray Zone Confrontation
Taiwan was once North Korea's fourth-largest export destination, with Acer computers and HCG sanitary ware visible in Pyongyang offices. This history—from robust trade to comprehensive embargoes—is interwoven with secret agricultural aid, maritime smuggling, and deep geopolitical intelligence struggles.
Chiayi City: Named by an Emperor, Yet the Provincial City Most Easily Overlooked
In the 52nd year of the Qing Qianlong reign, an imperial edict renamed “Zhuluo” as “Chiayi,” making it the only city in Taiwan personally named by an emperor. In 1908, in rice paddies 3.3 kilometers southwest of the city, the Japanese erected the world’s first Tropic of Cancer monument. In 1931, Chiayi Agriculture and Forestry’s mixed squad of three ethnic groups reached the Koshien runner-up position. On March 25, 1947, the painter Chen Cheng-po was bound and executed by firing squad in front of the train station; his body was left in the street for three days. Today Chiayi City has 260,000 people and 60 square kilometers, no high-speed rail station, and is entirely surrounded by Chiayi County. It is a specimen of Taiwan’s mid-sized cities.
Chiayi County: 490,000 People Lend Their Face to Alishan, and No One Remembers the County Seat Is in Taibao
At five in the morning, the oyster racks off Dongshi are still in the water; half of the nation's oysters come from this stretch of sea. A hundred kilometers away on Alishan, the forest railway that opened to Erwanping in 1912 runs 66.6 kilometers. In between, beside Taibao's high-speed rail station, the Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum took 15 years to open, drawing 760,000 visitors in 2018. When the Chiayi County seat moved from Chiayi City to Taibao in 1991, the whole country thought Chiayi meant Chiayi City. Thirty-five years later, this county of 490,000 people surrounds a city of 270,000 that was carved out of it, with an aging index of 174%, the highest in Taiwan.
Houtong: The Camera That Saved a Mountain Town Also Fed Taiwan's Largest Cat Dumping Ground; TNVR Patches Up What Tourism's Good Intentions Couldn't Finish
In 2009, photographer Chien Pei-ling (Cat Lady) walked into a forgotten mountain town along the Pingxi Line that had been abandoned for 19 years after the Ruisan coal mine ceased operations in 1990. Her camera turned Houtong into one of CNN's six best cat-watching destinations in the world in 2013. But the 'Cat Paradise' label bred Taiwan's largest cat dumping ground — a 2012 feline distemper outbreak, at least 10 cat abuse cases in 2013, and a 2022 abandonment case fined NT$110,000. In 2014, Cat Lady quit, leaving behind the words: 'Endlessly exploiting the cats, exploiting me, exploiting Houtong.' In January 2026, TNVR brought the cat population from 200–300 down to 30-something, and Mirror Weekly reported it under a 'village extinction' frame. But what disappeared wasn't the cat village — it was the 'single influencer IP propping up local revitalization' model.
Lunar July: From Collective Dread of 'The Gates of Hell Opening' to the Gentle Reconciliation of an Island
In the midsummer of 2026, long tables are still set up on Taiwan streets. From the firelight in Wanghai Lane to the sweat on the lonely scaffold, from the 'Tiger Gate Opening' at Xinzhu City God Temple to the might of Minxiong Fire Cremation Shrine—Lunar July is more than a matter of taboo; it is a narrative of coexistence, memory, and an island crossing the boundary between Yin and Yang.
Sky Lanterns: A Signal of Peace in 1820, 326 Kilograms of Mountain Waste in 2019 — The Same Pingxi People Carrying Two Identities
In the 1820s, the Hu family released the first sky lantern in Shifenliao as a signal of peace. Two hundred years later, on the Lantern Festival of 2019, American volunteers collected 326 kilograms of sky lantern debris along the Pingxi railway in just two hours. Earning, paying, cleaning — the chairman of the Sky Lantern Association is surnamed Hu, and the victim whose house burned down is also surnamed Hu. Eighty-eight-year-old Mama Cai, a vendor on the Old Street, and Chen Chien-chih of the Keelung River Guardian Alliance drink from the same river. In 2025, the autonomous ordinance was passed on its third reading. The people of Pingxi are now trying a fourth path of festival transformation.
Wang Lien-Cheng (Shrimp Dad): The Taiwanese Sound Installation Artist Who Made 23 Machines Simultaneously Read the Analects
Born in Taipei in 1985, with a CS degree from Dong Hwa University and an MFA in Arts and Technology from TNUA. In 2017 his work *Reading Plan* — 23 automated page-turning machines simultaneously reciting the Analects — won the Lumen Prize Sculpture Award in London, and the following year he won the top prize at the Taipei Art Award. He is a member of Taiwanese sound art collective i/O Lab, co-director of Lacking Sound Festival 2009–2010, one of six artists in FAB DAO's Hundred Peaks Project, and currently an assistant professor of New Media Arts at TNUA. From the five autonomous-operation installations in *Beyond Consciousness* at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 2022, to *Beyond the Machine* at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in 2025 — using automated platforms featuring Buddhist, Christian, and Taoist icons to interrogate AI ethics — Wang Lien-Cheng is the Taiwanese creator who has written algorithm, mechanism, and sound as a single line through contemporary sound art history.
IG: From Photographers' Filters to Taiwan's 'Fragile' Anxiety
A filter from a beach in Mexico in 2010 has become the daily ritual for 11.3 million people in Taiwan fifteen years later. IG has evolved from a visual safe haven into an algorithmic battlefield in Taiwan, and the rise of 'fragile' Threads has forced the tension between refined aesthetics and real controversy to the surface for the first time.
NVIDIA in Taiwan: The World's Most Valuable Company Does Not Make a Single Chip Itself
At Computex in May 2025, Jensen Huang walked onstage in a leather jacket as the backdrop lit up with the logos of 55 Taiwanese companies: an American company publicly named an entire island's industries as its own physical body. From the 1996 letter to Morris Chang, to a market value breaking US$5 trillion, to the Taipei City Government spending NT$4.434 billion to clear a parcel of land for it, NVIDIA has lodged its entire body in Taiwan. Taiwan therefore holds the switch the world cannot turn off. Yet its gross margin is only 5%, its water and electricity are drained, and war risk is placed on the island: being indispensable to NVIDIA does not mean Taiwan calls the shots.
Taiwan Gamers' Wildest Moments: Chasing Delivery Trucks, Mobbing Beitou, Lifting the Cup in LA
At 3 a.m. in 2012, Taiwan gamers rode scooters to chase convenience store delivery trucks hunting for Diablo 3. In 2016, a single Snorlax drove thousands of people into Beitou Park and TIME magazine called it a preview of the apocalypse. In 2020, hands that hadn't stopped grabbing masks turned to grabbing Switch consoles — and then PS5s.
Taiwan's Robotics Industry
The island that leads the world in semiconductors — why is it 'making up for lost time' in the robotics era? From the 2026 unveiling of NCAIR, looking back at the miracle and blind spots of Taiwan's precision machinery.
Taiwan's VR Decade: From Cher Wang's 'Year One' to Selling the Team to Google
In 2016, HTC launched the Vive at MWC Barcelona and Cher Wang declared it the 'Year of VR.' Nine years later, HTC sold its XR team to Google for $250 million. What happened in between is an island's collective bet on the next big thing — and its collective loss of faith.
Meiyu: From the 1981 Deluge that Submerged Northern Taiwan to the Scientific Mission that Flew Americans to the Island
On the morning of May 28, 1981, a catastrophic Meiyu front erupted over the Taoyuan-Hsinchu-Miaoli region and greater Taipei, dumping over 140 mm of rain in a single hour near Gongguan, leaving 8 dead and thousands of homes damaged. Six years later, the TAMEX initiative was launched. Defying the shadows of broken diplomatic ties, over 125 American and Taiwanese scientists chased fronts using a NOAA P-3 aircraft, three research vessels, and three Doppler radars. Forty years later, this stationary front, arriving precisely every May and June, remains both the lifeblood of drinking water for 23 million people and a potential killer capable of submerging entire cities.
Cheng Li-wen
From the student activist who went on a hunger strike for 'Taiwan independence' at the NTU gate in 1988 to the KMT chairperson who told Xi Jinping in Beijing in 2026 that 'compatriots across the strait are all Chinese.' What happened along this trajectory?
I Am a Person from [City]: The 'Local' Fan Pages with an AI Prompt Left in the Back-end
In February 2026, a local fan page claiming to be 'a person from Taipei' left behind an unedited AI prompt: 'Remove sensitive terms, enhance Taiwan local dialect.' Following this trail leads to a corporate entity in Neihu, Taipei, which uses AI to rewrite news from CTi News and CTWANT into the vernacular of locals, distributing them across fan pages disguised as residents of various cities. It doesn't fabricate news; it reposts real news. The problem lies in the untraceable origin and funding—while those best at identifying cognitive warfare in Taiwan are urging: 'Don't rush to label things.'
HTC: From Android Trailblazer to VR Transformation
Founded by Cher Wang in 1997, manufacturer of the world's first Android phone, stock price surged past NT$1,000 in 2011 surpassing Nokia. After smartphone market setbacks, pivoted to VR in 2015, redefining the virtual reality industry with VIVE.
Taiwanese Companies: MediaTek
Starting with a small team spun off from its parent company, the founder began with chipsets and provided turnkey solutions that fueled the Shenzhen knock-off phone ecosystem, once being ridiculed as a manufacturer of cheap goods. Later, this company's mobile chipset market share surpassed long-standing rivals, with revenue exceeding US$10 billion, jumping to become the world's fifth-largest design firm—proving the theory of the 'generational champion' that one must constantly evolve to avoid being replaced by challengers.
Taiwan's Textile Industry: From Sunset Sector to the Hidden Champion of Olympic Function Wear
How a traditional industry once seen as 'dying' is transforming its narrative of resilience by creating high-tech gear for global teams at the 2024 Paris Olympics, using recycled PET bottles, discarded fishing nets, and even captured factory emissions.
The Great Recall: The Largest Recall Wave in Taiwan’s History, Measuring Every Tick of Democracy
On the night of July 26, 2025, one-third of Taiwan’s electoral districts held simultaneous vote counts. All 25 recall cases failed. From the Bluebird Movement to claims of over 1.3 million signature supporters, and three waves of voting resulting in zero recalls, this largest recall wave in Taiwan’s history did not remove a single official, yet for the first time, it measured the mobilization energy, the height of the threshold, and the cost of polarization simultaneously.
Green Island Prison: Layered Memories from Political Black Jail to the Homeland of Big Brothers
Green Island, a solitary island in the Pacific, was once a purgatory for political prisoners during the White Terror era and the final resting place for underworld 'big brothers.' From the New Life Training Center to Chongde New Village, how does the history of Green Island Prison reflect the contradictions and memories of Taiwanese society?
The Sino-French War in Taiwan: Eight Months at Keelung and Tamsui
In the autumn of 1884, the French fleet shelled Keelung harbor and 2,000 marines landed, seizing the port. But they spent the next seven months unable to fight their way out of the hills surrounding Keelung. That same week, 600 French sailors landed at Tamsui — and were driven back to sea within two hours. When the war ended, France took Vietnam and relinquished Taiwan. The Qing dynasty nearly lost everything, yet as a result Taiwan went from a dependency to a province.
Beida Special District: Three Decades of Urban Planning and the University Town Living Experiment
From the 1895 Longenpu Battlefield to the 2026 MRT University Town, this is an in-depth encyclopedia about land, aesthetics, and selective identity.
How to Read the Taiwan Map: Four Hundred Years from Sweet Potato to Satellite
In 1554, a Portuguese cartographer drew a blurry island called 'I. Fremosa' across eight sheets of sheepskin. He never set foot there. Four hundred and seventy years later, what Google Maps shows you for Taiwan depends on which country you are in — this is not a technical question, it is a political one.
Archipelago Thinking: Placing Taiwan Back on the Map of the Malay World
Taiwan is not only an isolated island on the margins of China; it is also the northeastern edge of the Malay world, the homeland of Austronesian languages, and the starting point of Pacific dispersal. Rotate the map 30 degrees southward, and you will see another coordinate system that is entirely valid yet long overlooked.
Guan Sheng Di Jun: How a Defeated General Became Taiwan's God of Everything
Three Kingdoms warrior Guan Yu died a prisoner, his head taken by an enemy. Seventeen centuries later, he commands the most-visited temple in Taiwan — one that banned incense. How a Chinese general became a uniquely Taiwanese deity.
