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Fri, July 24
34 articlesKinmen County: The 56 Hours in 1949 That Determined Kinmen’s Fate for 75 Years
Kinmen is only 1.8 kilometers from Jiaoyu off Xiamen at its closest point, and 358 kilometers from Taipei. In 1387, the Marquis of Jiangxia, Zhou Dexing, built a fortified garrison here, taking the meaning of “solid as metal and moat, a mighty guard at the sea gate.” At 2 a.m. on October 25, 1949, three Communist regiments, 9,086 men, landed on the beaches of Guningtou; Taiwan’s armed forces fought for 56 hours and repelled them. During the 44 days beginning at 5:30 p.m. on August 23, 1958, 474,910 artillery shells fell on an island of 151 square kilometers, followed by 21 more years of shelling on odd-numbered days and silence on even-numbered days. Today, 145,000 people are registered in Kinmen, and at Shuitou Pier at 4 a.m. there are more boats to Xiamen than flights to Taipei. Yeh Hua-cheng’s great-grandson waited 67 years for an apology.
Culinary Class Wars in Taiwan: One Netflix Korean Reality Show, Seven Consumer Industries, Sixteen Months
In September 2024, Netflix's Culinary Class Wars claimed the top spot in Taiwan during its