Siù-á: A Sweet Plate of Lunar New Year Treats, and the Blessing That Doesn’t Require Everything to Be Delicious
From the Shengren tang (peanut brittle) passed down since the Xianfeng era of the Qing Dynasty, to the date-less cunzao, to the sesame malt treats on the altar for the Jade Emperor’s birthday on the first day of the first lunar month, Taiwan’s Lunar New Year snacks embed homophonic blessings into peanuts, glutinous rice, and sugar frost. Today, the candy box faces individual taste preferences, calorie counts, and food safety concerns. What tradition leaves behind is not a mandatory checklist of must-eats, but a table that allows family members to continue sharing, selecting, and discussing.
Indigo Dyeing: Two Centuries Later, Cultivating the Same Strobilanthes cusia
In August 1999, Chen Ching-lin guided the Sanxia Dye Workshop in producing the first blue scarf in over seventy years. From a major Qing-era export to just ten remaining households by 1940, this craft requiring patience for living bacteria now yields distinct answers in Sanxia, Miaoli, Taiping, and Chingliao: Is the goal of revival to restore a living vat of color, or to build a sellable brand?
Ba-wan: From Flood Survival Food to the Craft of Three Fingerprints
A devastating flood in 1898 accidentally gave birth to Taiwan's beloved street snack, the ba-wan meatball. From the survival flour balls made by temple scribe Fan Wan-chu of Beidou under divine guidance, to the north-fried-south-steamed taste divide, this is not just a delicious evolution — it is a resilience memory of Taiwanese people surviving amid scarcity.
Daxi Tofu: After the River Port Declined, How Black Tofu Carries the Nostalgia of Daxi People Outward
After the decline of Dahan River transport in the late Qing and early Republic of China eras, Daxi residents took tofu to mines, cities, and workplaces. From the sugar-darkening coloring process and well-water legends to the 2025 Tofu Festival’s design transformation, the black tofu preserves not just a color, but a local memory that continues to flow after the river port left its waterways. When it becomes a city brand, can this life of leaving home still be slowly tasted bite by bite, allowing the craft to be seen?
New Ecological Art Environment: The Seven Years Before the Subsidy Structure, in a 400-Ping Old House on Yongfu Road in 1992
In June 1992, Du Zhao-xian opened the 'New Ecological Art Environment' in a 400-plus ping old building on Yongfu Road, Tainan. The National Cultural and Artistic Foundation had not yet been established, the National Taiwan University of Arts had not yet opened, and the MOCA's 'Reuse of Idle Spaces' policy was not yet online. It survived for seven years; when it closed its doors in 1999, the institutional nervous system of Taiwan's contemporary art was just beginning to grow. It ran ahead of all subsidy structures; by the time subsidies finally entered, such self-operated spaces instead began to exit.
Taiwanese Cinema: The Voice Beside the Screen and a History of Films That Died and Came Back to Life
In 1930s cinemas, narrators stood beside the screen using Taiwanese to provide improvised commentary for silent films; ninety years later, "Cape No. 7" brought five different languages back to the silver screen together. Taiwanese-language films were once the world's third-largest producer of feature films before being stifled, and during the years when New Cinema won the Golden Lion in Venice, the box office share for local films in theaters plummeted to just 0.36%. Taiwanese cinema is not a straight line from bad to good, but a history of repeatedly being declared dead only to be brought back to life.
Wang Hsin-jen (Aluan): The Generative Artist Who Codes Landscapes and Writes Philanthropy Into Smart Contracts
Born in 1982 in Taichung, MFA in New Media Arts from Taipei National University of the Arts. On August 22, 2021, his work Good Vibrations made him the first Taiwanese artist on Art Blocks — 1,024 NFTs sold out in one hour. The following year he joined FAB DAO's Project % with five others, creating Asia's first NFT revenue-sharing structure with philanthropy written directly into a smart contract. His work spans Art Blocks, Verse.works, fxhash, and Tezos; he has exhibited Chaos Culture at Art Basel Hong Kong, collaborated with C-LAB on the immersive sonic work Hao Dou, had the Polypaths series collected by the National Taiwan Museum, and in 2026 developed inkField with Claude Code — leaving human hesitation and pauses embedded in the generative system.
Taiwan's Choirs: Sixty Years from Rongxing to Asia's Top Five
In 1957, Lu Quan-sheng and Gu Wei-fu founded the Rongxing Children's Chorus, transforming rustic folk tunes into refined choral arrangements. Over six decades later, the Taipei Philharmonic brought its own flag to the Hungarian stage, the Puli Junior High School Chorus achieved a three-peat as world champion, and the O-Kai Singers accumulated 55 international awards. From campus-wide participation to world-class professionalism, this choral excellence rests on a complete ecosystem — and on a history of choirs defending dignity under political suppression.
CHTHONIC: The Band That Sings Taiwanese History into Black Metal
CHTHONIC is a Taiwanese heavy metal band formed in Taipei in 1995, centered on black metal, erhu, Tâi-gí (Taiwanese Hokkien), Taiwanese mythology, ghost narratives, and historical trauma, pushing figures like Lin Chang-tsuo, the Wenshe Incident, the 228 Incident, the Takasago Volunteer Corps, Martial Law, and Taiwan's sovereignty onto the international metal stage. It is not merely a backdrop for Lin Chang-tsuo’s political career, but a creative entity sustained by members like Freddy, Doris, Jesse, Dani, and CJ.
Indigenous Music Traditions of Taiwan
Explore the rich musical culture of Taiwan's 16 indigenous groups, from ancient chants to traditional instruments, witnessing millennia of cultural heritage
Taiwanese Hakka Music: From Mountain Songs to Lin Sheng-xiang's Award Refusal and the Politics of Language
Hakka mountain songs originated in labor life, while Hakka eight-tone ensembles accompanied weddings and funerals. In 1999, the Labor Exchange Band won the Golden Melody Awards for Best Composer and Best Producer with *We Are Going to Sing Mountain Songs*, ushering in the era of Hakka rock. The 14th Golden Melody Awards in 2003 established the Best Hakka Vocalist category; in 2004, Hsieh Yu-wei became its first recipient. In 2007, Lin Sheng-xiang won with *Planting Trees* but refused the award on stage, calling for classification by musical genre rather than language, igniting a debate over the existence of language-based categories that led to the creation of the Golden Indie Music Awards three years later. Hakka TV, founded in 2003, has continued to expand the visibility of Hakka-language music. The threat of language loss persists, but the tension between preservation and innovation continues to drive Hakka musicians forward.
Development of Taiwan's Audio Industry
Starting from OEM manufacturing for Japanese and American brands in the 1970s, this island's audio industry accumulated technology through radios, cassette players, and CD digital audio, and in recent years has shifted toward proprietary brands and higher value-added products. Hi-Fi brands have established international recognition, while automotive and professional audio manufacturers lead in technology, forming a complete industry chain dominated by SMEs with vertical division of labor and high specialization.
Formosan Sambar Deer: From the Vanishing 'Mountain Spirit' to Low-Altitude Ecological Engineer
In 2025, hikers on the Nengao Cross-Ridge Trail can easily make eye contact with sambar deer — hard to imagine that thirty years ago, spotting one was like winning the lottery. This article explores how Taiwan's largest herbivore came back from the brink of extinction, and why they started stripping tree bark — a story that pulls together research on animal self-medication, the complex balance of Taiwan's alpine ecology, and the cultural memory of Indigenous peoples.
Atlas Moth in Taiwan
With a wingspan of up to 25–30 cm, one of the world's largest moths, its wings unfold like an open book—it never eats in its adult life, living only to fly once.
Abao (Aljenljeng Tjaluvie): The Future Pop Singer Who Sent the Paiwan Language to the Golden Melody Album of the Year
The 2020 Golden Melody 31 Album of the Year went to the all-Paiwan electronic album 'kinakaian — Mother Tongue.' Abao (Aljenljeng Tjaluvie, b. 1981, Jinfeng, Taitung) debuted as one half of the R&B duo Abao & Brandy, worked as a nurse for a decade, then in 2019 collaborated with Dizparity to make indigenous-language future pop — rewriting the equation that 'indigenous music = preservation.'
Crowd Lu: The Triple Crown Champion Who Was Run Over by a Bus
In 2003, a boy from Tainan rode out for a late-night snack and had his leg crushed under a bus. Bedridden and bored, he picked up the guitar his cousin had given him. Twenty-two years later, he is the youngest Triple Crown winner in Taiwan's history — Golden Melody, Golden Bell, and Golden Horse — a road walked on a guitar and a pair of legs that once broke.
Hebe Tien: The Singer Who Shed the Idol System, One Layer at a Time
When Hebe Tien released her debut solo album To Hebe in September 2010, the poster read 'super newcomer after ten years in the industry' — by then S.H.E had already sold over ten million records. Eleven years later, she stood on the Golden Melody stage and called out to her mother: 'Mom, I didn't waste the water bill — I won a Golden Melody Award.' From a Hakka small town in Hsinchu to the Taipei Arena stage, the idol groomed by HIM International Music spent twenty-five years actively shedding endorsements, variety shows, the China market, and the 'literary queen' label — one by one.
Huang Chun-ming: Born in Luodong, 1935 — Chronicler of Small Figures from 'The Days of Watching the Sea' to 'The Sandwich Man'
Born February 13, 1935, in Luodong, Yilan. 'The Days of Watching the Sea' (1967) and 'The Sandwich Man' (1969) represent the core concern of Taiwan's nativist literature for ordinary people. The Nativist Literature Debate of 1977. Recipient of the Wu San-lien Literary Award and the National Award for Arts. His second son, Huang Kuo-chun (a writer), died by suicide on June 20, 2003. Hou Hsiao-hsien adapted his work for the screen in 1983. Still living as of 2026.
Huang Guang-xiong: The Man Who Built a College of Education on a Chiayi Field
In 1996, Huang Guang-xiong traveled south from NTNU to Chiayi, founding the Graduate Institute of Education at National Chung Cheng University — which he later expanded into the College of Education. He spent half a century translating Western curriculum theory into Taiwan, co-translated a landmark qualitative research textbook, led the research and planning for the nine-year integrated curriculum guidelines, and coordinated a three-year interdisciplinary team to design a moral education program centered on 'respect and care.' He passed away in 2021 at age 84.
Liao Hung-chi: The Ocean-Writing Fisherman Who Measured Taiwan Waters with His Life
Liao Hung-chi turned to life as a fisherman in 1992, founded the Kuroshio Ocean Education Foundation, and through the Kuroshio 101 Drift Project and the Sperm Whale Pi Project redefined how Taiwanese people view the ocean. He is a key figure in contemporary ocean literature and ecological conservation.
Lin Jia-chen: From Writing Songs for Earth Group to Meme Dances at Breakfast Shops, Turning Idols' Perfection into Personal Ease
In 2022, Lin Jia-chen gained public attention as a member of the "Earth" group in *Atom Youth* and contributed lyrics to the finale song. In 2026, he released the 〈Love Me Again〉 Demo from his room, transitioning from rock shouts to breakfast shop dances in Taipei's back alleys. The most interesting part of this journey is that he did not leave the idol framework but wrote a sense of life back onto the stage within it, making group experience the foundation for personal creation.
From Underground to the Presidential Office: Nymphia Wind and the History of Taiwan's Drag Queens' Self-Empowerment
How a Taiwanese boy who was bullied for his gender expression brought the drag art form — once considered a subculture — to the international stage, and used the banana as a symbol to show the world Taiwan's diversity and confidence.
Tzuyu
A Tainan girl who never talked politics. An 8-second flag on Korean TV. An election-eve apology video. And ten years later, she stood at the Dome and read from a handwritten letter: 'I didn't leave — not because I was obedient, but because I truly wanted and longed to stay.'
Complex Life Festival: Two Medical Students' 'Unsuccessful People's Forum' and a Generation's Five-Year Refusal to Say They Are Good Enough
In May 2016, Hsu Hao-ning posted a string of 'eighth-generation' (born 1981-1990) 'people who make life exhausting' on Facebook, and together with classmate Huang Tou-ni (Huang Yen-lin), organized the first 'Unsuccessful People's Forum'. A TCM practitioner and a Western medicine doctor who later went to Harvard rewrote the previous generation's commercially co-opted 'simplicity' into 'complexity', allowing only talk of growth, not success. Five years later, Hsu Hao-ning's soul remained in Taichung to run a bookstore and ran for city councilor, losing the election; his assistant looked back and called it 'Hao-ning's masterpiece, sealed here': Is 'unsuccessful' a humble term, or a self-expectation of a generation that is always just a little bit short?
The Remote Area Schools Education Development Act: NT$17.5 Billion Spent, and Demographic Gravity Still Wins
On November 21, 2016, the Legislative Yuan passed the Remote Area Schools Education Development Act — 21 articles that amounted to the state's formal admission of its own institutional failures. Eight years later, the government has poured NT$17.5 billion into rural school infrastructure, yet 2024–25 saw 18 primary schools close — the most in Taiwan's educational history. The law rescued the legal framework, but couldn't stop demographic gravity.
Sunflower Movement—Twelve Years After Those Thirty Seconds
A legislator lay on the floor and read a thirty‑second statement with a lapel microphone, triggering a twenty‑four‑day occupation of the Legislative Yuan, a generation’s political awakening, and the turning point of Taiwan’s economy away from China. Twelve years later, the law the students demanded has not been passed, but they won a war they didn’t even know they were fighting.
Taipei Smoking Room: The Glass Box That Breathes in a Smoke-Free City
2026 May 7, a transparent box was erected next to Exit 6 of Ximen MRT Station, Taiwan's first outdoor negative-pressure smoking booth; when the door opens, wind blows in but does not escape. Taipei aims to be a smoke-free city, yet it first built a glass house for smoking on the street. From the 1984 case where a strict path removed a lung lobe, to indoor secondhand smoke dropping to 3.2% while nearly half remains outdoors, this box holds a legal cigarette and a city's unfinished public-space contract.
The Gatekeepers Behind the Screen: The Evolution of Taiwan Content Rating — From Film Censorship to Five-Tier Classification
Taiwan's rating system is a historical microcosm of the transition from martial-law-era 'content censorship' to the democratic era's 'child and youth protection.' From abolishing the Film Inspection Law in 1983 to Jurassic Park catalyzing the protected rating in 1993, to the comprehensive adoption of a five-tier system in 2026, this is the record of a long evolution concerning viewing rights and social responsibility.
Thinking Taiwan Forum: 14 Years from a Post-Election Loss Touchstone to a Cross-Party Democratic Dialogue Container
On May 2, 2026, former People First Party Chairman James Soong, Taiwan Statebuilding Party Chair Wang Yu-ther, Social Democratic Party legislator Miao Poya, and veterinarian/founder of Fresh Milk Farm Gong Jianjia all appeared on the contributor list for "30 Years, 30 People, 30 Perspectives." This online forum, founded by Tsai Ing-wen after her 2012 presidential election defeat, has accumulated nearly 5,800 articles over 14 years, survived the firewall moment when Jian Chih-chung took over as chairman, and endured nine years of near-stasis during the Tsai administration. In 2026, it is still answering the question that has hung over it since day one: Can a platform called the "Tsai Ing-wen Education Foundation" sustain cross-party democratic dialogue?
Taiwan's Shipbuilding Industry: Turning Fish Ponds, Sugarcane Fields, and Shallows into Maritime Industry
The Kaohsiung CSBC shipyard, completed ahead of schedule in 1975, rose from fish ponds, sugarcane fields, and harbor shallows to create a 1-million-ton dry dock. The 2001 restructuring came at the cost of layoffs and pay cuts, while post-2016 developments linked shipbuilding, marine engineering, and offshore wind energy. What Taiwan's shipbuilding industry truly left behind is not just ships, but a maritime industrial capacity capable of repeatedly shifting between national planning, industrial technology, and market crises.
Taiwan's Top 50 Companies: The Sacred Mountain That Holds Up One Table, and Also Holds Up a Single-Point-of-Failure State
On May 19, 2026, TSMC alone accounted for 31.51% of the Taiwan Capitalization Weighted Stock Index and roughly 40% of the total market capitalization of Taiwan stocks; the top 50 companies together sustain an economy the size of one GDP, but one company among them has hijacked that GDP's fate. Electronics account for 36%, finance 25%, and traditional industries 10%; the so-called tripartite balance of electronics, finance, and traditional industries is in fact half a body held up by one electronics leg. From the night Jensen Huang and Morris Chang took a photo together at Ningxia Night Market, to the 32 lives lost on Kaixuan 3rd Road before dawn, this ranking is both Taiwan's irreplaceable spine and its most fragile single point of failure.
Tour Buses: Why Has This Iron Box Carrying Taiwan's People Up Mountains and Across Seas for Six Decades Always Been Involved in Accidents?
From Yu Liu Ju-lan, who became a conductor at 14 during the Japanese colonial era, to the 1959 Golden Horse bus on the Central Cross-Island Highway, the wild buses of the 1980s, the 2017 Van Gogh's Sunflowers crash in Nangang that killed 33, and the 2025 Guoyi Highway fire and Shilinxi valley drop, tour buses have carried Taiwan's post-war tourism dreams, pilgrimage groups, and school trips. But the agency system, low tour fee competition, and long working hours have made this iron box one of the island's most dangerous vehicles. Can the new driver identity verification system implemented on New Year's Day 2026 end this cycle?
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.
Wang-a-piau: Taiwan's Battle Cards of Childhood — From Election Flyers to Schoolyard Showdowns
Starting in the 1950s, wang-a-piau were both a game in children's hands and a yardstick of peer status — the more you collected, the more weight you carried in the schoolyard after class. These cards, rooted in Chinese leaf-games and inspired by Japanese children's toys, shifted from metal to plastic and their imagery from puppet-theater characters to comic heroes. They carry the collective memory of generations of Taiwanese people. Most remarkably: in Taiwan, even election flyers could be folded by children into wang-a-piau, becoming unconventional weapons on the childhood battlefield.
Village Chief System: 7,748 Elected Heads, Taiwan’s Most Grassroots Political Unit
A 5:30 a.m. village office, a monthly administrative subsidy of NT$45,000, over 60 % non‑partisan — the village chief is the political position that looks least like “politics” in Taiwan’s elections, and the most complete evidence of Taiwan’s democratization. From the Japanese‑era Baojia system to direct elections in 1950, this nationwide total of 7,748 positions—more than the number of 7‑Eleven stores—has been operating as a local‑relationship agency for eight decades.
Four Yardsticks Beyond Blue and Green: From a Plot of Land to a National Health Insurance Card—Taiwanese Policies That Outlived Their Partisan Origins
A reader, tired of the constant bickering between the Blue and Green camps at the dinner table, wanted to remember the things that truly benefited Taiwan. Thus, we examined eleven policies spanning seventy years—from the authoritarian land reform involving forced agricultural land seizure, martial law lifting, and National Health Insurance, to the ongoing debates over same-sex marriage and the Forward-looking Infrastructure Development Program. Instead of using partisan yardsticks, we deliberately applied four: livelihood, democracy, civil rights, and sovereignty. The conclusion is somewhat counterintuitive: policies that outlive their original political affiliations were often the most fiercely contested on the day they were born.
National Human Rights Museum: The Names Not Written on the Tearful Monument
On International Human Rights Day in 1999, Lee Teng-hui personally unveiled the Tearful Monument on Green Island. Bo Yang wrote 28 characters that captured all mothers' long nights of weeping, yet did not write a single perpetrator's name. Six years of preparation, an unveiling in 2018, and a frozen budget in 2025. A museum built by the state itself to commemorate what the state itself had done. In the 39 years since martial law was lifted, not one perpetrator has faced judicial trial.
Agricultural Cooperatives Do More Than Sell Fertilizer: How Taiwan's Rural Public Organizations Evolved from Colonial Institutions to Credit Department Reforms
Tracing the evolution of agricultural cooperatives from the 1900 Sanxia Cooperative, the 1943 Agricultural Associations, the post-war merger and division of cooperatives, to the credit departments and the 2003 Agricultural Finance Act, this article explores how cooperatives serve as a public interface for agricultural technology, local finance, and rural power. It also examines how cooperative archives, membership qualifications, local elites, and credit department reforms have collectively shaped the institutional memory of Taiwan's rural areas.
Taiwan's Fisheries Modernization: How a Fishing Net Connects Qianzhen, the Three Oceans, and the Island's Table
Tracing Taiwan's fisheries from coastal livelihoods to a transoceanic industry: from colonial fisheries administration and postwar Qianzhen Port's cold chain, to the 1979 distant-water development plan, the 1982 EEZ regime, and 2005 international sanctions. The article examines fisheries schools, aquaculture exports, fishing village households, port diversification, and flag-state responsibility, revealing the resource, labor, local governance, and international regulatory realities behind production growth.
Beyond Setting Sail: How Taiwan’s Fisheries Were Rebuilt by Research Vessels, Fish Markets, and a Community of Technical Experts
Tracing how Taiwan’s fisheries transformed across ports, cold chains, education, capital, and local life—from Japanese-era hydrographic research and the Rinkai Maru, to the Batousi and Kaohsiung fish markets, postwar technical personnel, US aid for distant-water fishing, and the Dongshi fishing village.
Sound Has No Address: How Taiwan’s Radio Evolved from a State Megaphone to a Local Public Space
Tracing the receiver’s journey from the 1925 experimental broadcasts and colonial broadcasting bureaus to the post-war "Voice of Taiwan," martial-law private stations, and underground radio, this article follows how the radio transmitted not only government decrees and songs, but also the local experiences that were difficult to silence.
Dadaocheng: 800 Meters, Three Centuries, from Formosa Tea to the First Shot of February 28
Dihua Street is quiet at 5:30 in the morning. The Western-style building of Chen Tian-lai's Jinji Tea Company, opened on Guide Street in 1891, still stands in its original place, and the incense burner at Xia-Hai City God Temple has burned for 167 years. In 1851, several households opened shops here; in 1853, Tong'an people fled here for refuge; in 1869, the first 120,000 catties of Formosa Tea were shipped from Tamsui to New York; in 1885, Liu Mingchuan established Taiwan's first Western-style school here; in 1921, Chiang Wei-shui opened Da'an Hospital in Taipingcho, making it the political starting point of the Taiwan Cultural Association; and at dusk on February 27, 1947, a packet of contraband cigarettes outside Tianma Tea House ignited the February 28 Incident. A place that traded in tea, hosted a Western-style school, and became the site of postwar Taiwan's deepest wound: 800 meters hold three centuries.
Viewing Taiwan's 22 Counties and Cities Through Data: 151× Gap Between Most and Least Crowded, Elderly-to-Children Ratio from 1:1 to Nearly 3:1
Same island, but Taipei City packs 8,975 people per km² while Taitung County has only 59 — a 151-fold difference. Using 2025 year-end household registration data from the Ministry of the Interior, this article draws a verifiable portrait of all 22 jurisdictions: 70% of people squeezed into 30% of land, the highest elderly share is in the densest Taipei City, and the highest elderly-to-children ratio in Chiayi County approaches 3:1. All 22 jurisdictions without exception now see more deaths than births.
Pingtung County: The Nation's Turning Points Happened Here, and Taipei Has Never Really Remembered
On May 22, 1874, Japanese lieutenant colonel Sakuma Samata led 150 men into the Shimen gorge, where Paiwan chief Aruqu and his son were killed in battle. This fight made the Qing court reverse its Taiwan policy: Shen Baozhen came to establish Hengchun County, and Eluanbi Lighthouse was built in 1883. Pingtung County's 780,000 people are spread across 33 townships, towns, and cities, with five Indigenous peoples living alongside six Hakka Liudui townships. At 4:30 a.m. in 2009, the Linbian floodgate could no longer hold. The history that changed Taiwan began from this peninsula twice, but all the capital remembers is Spring Scream in Kenting.
Shilin: Ketagalan Land, a Temple from the Zhangzhou-Quanzhou Feuds, and Now Taipei's Most Crowded Night Market Every Night
At 7:30 p.m., Korean tourists at the entrance to Shilin Night Market hold up giant fried chicken cutlets for selfies, while beside them Cixian Temple at No. 84 Danan Road has stood from 1796, the first year of the Jiaqing reign, to 2026, when it turns 230. In 1859, the ninth year of the Xianfeng reign, Zhangzhou people were burned out of this street by Quanzhou people. In 1860, the gengshen year, Pan Yongqing laid out four squared-off streets in Xiashulin: Dadong Road, Danan Road, Daxi Road, and Dabei Road, placing the temple at the exact center. In 1909, the Japanese built a market opposite the temple; in 1955, Yangming Theater was completed on Wenlin Road; in 1992, Hot-Star Large Fried Chicken was invented in Taichung and entered Shilin in 1999. The postwar-added sheds were demolished in 2002; the new market opened in 2011; the underground food court has two shifts of people from morning to night. The temple is still in its original place, but at its feet two cities take turns every day.
Zhongshan North Road Alleyways: The Path to the Shrine Paved by the Japanese, Ultimately Reclaimed by Japanese Businesses
On April 17, 1923, Crown Prince Hirohito (裕仁) traveled from Taipei Station on a carriage along a 15-meter-wide road to the Taiwanese Shrine in Yuan Shan. It was expanded into a 40-meter avenue in 1941 and renamed "Zhongshan North Road" in 1945 to commemorate Sun Yat-sen. After American military occupation, Japanese businesses took over these alleyways.
Taiwan Lacquerware: Polishing the Everyday, Layer by Layer
Lacquerware was once a staple in Taiwanese households as tea trays, cake stands, and gift items, and served as an export industry to Japan in the 1970s. After plastics replaced it, what truly disappeared was not just the objects, but an entire body of life knowledge connecting lacquer trees, lacquer refining, application, and repair. From Penglai lacquer to Puli natural lacquer, this craft, once close to daily life, is now re-engaging with material autonomy and the transmission of skills.
Gua Bao: From Fuzhou’s Tiger Bites Pig to BAO London’s Michelin Symbol
In the 1927 diary of Hsinchu gentleman Huang Wang-cheng, “tiger bites pig” was a snack served at the weiya year-end banquet to reward workers. A century later, the line on Lexington Street in London’s Soho waits for the same folded wheat bun, and the Michelin Guide has written it into its Bib Gourmand selections. This plump white folded snack carries within it Taiwan’s four centuries of Fuzhou migration history, the labor-management ritual of Tudigong weiya, and the story of how an artist from Taipei brought it onto the international table.
Invisible Nation: An American Director Spent Seven Years Pressing the Shutter, Filming a Taiwan the World Decided Not to See
In Taiwan theaters in June 2025, a documentary made by an American grossed more than NT$37 million and became the third-highest-grossing documentary in Taiwan's film history. Vanessa Hope spent seven years and conducted five close-range interviews with Tsai Ing-wen, pushing before the camera a Taiwan removed from the United Nations, whose diplomatic allies fell from 22 to 12, and which can compete in the Olympics only as "Chinese Taipei." But the sharpest question about this film, made to let Taiwan "be seen," is whom it itself leaves outside the frame: seeing has never been a status, but an act.
New Taipei City Museum of Fine Arts: Reeds by the Dahan River and an "Unfinished" Urban Aesthetic
On April 25, 2025, the New Taipei City Museum of Fine Arts officially opened in Yingge. Designed by Kris Yao with a budget of nearly NT$3 billion, the building uses the imagery of a "museum within a reed thicket," attempting to plant seeds of art on the urban fringe. However, from construction delays and budget increases to post-opening criticisms of being a "mosquito museum," it serves not only as a temple of art but also as a microcosm of Taiwan's public construction and cultural vision.
Q Series: How a Laptop Maker Planted the Seeds of Taiwan's TV Drama Revival
In 2016, tech industry mogul Tung Tzu-hsien put up the funding for Wang Shaudi to lead Taiwan's top directors in doing something that defied commercial logic: skip the blockbusters, and mentor newcomers instead.
Open Culture Foundation: Doing the Most Boring Thing for Taiwan's Most Uncontrollable People
In 2020, the mask availability map went live in three days. All of Taiwan remembers the miracle. Nobody remembers who handled the project's receipts, contracts, and labor insurance filings. That back office was the Open Culture Foundation (OCF)—a decentralized movement built on the motto 'no one is omnipotent,' which, to keep hackers hacking, had to grow its own legal entity capable of issuing invoices and answering to a board of directors. A decade later, this back office that just wanted to help people file expenses became a name the international community thinks of when discussing digital rights in Taiwan.
Monaneng: Two Kinds of Blindness, One Poetry Collection
Monaneng, the first Indigenous poet to publish a modern poetry collection in Chinese, became blind only in 1979; in 1989, Morning Star published The Beautiful Rice Stalks. The line in 'Come, Have a Drink' — 'The slogan of self-determination for eighteen million people / cannot hear our sighs' — wrote the question of 'who counts as Taiwanese' into thirty poems. Read thirty-seven years later, that question still has no answer.
Du Pan Fang-ge: Three Languages, a Performance of Peace
A cross-linguistic generation Hakka female poet and relative of the 228 victims Chang Shih-lang. Her poem "Peace Performance" transforms a folk ritual into a record of survival under White Terror—for those whose language was seized by the regime, the harshest line in their mother tongue is written for their own people.
The Delivery-Specific Law: The Legal Floor Is Laid, But Above It Still Rules the Algorithm
At 12:00 AM on July 21, 2026, Taiwan's first delivery-specific law took effect: a minimum of NT$45 per order. On that day, one rider received two orders—one 4.4 km and another 8.6 km—both paying only NT$90. From the deaths of two riders during the National Day holiday in 2019 to these 28 articles took six years. The law deliberately avoids answering whether they are employees and does not touch the dispatch algorithm that truly determines income; even a week after implementation, there was no answer on how many local inspectors were deployed or if fines would be issued.
Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury: Taiwan's Energy Poverty and Residential Heat Safety in Public Governance
Energy poverty in Taiwan means more than inability to pay electricity bills; it includes living in poorly insulated old homes, using energy-intensive appliances, fear of turning on air conditioning, and being forced to trade health for affordable bills in extreme heat. This article reconstructs Taiwan's energy poverty problem at the intersection of energy expenditure, housing conditions, and heat injury, and proposes policy directions centered on residential heat safety, on-site diagnosis, community retrofits, and data governance, explaining how energy transition can safeguard the dignity and health safety of vulnerable households.
International Migrant Workers: The "Great Living Room" of 870,000 People and the Cross-Ocean Struggle for Survival
As of March 2026, migrant workers in Taiwan have reached 873,000; including those who have gone missing, the total approaches one million, accounting for over 5% of Taiwan's resident population. This article provides an in-depth analysis of the labor characteristics of Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand, explores the demands of the Migrant Workers' Grand March for "abolishing the work-year limit," and balances the public anxiety, opposition party oversight, and the government's "conditional" stance behind the 2026 Indian migrant worker introduction plan.
National Holidays: A History of Taiwan Written in Days Off Work
The Republic of China's first statutory national holiday was not Double Ten, not New Year's Day, but 228 in 1997. From the Japanese colonial government's June 17 “commemoration of shameful rule” to the 2025 Legislative Yuan uproar over “retrocession vs. war's end,” every red-letter day on the calendar is a regime's answer to what Taiwan should commemorate and to whom it belongs. But holidays have never been only a question of nationhood; they are also about whether workers should be allowed to rest.
Public Television: From the NT$900 Million Golden Headband to Expulsion from the Legislative Chamber, Twenty-Eight Years of Independence Still Unfinished
When PTS went on air in 1998, the Public Television Act required government-donated funding to decrease year by year and eventually froze it at NT$900 million annually. That provision bound PTS for 23 years. In the meantime, it nurtured five flagship Taiwanese dramas that shook society: The World Between Us, Gold Leaf, The Teenage Psychic, Wake Up, and A Touch of Green. In May 2023, legal amendments lifted the golden headband, and the budget more than doubled to NT$2.3 billion. But 19 months later, 1% of the budget was cut and 25% frozen; another year later, in May 2026, Chairperson Hu Yuan-hui was asked to leave the Legislative Yuan chamber. What PTS has proved over 28 years is this: removing the golden headband does not mean independence has been built.
Grid Resilience: Who Restores the City First After a Power Outage?
The August 15, 2017, and March 3, 2022, major power outages in Taiwan revealed that grid vulnerability is not just about generation capacity, but also centralized nodes, operating procedures, transmission/distribution equipment, and local recovery capabilities. When electricity becomes the common foundation for healthcare, transportation, communication, and industry, resilience is not merely a Taipower engineering problem; it is how an entire city restarts after losing power.
Taiwan's Spectrum of Sovereignty: Four Positions Plus One Status Quo, A Map of Identity Quietly Redrawn Over Thirty Years
In the seven days following the Trump-Xi meeting in May 2026, Lai Ching-te publicly reaffirmed Taiwan's sovereignty twice, using three different names: "Republic of China," "Republic of China (Taiwan)," and "Taiwan." A single president compressing these three names into one statement—"all are sovereign and independent"—is a microcosm of contemporary unification debates. The percentage supporting the "status quo" rose from 9.8% in 1994 to 33.2% in 2023; the binary framework describing Taiwan is no longer sufficient.
Shopee: The Expansion Trajectory of the Orange Empire and the Dynamics of Digital Society
Entering Taiwan in 2015, Shopee used free shipping subsidies to conquer PChome's territory and expanded its "Shopee Xpress" to over 2,500 stores to control the last mile of logistics. Now, South Korea's Coupang is catching up. While the orange brand is now on every street corner, concerns regarding Chinese capital, persistent fraud vulnerabilities, and massive packaging waste remain part of Taiwan's digital landscape.
Taiwan's Bus System: After Hsinchu Bus Drives Away, Who Will Pick Up the People Without Steering Wheels?
On the morning of September 15, 2024, at Tongluo Railway Station, more than 30 people, from kindergarten children to a 90-year-old elder, boarded the last Hsinchu Bus 5658 service. From Taipei's first joint-operation route in 1977, to rural areas left with only two services a day, drivers averaging 51 years old, and TPASS monthly passes driving Hualien ridership up by nearly 70 percent, buses have always carried people with no other choice: students commuting to school, older adults who do not drive, families without cars. And this system is being pulled out from under them, route by route.
Taiwan Elections and Party Politics
From the flames of the Zhongcha incident to 8.17 million votes, how Taiwan transformed voting from a martial-law tool into a national faith over half a century
Jinguashi: Many layers of life stacked on a mountain, from gold dust and POWs to arsenic-contaminated soil
On November 14, 1942, 523 Allied prisoners entered the copper mines of Jinguashi, beginning a period that lasted three years for some and resulted in no survivors. This mountain is often remembered through the orange glow of the Thirteen Layers ruins, the 220-kilogram gold bar one can touch, or the sea views from Secret Realm when passing by Jiufen. However, the same mountain also buries the gold earned by local miners with their lungs, the bones of over five hundred foreign prisoners, and a patch of arsenic soil that has not yet been fully remediated. Only by seeing all these things together can one see the whole of Jinguashi.
Lienchiang County: The County Farthest from Taiwan, Closest to the Cold War
From the summit of Nangan, the city of Fuzhou lies 16 kilometers away. Taipei is 200 kilometers away, while the seat of Lienchiang County sits on the Chinese military side. In 1617, Shen Yousong captured 69 Japanese pirates at the foot of Dongju Mountain. In 1956, the Nationalist government designated these five islands as a special military zone. It was five years after Taiwan in 1992 that Jinmen and Matsu relaxed travel restrictions. Today, 13,646 people live here, with a 94% attrition rate of the Matsu dialect. The only gambling referendum passed nationwide in 2012 has since gone silent. Blue tear flowers bring in 200,000 tourists annually, yet locals remember the strict lighting controls. A county of 28.8 square kilometers carries Taiwan's Cold War history within itself.
New Taipei City: The Ring-Shaped Metropolis Surrounding Taipei, Supporting the Capital's Commuting, Industry, and Memories with 4.01 Million People
Since the Spaniards laid the first brick at Tamsui's Fort San Salvador in 1628, 398 years have passed—247 years before Shen Baozhen established the Taipei Prefecture in 1875. Today, New Taipei City's 29 districts surround Taipei City's 12 districts, with 4.01 million people residing in this largest special municipality in Taiwan, and 390,000 people commuting across county lines to work in Taipei. However, this "ring-shaped metropolis" is not merely a dormitory city for Taipei—it holds the 1853 Banqiao Lin Family, the 1869 export of oolong tea from Tamsui to New York, the 1890s Jiufen and Jinguashi gold mines (Asia's first), the 1929 Pingxi Railway for coal transport, the 1947 carving of the Sanxia Ancestral Temple by Li Meishu, and the Wulai Atayal Dalannan Tribe. New Taipei City is a microcosm of Taiwan's 400-year history, situated just outside Taipei City.
Penghu County: Twice It Said No to Casinos, and Chrysanthemum Island Did Not Choose Poverty
On September 26, 2009, the public vote was cast: 17,359 against, 3,962 for the casino. Seven years later, in 2016, another vote was held, with 81.07% opposing. This offshore island, with an annual rainfall of only 1,000 mm and a registered population of 108,000 but only 80,000 residents, held the nation's first local gambling referendum, and then held it again. In the same waters, in 1604, Shen Yourong forced the Dutch to retreat; in 1622, the Dutch moved from Fengchwei to Tainan; in 1885, French Admiral Courbet died of illness in Magong Harbor. The 17.4-million-year-old basalt columns remain; 89 islands are made of black volcanic rock, and one is of older andesite. In the winter's vegetable stone walls, crops grow in the leeward areas.
Golden Bell Awards: After Seventeen Years of Rotation Among Three Stations, Taiwan Draws a Line for 'Our Television' Every Year
On October 22, 2022, Chen Ya-lan took the stage at the National Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in a suit, winning the Best Actor in a Drama Program award with Taiwanese opera, the first woman in fifty-seven years. This bell cast in 1965 for broadcasting rotated among only three names—TTV, CTV, and HTV—for seventeen years; later, PTS, Hakka drama, and Vietnamese actors one by one entered the list. What the Golden Bell Awards present each year is acting talent, but what it truly draws is a line: who counts as Taiwan's television, and who remains outside.
Taiwan's Religious Beliefs: An Empire of Faith Grown from Fear
The island with the highest temple density in the world and ranked second in Asia for religious freedom, its two largest faiths—Wangye and Mazu—have historical origins tied to plague and death. From 17th-century military migrants bringing deity statues across the Black Ditch, to the 94-point score in the 2025 Freedom Report; from the 1953 ban on Yiguandao to its legalization as the first after martial law lifted in 1987, to the four major Buddhist mountains and the Presbyterian Church each taking their own path in church-state relations—Taiwan's faith is not in scriptures, but in the incense smoke at street corners.
The Echo of Golden Times: From the Mengchen Pot to Plastic Cups, Taiwan's Tea Has Changed Its Vessels Over a Century
In the Qing Dynasty, wealthy merchants in Taiwan insisted on 'the pot must be Mengchen.' Today, office workers reflexively order 'less sugar, less ice' at bubble tea shops. Over the past century, Taiwan's tea has switched from gongfu tea small pots to competition tea tin cans, and now to plastic cups for hand-shaken drinks. In 1869, Zealong changed the Fujian tea surname to 'Formosa' and sent it to New York; in 1976, a jin of Lugu champion tea was priced at NT$5,000; in 2025, there are 16,000 hand-shaken drink shops across Taiwan. What has changed is the vessel; what has not is this island's knack for brewing foreign opportunities into its own flavor.
Wretch: Scavenged Computers, Sold Youth, and a Disappearance No One Mourned
In a 1999 NCTU dormitory, six CS students cobbled together a BBS called "Wretch" using the department's discarded equipment. It grew into Taiwan's largest blog platform and the cradle of the island's first generation of creators, even surpassing Yahoo to become the number one website in 2008. Then Yahoo bought it, and on the night of December 26, 2013, deleted it along with a generation's photo albums. Today most people can only retrieve empty, unopenable albums. It is remembered as youth, but that youth was stored from the start on someone else's servers — servers they could shut down anytime.
Taiwanese Banquet: The Feast That Goes On in Torrential Rain, and a Vanishing Tradition Spanning the Realms of Humans, Gods, and Ghosts
A 120-table banquet, where evening torrential rain flooded up to the calves and over a dozen trout swam about; head chef Wang Yi-yong rolled up his sleeves, waded in to catch the fish, and in the end only one was missing. For three hundred years, this is how banquets have been: if the host doesn't call it off, the feast goes on. Today this craft is at a crossroads: the dishes have entered five-star hotels and Michelin, and gained fame overseas, yet the entire body of ritual knowledge that mobilizes the whole village and spans the realms of humans, gods, and ghosts is quietly being lost for lack of successors.
Taiwanese Breakfast Culture: Twenty Thousand Shops Sell the Same Breakfast, Yet No One Owns It
In 1955, three soy milk shops lined up at Yonghe Zhongzheng Bridge; the one with the 'Yonghe Soy Milk' sign never left a trace. Seventy years later, concentrated soy milk and factory-made pastry skins tore down the barriers to opening a shop. The Judicial Yuan reclassified 'MexiMi' as a weak trademark, and an entire street sprouted Mii-Miii, Hongyi, and Morning Beautiful Rice Cake. This meal could not hold its recipe, could not hold its name, and could not hold the body standing in front of the griddle—so it became the shared dawn of twenty thousand shops.
Taiwan Fruit Kingdom: This Island Cultivates Every Piece of Fruit as Life and Memory
From the early mornings on Yujing slopes, old pomelos in Matou, morning auctions in Binjiang, to grandmothers peeling fruit skins, and from lychee weevils to foreign workers in orchards: this subtropical island turns fruit into a way to converse with the land, generations, and the world.
Penghu International Art Island: An art museum without a gallery that borrows the entire island as an exhibition space
Works are displayed in chicken farms, grocery stores, restaurants that require reservations to enter, and even on boats traveling to Southern Penghu. The Penghu International Art Island, co-organized by the County Government and the Chinese Culture Association, spans four townships and five islands over ten years and five editions. Instead of building its own gallery, it borrows battle tunnels, military cinemas, shops, and ferry services as exhibition spaces, with opening hours dictated by the businesses. This is the most concrete example of what the county magistrate calls an 'island museum,' and people have already begun to speak within those borrowed spaces.
Sunset Rollercoaster: 14 Years From a Photo Booth Background to Coachella, Singing Taipei Sun in English
In 2010, a 19-year-old student randomly chose the "Sunset Rollercoaster" preset from Mac Photo Booth as their MySpace profile picture. Fourteen years later, this band became the first Taiwanese group invited to Coachella in over twenty years. With all-English, subtropical City Pop that doesn't rely on the industrial system, they created the most globally heard version of Taiwan using a casual photo silhouette of a roller coaster.
Taiwanese Instrument Manufacturing: Taiwanese Hands in the Global Soundscape
In the late 1940s, Zhang Lianchang, a picture framer from Houli, salvaged a burnt Japanese saxophone near a fire and welded Taiwan's first brass instrument; later, millions of guitars from Jupiter on the Nanzi line and the ticking music boxes from Otaru all passed through Taiwanese hands. This memory of a sound-making supply chain is more worthy of preservation than that of fighting heroes.
Semiconductor Water Use and Taiwan’s Water Resources: The Reservoir Beside the Fab
Chip manufacturing needs ultrapure water, but Taiwan’s water does not exist only inside factory pipes. It also exists among reservoirs, rainfall, drought, agricultural irrigation, reclaimed water, and local allocation. This article does not reduce semiconductor water use to a one-line conflict of "TSMC stealing water." It explains how advanced processes bind Taiwan’s island hydrology, public governance, reclaimed-water infrastructure, and global supply chains together, pulling high tech back to reservoirs, farms, and local trust.
Threads in Taiwan: From 'I Eat a Little' to an Egyptian Student ID, How a Feed Became a Digital Night Market
At the end of 2025, a National Taiwan University student ID found near the Sphinx in Egypt was turned into a cross-border search on Threads; in the same feed, food photos from Japanese and Korean travelers attracted the 'Hello, I eat a little' cat. Taiwan's 'crispy' nature squeezes spam, mutual aid, memes, and public discussion together, allowing strangers to briefly sit at the same table and relay stories further.
Taiwan's Climate Crisis and Net-Zero Transition: The Choice of Physical Limits Began When the NMMC Referendum Failed
The August 23, 2025, referendum on extending the life of NMMC saw 4.34 million 'yes' votes, with 74% in favor, but a voter turnout of 29.53% did not meet the threshold. With the referendum failing, Lai Ching-te announced three principles the next day, and seven months later, Taipower submitted the life extension application to the Nuclear Safety Commission on March 27, 2026. With 98% of energy relying on imports, a NT$9 trillion net-zero goal, geothermal capacity only reaching 7.4 MW against a 200 MW target, offshore wind being ranked seventh globally in installed capacity, Onkalo's ultimate disposal site, and TerraPower's fourth-generation nuclear power—this island's energy issue has never been a political one; it is a matter of physical limits.
Audrey Tang: Every Famous Decision She Made Was a Refusal of the 'Genius' Label
Knocked unconscious by a classmate at age 8, declined guaranteed admission to Jianguo High School at 14, came out as transgender at 24 but refused to be a spokesperson, and at 35, her first condition for joining the cabinet was 'no office.' On December 2, 2025, in Stockholm accepting the Right Livelihood Award, what she said on stage wasn't 'I,' but 'we.'
Tseng Po-en: Can Calculate Punchlines, Can't Predict Society
Born in 1990, Tseng Po-en went from wearing headphones on his desk at Chien Kuo High School, to a double major in Foreign Languages and Psychology at National Taiwan University, then an MSc in Brain and Mind Sciences at University College London, and a Master's in Integrative Biology at Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris 6). On the eve of PhD applications, he pivoted to stand-up comedy. Together with Hsieh Cheng-hao, he co-founded Satire Entertainment, pushing Taiwan stand-up from open mics at Comedy Club to the 13,000-seat Taipei Arena. Yet with that same neuroscientist's precision, he miscalculated the societal emotional weight of the Cheng Nan-jung joke, the delivery driver video, and the entertainment tax lawsuit.
Chen Chih-chung: Elected to Kaohsiung City Council Three Times, Two Terms Ended in Legal Proceedings
On August 18, 2008, orientation for the University of Virginia School of Law began, but Chen Chih-chung, who was preparing to pursue his J.D., never showed up and lost his admission eligibility on the very day. Later, he was elected to the Kaohsiung City Council three times from Xiaogang in Qianzhen District, with two of his terms ending at the moment a judgment became final. In between, he served 272 days in prison. The verdict rendered in April 2023 did not include a forfeiture of civil rights. A month later, the three-reading revision of the election and recall law added a blacklist clause, preventing him from registering as a candidate.
Huang Chongren: He Studied Medicine, Spent His Life Treating the Company Like a Patient
Huang Chongren earned his PhD in the United States and didn't leave academia to work on scanners until age 38. In 2012, Powerchip went public at NT$0.29 per share, turning roughly 270,000 shareholders' stocks into wallpaper. Banks demanded an NT$8 billion personal guarantee or his resignation; he chose neither, writing to 43 banks that he wouldn't seek emergency aid, selling assets piece by piece to keep production lines running. Nine years later, the company returned to the stock market. The same no-bankruptcy logic saved the factory and allowed him to buy back his own shares at three cents each.
Huang Tu-shui: A Modern Taiwanese Sculpture That Returned from Disappearance
He learned Western sculpture in Tokyo, yet gradually found Taiwan through the gaze of a foreign land; a marble work missing for seven decades brought this chapter of art history back into view.
Ma Ying-jeou: Harvard Law PhD worked as an English interpreter in Chiang Ching-kuo's office for eight years, becoming a president known for 'integrity,' leaving behind cross-strait relations, Sunflower Festival, and 22K
On November 7, 2015, at the Shangri-La in Singapore, he shook hands with Xi Jinping for 1 minute and 20 seconds, marking the first meeting between top leaders of both sides since 1949. The same photo is remembered by Taiwanese society today in two completely different ways: one seeing a historical breakthrough, the other seeing a concession of sovereignty. His 'integrity' image from his eight years as president, cross-strait relations, 22K, and the Sunflower Festival, along with his second visit to China after leaving office and his family's statement in 2026, still have no definitive conclusion today.
Mona Lodo: The Anti-Japanese Hero Minted on a 20 Dollar Coin, and the World Without China or Japan
In 2001, the Central Bank of Taiwan put the face of the anti-Japanese hero Mona Rudao on a 20 dollar coin. However, the mint could not find any photos in domestic historical records, so they eventually found one in a Japanese magazine. From the Wushe Athletic Meet in 1930 to a skeleton that served as an anthropological specimen for nearly forty years, three regimes needed him. The world he truly defended—the one with Rainbow Bridge, Wenmian, and Gaya—never had China or Japan.
Academia Sinica: An Institution Born to Study China, How It Took Root on This Island
In the winter of 1948, the nation's highest academic institution landed in Taiwan, with only about fifty people making the journey. The artifacts and boxes from the Institute of History and Philology were stacked in a warehouse beside Yangmei Railway Station. Seventy-some years later, it has twenty-four research institutes and nine research centers, gaining a rare kind of longevity: excavating one archaeological site every ten years, establishing one institute every eleven years. The design that enables this—no teaching, no student enrollment, reporting directly to the Presidential Office—simultaneously subjects its leadership to presidential appointment, its budget to annual scrutiny, and even the question of whether to change its name becomes a matter of national positioning.
Benzo(a)pyrene Food Safety Incident: 19-Day Delay Before Reporting, 1,322 Stores Finally Counted
In July 2026, Chung Lien Oil detected benzo(a)pyrene levels four times above standard in a batch of soybean salad oil, affecting 1,322 downstream retailers and school lunch programs. Chung Lien learned of the issue on June 11 but did not report it to authorities until June 30—those 19 days are legally difficult to classify as overdue. The Food Safety Act leaves it to businesses to decide 'when you should be informed,' which is a harder structural problem to fix than assigning blame.
Taiwan Design Institute: The Organization That Secretly Puts Design into Clinics and Ballots
In 2022, after the renovation of the ticket area at Taipei Metro Zhongshan Station, someone commented, "It was done well; don't do it again." An organization that survives on Gold Point Awards, million-visitor design exhibitions, and international rankings places its biggest bets in areas you might not feel—the waiting areas of clinics in Xizhi, or the typeface on your ballot. The Taiwan Design Institute aims to prove that this manufacturing island can decide what things look like for itself, including how the government interacts with the people, moving from "Made in Taiwan is a synonym for imitation" to "design power is national strength."
Who Counts as Low-Wage: Minimum Wage Held the Base Salary, Low Wages Moved to the Year-End Bonus Column
A PR planner who entered the workforce six years ago started at 28,000 NT$, takoyaki prices rose from 45 to 70 NT$, and next year's minimum wage breaks 30,000 NT$—the floor has caught up with her. In September 2026, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics said that by monthly salary, no one in Taiwan earns low wages; by annual calculation, 1.26 million people do. The difference lies in the year-end bonus column: minimum wage law protects the base salary, but no law protects year-end bonuses. A decade of consecutive increases has pushed the floor past the international low-wage line, but low wages haven't disappeared—they've moved into industries that don't pay bonuses.
SLP Taipei Entrepreneurship Leadership Program: A course starting at six thousand dollars that reaches fifty-eight thousand and is still hard to find
In 2012, a group of people who were also entrepreneurs held a class in Taipei out of pocket. The first session cost only six thousand yuan, which is less than one hundred per hour. Fourteen years later, the same thing has become an institutionalized community where over a hundred people compete for thirty spots and fees approach sixty thousand, yet the official website's wording always states that 'all funds are used for students.' This is a history of mutual aid in Taiwan's startup scene, sustained by human connection and pragmatism.
Taiwan Creative Content Agency: A Government Agency Required to Run Like a Corporation, and the Same Wall It Has Hit for Seven Years
Launched in November 2019, TAICCA was entrusted to execute the National Development Fund's allocated investment quota of NT$10 billion, putting money into Taiwan's stories through equity investments rather than grants. As of the end of 2024, it had invested NT$5.737 billion on behalf of the National Development Fund, which combined with private capital totaled over NT$10 billion — yet it has never disclosed the profit or loss of any single case. A government agency required to run like a corporation: the part demanded to move fast and the part that must slow down to be accountable are two sides of the same system.
Taiwanese Company: Uni-President
In 1967, 38-year-old Kao Chih-yuan started a small factory in Tainan with 82 employees, making flour and animal feed. More than half a century later, the company has grown from a single pack of Uni-President noodles into a retail empire of 7,248 stores—including 7-Eleven, Starbucks, RT-Mart, and Carrefour: your breakfast tea egg, midnight beef noodle soup during typhoons, and even the utility bills you pay at convenience stores are largely products of this company. How did a Tainan flour mill become the container holding a day in the life of every Taiwanese person? This is a microcosm of Taiwan's history that you walk past every day but rarely read about.
Taiwan Customs Declaration and EZ WAY: When You Tap 'Declaration Matches', Who Do You Entrust?
Your phone vibrates with a push notification containing an incomprehensible product name. You tap 'Declaration Matches', legally completing a customs declaration entrustment. 7.59 million people in Taiwan have registered for this app. After a post went viral in August 2026, many people first checked who operates it: Customs and Immigration Bureau, where the Ministry of Finance holds 36.11% and state shares are less than half. At the same time, the government proposed for the second time to lower the NT$2,000 tax-free threshold. Who pays the bill for this convenient shortcut, and who has been unable to speak up from beginning to end?
Highways: From MacArthur Road to Xueshan Tunnel, Fifty Years of Power and Speed on Taiwan's National Expressways
On the day the Chung Shan Expressway opened in 1978, it was not Chiang Ching-kuo who cut the ribbon; this claim that has circulated for fifty years has almost no traceable source. But another line of inquiry, no matter how many times checked, cannot be overturned: the elderly recluse in Zhongli handled by land administration official Wang Chaosheng, the blind couple in Yangmei, the old farmer Wang Chunfa in Kaohsiung's Kaotan who was subject to land acquisition three times and prayed to the deity "please do not let the road be successfully built"—behind every "faster," there is someone paying the price for speed.
Taiwan's Queuing: From Imposed Order to Collectively Maintained Fairness
In 1979, Taipei City once enshrined queuing into urban governance; queues on MRT platforms, restaurant number-calling systems, and lines before popular food stalls later transformed this bodily discipline into the fair language of everyday service. Queuing may seem like a waste of time, yet it allows strangers to share a visible set of rules.
Taiwan's Street Trees: A Road Named After a Tree, and a Century-Long Unfinished Decision
At No. 292, Section 2, Qiasong Road, Changhua City, the house number is named after an old Qiasong tree whose age is debated — the road was adapted to the tree, not the tree to the road. From Yasusada Tashiro's tree-planting theory in 1898, to the widespread planting of blackboard trees in the 1980s, to over six thousand people petitioning in 2026 to ban heading-back pruning, each generation of Taiwanese has made decisions about the trees on the street. Yet that pruning guideline stating "strictly prohibited" remains merely "for reference and use by various agencies" to this day.
Toll Booth: The Three-Second Pause That Vanished on the Highway
On the day the Tatshinan toll booth opened in 1974, it took less than three seconds to hand over a ticket. That action was later precisely measured by the state and compressed to 3.7 seconds. In 2013, the entire system was compressed to zero, resulting in an eleven-year lawsuit for 947 toll collectors. Today, three ticket booths remain along the highway—visible but no longer usable.
2026 Nine-in-One Elections: Stress Testing Democratic Infrastructure in the Era of AI Cognitive Warfare
On November 28, 2026, all 22 counties and municipalities across Taiwan will hold elections for nine positions simultaneously, electing over 11,000 local executives and representatives. This election is unlike any before it—the difference is not in the candidates, but in the environment in which it occurs: the CCP's upgraded national AI cognitive warfare, 123+ fake news websites, and prosecutors including AI disinformation as one of their four key focuses. This article is not an election information summary, but an analysis of the historical positioning and structural pressures of this election.
EggPlantEgg: The Band That Freed Taiwanese-Language Pop from Its Mournful Cage
EggPlantEgg's distinctive 'Taiwanese-style romantic' rock and 'wanderer' narrative not only achieved massive commercial success but redefined what contemporary Taiwanese-language pop music could be — and became a key force in the genre's revival.
Chen Cheng-po
He conquered Tokyo's Imperial Art Exhibition with oil paintings, yet was shot dead in front of Chiayi Railway Station — and what made the world know him was often his death, not those paintings.
Chia Yung-chieh: The Taiwan Experiment of Converting Celebrity Social Capital into Public Mobilization Power, Again and Again
From her 2000 debut in a CTV prime-time drama, to raising NT$68.04 million in two days in 2021 to secure 252 HFNC units for frontline hospitals, to becoming the sixth chairperson of Taipei 101 in 2024, to the January 25, 2026 live global broadcast of Alex Honnold free-soloing the 508-meter Taipei 101—Chia Yung-chieh has walked a path with no precedent in Taiwan: a celebrity's social capital repeatedly converted across boundaries into public mobilization power, each step met with an equal measure of scrutiny, answered each time with an even larger mobilization.
Lee Ah-young
One of the defining representatives of Korean cheer squad 'long-stay' performers in Taiwan, she converted high visibility into high stability within the Fubon system — becoming a dual core of both ballpark performance and commercial content.
Sun Yun-suan: The Engineer-Premier Who Lit Up Taiwan from the Dark
From the five-month miracle of restoring electricity in postwar ruins, to the visionary bet on the semiconductor industry, Sun Yun-suan laid the foundations of modern Taiwan with engineering pragmatism and incorruptible character.
Taiwanese Overseas: From Exiled Students to Silicon Valley Engineers, a Diaspora Map of Two Million
Taiwan still has no absentee voting. Two million overseas citizens must fly home to their household registration address for every election. From the politically exiled students of the 1960s to the FAPA lobbying organization founded in Los Angeles in 1982, to the homeward pull of Silicon Valley engineers — this is a story of identity and civic capacity in diaspora.
Taiwan's Pastry Culture
From the 1877 fengyan gao (phoenix-eye cake) of Lukang's Yuzhenzhai to Chen Yao-hsun's red-soil salted egg yolk pastries that sold out in under 30 seconds, a 150-year layered story of Taiwan's pastries. In between: the square pineapple cake revolution of Yifutang during the Japanese era, Fengyuan Baquan's olive-shaped egg yolk pastry experiments, 270 hectares of contract-farmed native pineapples at the foot of Bagua Mountain, the craft breakthrough of oil-skin-wrapping-oil-flake, and century-old Han bakeries sharing the Mid-Autumn table with world bread champions.
Sat, October 3
2 articlesDevelopment of Taiwan's Electric Vehicle Industry Chain
From battery technology to charging infrastructure, exploring Taiwan's complete EV ecosystem and 2030 carbon neutrality transformation strategy
Taiwan Software Industry Development
In the digital economy era, pure hardware manufacturing's added value has been squeezed, while software and services have become the true value creators. According to Ministry of Economic Affairs statistics, the computer and information services industry's annual revenue reached approximately NT$570 billion in 2023, up 8.9% year-on-year, hitting a record high. From digital transformation and software services to AI applications and the gaming industry, Taiwan's transition from a "manufacturing powerhouse" to an "innovation powerhouse" has the software industry as its key battlefield.
Thu, October 1
18 articlesKeelung City: The Port Closest to Taipei, the One Taipei Sees Least
At 4 a.m., the Kanzaiteng fish market is still alive with the sound of auctions. Auctioneers chant prices in Hokkien, and within seconds a crate of fish moves from fishing boats in Hualien, Yilang, and Badouzi to a Japanese restaurant in Taipei's Eastern District. In 1626, the Spaniards planted a flag on Heping Island. In 1875, Shen Baozhen changed the name from 'Keelung' (Chicken Coop) to 'Keelung' (Base of Prosperity). In 1984, this was the world's seventh-largest container port. Then three things happened at once: Kaohsiung Port overtook it, Taoyuan Airport opened, and the mining economy collapsed. Today 360,000 people live here, and 39% commute to work in Taipei. What Taipei sees is decline. What the ocean sees is a port that has never left its position.
Linkou New Town: From "Ghost City" to Northern Taiwan's Emerging Metropolis — Transformation and Challenges
In the 1970s, the Taiwanese government planned a "garden city" new town on the Linkou plateau to ease population pressure on Taipei. After decades of development, this once mocked-as-"ghost city" area saw rapid population growth and industrial upgrading following the opening of the Airport MRT in 2017, becoming one of the youngest and most dynamic metropolitan areas in northern Taiwan. But challenges remain — most notably traffic congestion and a damp, chilly climate.
Miaoli County: The Hakka County Whose Mayor Doubled the County's Debt Over Eight Years
Japanese colonial camphor in Miaoli accounted for 95% of Taiwan's total; Sanyi started with wood carving using camphor tree trunks. The first Tung flower festival was held in Gongguan, Beihe Village in 2002. In 2008, Liu Chenghong took over the county with a debt of 202 billion, and by the time he left in 2014, it reached 67.6 billion. During this period, there were incidents such as Chu Fengmin drinking pesticides, Chang Pharmacy's forced demolition, and the Hakka Roundhouse being built into a mosquito museum worth 120 million. Today, 530,000 people live in this county with the second-highest Hakka proportion in Taiwan at 62.5%.
Taichung City: Nearly the Capital in 1887, Became the Second Largest Special Municipality Only in 2010
In 1887 Liu Ming-chuan petitioned to establish Taiwan as a province with the provincial capital at Qiaozaitou in Changhua County (today's Taichung urban core), planning an Eight Trigrams-shaped city; construction began in 1889. In 1894 Shao You-lian moved the capital north to Taipei, halting work on the Taichung provincial capital. The Japanese established Taichung Prefecture on 1 October 1920. Tunghai University broke ground on Dadu Mountain in 1955; Luce Memorial Chapel was completed in 1963. At 01:47 on 21 September 1999 the Chelungpu Fault ruptured from Jiji, Nantou to Dongshi, Taichung, killing 358 in Dongshi Township. On 25 December 2010 the county and city merged and upgraded to a special municipality with 29 districts. Toyo Ito's National Taichung Theater opened in Xitun District in 2016. Today 2.86 million people live in this city that waited 123 years.
Taiwan's Urban Development and the Rural-Urban Divide
70 years transformed Taiwan from agricultural island to urban island: The light and shadow of six special municipalities concentrating 70% of the population
City Character and Regional Culture
From Taipei's international metropolis to Tainan's historic charm, how Taiwan's cities shape distinct local identities
Yilan County: Twice Choosing Its Own Fate, the Lanyang Plain Never Looked Back
On the evening of December 13, 1987, Chen Ting-nan sat across from Wang Yung-ching in a CTS studio and kept the Sixth Naphtha Cracker off the Lanyang Plain. Nineteen years later, on June 16, 2006, the Hsuehshan Tunnel opened, cutting the trip from Taipei to Yilan from two hours to 40 minutes. Then, within ten years of its opening, 6,137 farmhouses rose across this rice granary, farmland prices jumped from NT$4,000 to NT$20,000 per ping, and in 2023 Yilan County alone issued 35% of all farmhouse building permits in Taiwan. Twice, at critical moments in history, one place made a choice; the Lanyang Plain accepted the costs together with the gifts.
Bubble Tea
A beverage that conquered the globe from a casual action during an employee meeting in Taichung in 1987. The controversy surrounding the origin of bubble tea, cultural politics, and the debate over a 500-calorie health drink.
Taiwanese Tea Culture
A small island excluded from international tea quotas, which nevertheless created a golden age for the tea industry, ultimately conquering the world with a milk tea containing "small snacks."
Hakka Food Culture
The rich and diverse culinary culture of the Hakka people, from the mellow aroma of *leicha* (ground tea) to the mountain charm of wild ginger flower zongzi, embodies the Hakka family's thriftiness, resourcefulness, and wisdom in utilizing local ingredients.
Taiwan's Coffee Culture: The Island Where Convenience Stores Sell 600 Million Cups a Year
The first coffee trees planted in Gukeng, Yunlin during the Japanese colonial period grew, a century later, into a cityscape with a café every fifty meters. Louisa Coffee has opened more than 600 locations — surpassing Starbucks. Alishan coffee has made its way into international competitions. For Taiwanese people, coffee has never been just coffee.
Taiwanese Food Overview: No Dish Is Purely Taiwanese, and Every Dish Is Taiwanese to the Core
Beside the Chiayi Fountain roundabout in 1949, Lin Tien-shou sliced chicken, laid it over white rice, and poured Minnan-style braising sauce on top; only after the U.S. military stationed in postwar Taiwan moved into Shuishang Air Base and brought large numbers of turkeys to Taiwan did this bowl evolve from chicken rice into turkey rice. From Indigenous slate-grilled wild boar, Hakka stir-fried pork intestines with shredded ginger, and military dependents' village Sichuan-style beef noodles to bubble tea invented in Taichung in 1986, and onward to the 419 restaurants included by Michelin in 2025. This island spent four hundred years cooking every borrowed dish into its own form.
Snow Mountain Tunnel: From an "Impossible Mission" to a Bloody and Tearful Miracle of Taiwan's Engineering
On December 15, 1997, a water inrush accident nearly claimed 300 lives, turning a TBM worth NT$1 billion into scrap metal. This tunnel, listed by the *Encyclopedia Britannica* as one of the world's most arduous engineering projects, is not just a traffic artery but a miracle forged in blood and tears by 25 martyrs and countless unsung heroes chiseling through tetrahedral sandstone harder than steel.
Taiwan's Digital Imaging and Animation Industry
From a global powerhouse of animation outsourcing to a new force in original content: the half-century transformation of Taiwan's digital imaging industry.
Tamsui River Bridge: A Colossal Landmark on the River-Mouth Horizon, Built for 'Transparency'
The Tamsui River Bridge is scheduled to open on May 12, 2026. Designed by the team of the late Dame Zaha Hadid, this single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge took thirty years of planning. Caught between the competing demands of preserving the famous Tamsui sunset and relieving traffic congestion, it redefines Taiwan's river-mouth landscape with fluid, sweeping lines.
Taiwan's Volunteer Firefighters: After Work They Put On the Uniform, Giving Localities a Second Fire Brigade
Called volunteers, yet they have statutory organization, professional training, operational command, and disaster insurance. From the Japanese-era fire-fighting associations to today's mountain search and rescue, this local force fills the time gap in the fire protection system while exposing challenges in recruitment, training, safety equipment, family support, and long-term retention.
The 2026 Advanced Subjects Test Controversy: A Structural Crisis of Educational Integrity
In July 2026, the Advanced Subjects Test was delayed for the first time due to Super Typhoon Bavi; following the release of results, 149 exam appeals were filed, all of which were rejected by the CEEC. With identical options in Biology and histogram errors in Geography, official responses merely claimed "no impact on performance." Legislators, parents, and a civic petition are demanding verifiable evidence rather than mere conclusions.
309 Village Head Books: Challengers Spending 30,000 or 120,000 See a 30% Win Rate
A novice from Taifeng Township, Changhua City, who received 732 votes in 2022 and paid 3,275 NTD for their own campaign. Out of the 13,988 village head candidates nationwide that year, only 309 submitted political donation books to the Control Yuan. When comparing these 309 books with election results, the success rate for challengers without incumbent status who spent under 30,000 NTD and those who spent over 120,000 NTD were both around 30%—the amount of money reveals how long someone has operated in the village, but it is difficult to turn a challenger into a village head.
Mon, September 28
31 articlesTaitung County: Two Islands, One Held Political Prisoners for Nearly Thirty Years, and One Stores Nuclear Waste for Over Forty Years
Taitung County has a population of 210,000 spread across 3,515 square kilometers, resulting in the lowest density in Taiwan with only 60 people per square kilometer, or one percent of Taipei. However, this county holds Taiwan's earliest human settlements (Beinan Site, 1,600 stone coffins from 5,300 years ago), is home to six indigenous tribes (Amis, Beinan, Paiwan, Rukai, Bunun, Atayal), and has the highest indigenous population ratio in Taiwan at 37.5%. From 1951 to 1987, Green Island and Fire Island held political prisoners for nearly thirty years. Starting in May 1982, Lanyu (Lan Yu) began receiving nuclear waste, and after over forty years, 97,672 drums remain there. On August 25, 1968, seven Bunun children defeated the Kansai minor league star team (not a world champion team) in a 7-0 game, marking the beginning of Taiwan's baseball national myth. The two islands bear the cost of an entire island.
Taiwan Enterprises: Sanchang—Sixty Years within Three Cups of Coffee, a Pair of Shoes, and an Insurance Policy
In 1964, three NTU business students founded Sanchanghang with 500,000 TWD, starting with handicraft exports. Sixty years later, it has evolved into Simple Mart (Meilianshe), Sanchang Qiaofu, Chuan Chia Fu (Quanjiafu), and Sanchang Life—a group whose daily operations are woven into the lives of almost every Taiwanese person.
Chen Shui-bian
The tenth and eleventh President of Taiwan, the implementer of the first party rotation in 2000. From a tenant farmer's son in Tainan to the first Democratic Progressive Party president, and then to the first former head of state who was imprisoned—his trajectory encapsulates the most complex tensions of Taiwan's democratic transition: inspiration, legislative foundation, storm, and rupture.
Cai Heipi: The Boy Who Grew Up Memorizing MRT Station Names, Packing Taiwan into 260,000 Subscribers
Born in 2002, Cai Jian-an started with "MRT Trivia" in high school; twelve years later, he stood on the stage of the Golden Road Awards, known as the "Oscars of the Transportation Industry." He changed his name, paused, and started again, handling research, maps, and editing himself—a model of long-termism for Taiwan's knowledge creators.
From Cheer Chen to Anpu — Two Names, the Same Question
Jiao Anpu wrote "Baby" at age 13, and under the stage name "Cheer Chen" became a representative voice of Taiwan's independent music scene. In 2013, she raised the Republic of China flag at a concert in the UK, leading to a ban from the Chinese market; in 2015 she voluntarily retired her stage name, disappeared for three years, then returned under her real name "Anpu", releasing "9522" in 2022. From the days when The Witch Shop had only two tables of customers to today, her two life chapters answer the same difficult question about name and stance.
The 19 Cattle of Qingtiangang: From Yuan Xing Cattle to Tainan Beef Soup, an Island's Beef Industry Breakthrough
Taiwan's beef self-sufficiency rate is only 4.6%, yet in 2024 the nation's first privately bred and officially certified cattle breed was born. The story of Yuan Xing cattle is an industry breakthrough scripted by a 94-year-old man, 19 wild black cattle, and a bowl of freshly slaughtered beef soup served before dawn.
When the Earthquake Hits, Who's on Duty? The Institutional Code Behind Taiwan's Disaster Medicine System
From the 921 Earthquake to the Hualien tremor, how Taiwan built a disaster medicine network centered on emergency medicine departments. The system's ingenuity lies not in equipment but in the clever design of 'who is on duty.'
Chen San-huo: Handing Broken Vases to Fate, Keeping the Temple Roof's Jian-nian Alive
After the 921 Earthquake, Tainan artist Chen San-huo picked up a shattered vase in Fengyuan, transforming from a temple restoration apprentice into a "rooftop artist" who creates with broken ceramics. Instead of making Jian-nian look like the original, he let fragmentation, chance, and recycled materials redefine its shape.
Taiwan High Speed Rail: From BOT Financial Experiment to Daily Life in the Western Corridor
The Taiwan High Speed Rail is not just about shortening the journey from Taipei to Kaohsiung to an hour and a half; it is also a systemic experiment transitioning from private Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) models, technological shifts, to public responsibility. How it changed the western corridor still depends on finance, last-mile connectivity, and station area development.
Taiwanese Market Culture: A Marketplace That Sells Not Just Vegetables, But Also Preserves Urban Memory
From colonial public markets and post-war population shifts to the electronic payments of Taipei City, this article explores how traditional Taiwanese markets simultaneously provide food supply, popular economy, community ties, and urban memory while searching for their next place between safety, convenience, and human connection.
André Chiang: He Never Waited for a Definition to Settle Before Turning Away
In 1997, a young French restaurant chef at The Sherwood Taipei invited two French three-star chefs to Taiwan for a ten-day collaboration, then bought a ticket to follow them to France. From peeling potatoes in southern France for two years, to pushing his Singapore restaurant to the 14th spot on the world rankings before voluntarily closing it the following year, to opening Taipei’s most difficult-to-book RAW and turning away again in its tenth year—André Chiang’s most irreplaceable move is to turn off the lights and ask the next question whenever he is about to be defined by a title: What exactly is the taste of Taiwan?
Chi-Huey Wong
World authority in glycoscience, 2014 Wolf Prize in Chemistry recipient, former president of Academia Sinica who was close to the Nobel Prize before the OBI Pharma controversy
Taiwan's 16 Indigenous Peoples: A Cultural Map
"16" is not a naturally occurring number—it is the result of negotiation. From 210,000 Amis to 441 Kanakanavu, Taiwan's indigenous peoples possess a cultural depth far exceeding any official roster.
Ethan Tu
Founder of PTT with a 486 computer, led Cortana AI at Microsoft, then returned to Taiwan to build nonprofit AI research—a thirty-year digital journey
Taiwan's Education System: An Island Experiment from Exam Hell to a Maze of Diversity
For 30 years, Taiwan tried to dismantle the centralized examination system; the re-examination classes in Nanyang Street shrank from 48 to 3, while private tutoring centers increased by 960 after the new curriculum was implemented. How does an island repeatedly conduct social experiments between academic pressure and educational equity?
Du Congming
Taiwan's first medical doctorate holder who developed the gradual smoking cessation method helping 11,498 people quit opium in 17 years; founder of Kaohsiung Medical University
Environmental Protection and Sustainable Development
From the 1980s era of being a 'smokestack island' that prioritized pollution before treatment, to the 1986 Lukang anti-DuPont movement that ignited environmental awareness in Taiwan, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Administration in 1988 toward institutionalization, and following the energy transition after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and the 2022 declaration of net-zero emissions by 2050: Taiwan has awakened from the cost of seeing the Love River turn black and PM2.5 levels exceeding standards over 40 years; today, the resource recycling rate has reached 60.1%, and over 200 companies have committed to science-based carbon reduction targets.
Chi Po-lin
How a government clerk who could not afford helicopters on his salary mortgaged his house to create Taiwan's most successful documentary
Hot Spring Culture
Taiwan's hot spring culture originated from military medical needs during the Japanese colonial era, evolving from the accidental discovery of Beitou's Tengu-an into the world's densest concentration of hot spring settlements. Guanziling's mud hot springs and Green Island's submarine hot springs are among the world's rarest geological wonders. This island fuses Japanese healing traditions with local social culture, weaving a civilization story born unexpectedly from war and healing.
Contemporary Taiwanese Literature: Wu Ming-yi, Lin Yi-han, and a Quiet Reading Crisis
In 2018, Wu Ming-yi was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize with _The Stolen Bicycle_ — the nationality field clearly read 'Taiwan.' Yet in that same era, first-print runs for serious Taiwanese literary fiction had already dropped below 3,000 copies. From Shih Shu-ching's epic trilogy spanning the Qing dynasty to the Japanese colonial period, to Lin Yi-han using a single book to drive legislative change — contemporary Taiwanese literature is touching the most universal questions in the most local voices. The audience, however, keeps shrinking.
Chang Yu-sheng: From Idol to Prophet, a Musical Experiment That Crossed Generations
In 1989, the son of an army entertainment troupe leader debuted with 'Miss You Every Day' selling 350,000 copies and became an idol; in 1994, he responded to the market with a 73-minute live band recording that sold dismally but was later called prophetic. Chang Yu-sheng spent nine years grinding between his idol identity and his creative conscience — four days after 'Mouth Says No, Heart Says Yes' went on sale, he crashed his car in the Tamsui pre-dawn hours and never woke up.
Jam Hsiao
Started performing in folk song restaurants at 17, rose to fame via Super Star Avenue in 2007, and released his debut album in 2008. Won Golden Melody Award for Best Mandarin Male Singer in 2013, later expanding into bands, film, and Cross-Strait stages.
Chen Yu-hsun
A Taiwan comedy director from a military dependents' village background who established a creative grammar for local comedy through five feature films, adept at exploring profound life issues through Taiwanese-style humor and humanistic warmth in absurd situations; deeply inspired by Hollywood comedy masters, he won the Golden Horse Award for Best Narrative Feature with "My Missing Valentine," earning the most substantial external validation for this grammar.
Mark Liu: The Berkeley PhD Who Succeeded Morris Chang — Six Years of Decision-Making in the US-China Chip Crossfire
In June 2018, Morris Chang retired, and Mark Liu and C.C. Wei jointly took the helm of TSMC. This UC Berkeley electrical engineering doctorate steered the world's most important chipmaker with an engineer's precision, announcing the Arizona fab, navigating geopolitical crosscurrents amid six years of US-China tech competition, and handing the reins to C.C. Wei upon his retirement in June 2024 — leaving behind a final line: 'Buy TSMC.'
Taiwan Railway History: The "Lung Disease" Railway, the "Black-Headed Ones," and the Line That Lost Its Foreign Names
A road the Japanese called "lung disease" that became a high-speed artery carrying 200,000 people daily over a century. Engineer Becker was scrapped by the Japanese; Hasegawa’s trunk line was renamed post-war; every generation pushed the previous records to footnotes. Foreign names faded, leaving Taiwanese slang like "black-headed ones" and political slogans like "Juguang" and "Ziqiang," until the Puyuma and Taroko era finally laid indigenous place names back onto the tracks.
Taiwan's Provincial Tensions
Provincial tensions are not the story of two groups of people disliking each other — they are a power struggle over who has the right to define a 'Taiwanese.' They die and come back to life in the ballot box, quietly evaporate in the demolition of military dependents' villages, and yet have never truly ended.
Fire EX — The Name They Found by the Pool, Twenty-Five Years of Singing
In the summer of 2000, three high school students from Kaohsiung's Sanmin MXHC spotted a red fire extinguisher and turned it into a band name. Twenty-five years later, their Taiwanese-language punk became the generational sound of the Sunflower Movement, they moved their label back south, and on the Takao Festival stage, they spent seven minutes telling ten thousand people: you can be disappointed, but don't become the kind of person you despise.
Shen Sheng-Po
Trained in computer science, Shen Sheng-Po brought code into Taiwan’s contemporary art scene. In just 34 years, he left behind not only digital artworks, but also a way of treating programming as lived experience and free software as an artistic ethic.
Yin Hai-Guang: The Philosopher Who Planted Liberalism in Taiwan from a House on Wenzhou Street Lane 18
In 1949, a young man from Hubei named Yin Fu-Sheng arrived in Taipei from Nanjing, took the pen name Yin Hai-Guang, and became the sharpest editorial voice at Free China magazine and a philosophy professor at National Taiwan University. He used logical positivism to give students intellectual immunity, and used editorials to challenge Chiang Kai-shek's third-term bid. After being placed under house arrest on Wenzhou Street, he died of stomach cancer at 49 in 1969 — leaving behind the most complete spiritual prototype of Taiwanese liberalism.
Taiwan's 5G Network Construction and Digital Transformation
Tracing Taiwan's journey from leading in 4G to deploying 5G, exploring the national strategy for digital transformation and smart application development.
Jay Chou
A shy young man playing the piano on a talent show, his debut album rewrote the history of Mandopop. Through his original musical style, he proved to the music industry that songwriting could be commercially successful. With multiple albums, he demonstrated that Mandopop can maintain its Eastern identity while conquering the global stage. From a young creator whose manuscripts were repeatedly rejected, he has become a true musical revolutionary who disrupted the entire industry.
Sun, September 27
13 articlesTaiwan Hot Springs Landscape
From "Witch's Hot Spring" to the top 15 global hot spring destination—how tectonic collision cooks this island's healing remedy
Taiwan's Biodiversity Hotspots
Within its 36,000 square kilometers, Taiwan hosts 59,000 known species, a density 100 times the global average, with over 30% of these being endemic species found nowhere else on Earth. A vertical climate elevator spanning 4,000 meters allows this island to recreate half the world's climate zones within a small area: the Formosan Landlocked Salmon, which lives at the lowest latitude in the world, is now restricted to the Qichijew River, and the habitat of the Formosan Salamander at altitudes of 1,500 to 2,500 meters has shrunk from 11 locations to just 7. There are approximately 200 to 600 Formosan Black Bears in Taiwan, each requiring 30 to 40 square kilometers of roaming space; in this stage with the highest biological density in the world, how much space can still be reserved for wildlife?
History of Taiwan's Indigenous Peoples and the Rectification of Names Movement
In 1987, 19-year-old Tsou youth Tang Ying-shen was executed by firing squad at the Taipei execution ground; his death ignited the initial spark of Taiwan's Indigenous peoples' rectification of names movement. From the founding of the Alliance of Taiwan Aborigines in 1984, the toppling of the Wu Feng bronze statue and the "Return Our Land" parade in 1988, to the 1994 constitutional amendment changing "mountain compatriots" to "indigenous peoples," and the 2005 Indigenous Peoples Basic Law adding the character "zu" (ethnic group), this path took 21 years. The Dutch's "acculturated barbarians" and "wild barbarians," the Qing's "cooked barbarians" and "raw barbarians," the Japanese colonial era's "fanren" and "lifan," and the postwar "mountain compatriots" — every name was a lock; the first three times others named you, the last two times you seized the name back yourselves.
Taiwan's Long-Term Care System Development
Through institutional design, Taiwan has built Asia's most advanced long-term care system, with the government investing massive annual budgets to serve the public; simultaneously, hundreds of thousands of foreign live-in caregivers quietly sustain a larger, invisible care network within households — two parallel systems that barely intersect, weaving a profound story of institutional design, social values, and pragmatic compromise.
Taiwan's Animation Outsourcing Industry
Taiwan was once a global animation outsourcing powerhouse where companies like Cuckoos' Nest Studio handled classic Hollywood animations, producing one-third of global animation output at its peak.
‘Ho Fei-peng’
‘A media entrepreneur who led by eight years and suffered seven years of losses, ultimately building Taiwan’’s largest publishing group.’
Li Chih-kai
From 'Market Kai' in the documentary Tumbling Boys to an Olympic silver medal — sixteen years of tumbling through life for Taiwan's Pommel Horse Prince.
Ya Hsien: Ceasing Poetry After "The Abyss," Spending His Latter Life as a Pillar of Literary History in the United Daily News Supplement
In 1968, at age 36, Ya Hsien stopped writing after compiling ninety poems into his collection *The Abyss*. From 1977 to 1998, he served as editor-in-chief of the *United Daily News* (UDN) Supplement for 21 years, transforming the editorial desk into Taiwan's most important post-war literary public space. He passed away in Vancouver, Canada, on October 11, 2024, at age 92—his 56-year silence after ceasing publication proved longer than a thousand volumes of poetry; his refrain "Hallelujah, I am still alive" became an obscure, poetic symbol that evaded censorship during the Martial Law era.
Post Offices: Opened in 1888, Regimes Changed Names, Counters Remained
In 1888, Liu Ming-chuan established the Taiwan Postal Bureau in Taipei Prefecture; the post office subsequently navigated Qing rule, Japanese colonial administration, and post-war state-owned enterprise systems, evolving from a letter-sending counter into a public network for savings, insurance, and local care; it is the most ordinary institution, yet the one that best reveals how Taiwan transformed state systems into daily life.
VH (Vast & Hazy): Fifteen Years of Directional Calibration for an 'Exit-System Band'
Formed at the Tamkang University Jin Shao Award in 2011, went on hiatus in 2014, returned as a duo in 2017, and was nominated three times for Golden Melody Best Vocal Group. In an era when the Taiwan indie scene favored noise, Vast & Hazy chose to be a shelter for nameless anxiety — and fans spontaneously named them an 'exit-system band.' In April 2026, after Yi-chi announced his move to behind-the-scenes work, Ka-ka carries the name forward.
Kaohsiung: In the year it was upgraded to a special municipality, eight Kaohsiung residents were imprisoned in Taipei's jail
On July 1, 1979, Kaohsiung was upgraded to Taiwan's second special municipality. On December 10th, World Human Rights Day, the speech by the Beauty Island magazine company at Da Gangpu Roundabout turned into a conflict under tear gas. Eight people were sentenced, and on February 28, 1980, the blood incident occurred at Lin Yi-hsiung's home on Xinyi Road in Taipei. In the same year, 1979, Kaohsiung gained administrative glory but also endured Taiwan's heaviest post-war political repression. With 2.71 million people spread across 38 districts, Flag Island Shoal, the Indigenous Na'mahe tribe, China Steel smokestacks, and the Weiwuying aluminum alloy roof all coexisted in one city; this city spent 45 years stitching its wounds into its own shape.
The Penglou Peoples: From "Administrative Formatting" to the Siraya's Century-Long Rebirth as the 17th Tribe
On July 30, 2026, the Executive Yuan officially recognized the Siraya as the 17th statutory indigenous people, ending the Penglou community's century-long "administrative disappearance." From 40,000 people in Dutch-era household registers to collective invisibility caused by omissions in the 1950s Nationalist government records, and now with 8 tribes still waiting for recognition, this naming movement opens a new chapter in Taiwan's multicultural historical narrative.
Taiwan's Fuel Pricing Mechanism and CPC: The NT$36 Saved, Booked First Under the Name of a Company Standing at the Front
On March 22, 2026, a woman in Yunlin saved NT$36 by filling up before a price hike — the same day the Premier said people should thank CPC at the pump. From the 2008 freeze to this year’s war-driven surge, Taiwan lets this state company, at a 93% debt ratio, absorb spikes first and recoup them via supplementary budgets. Savings split evenly per liter; who benefits most has never been tallied.
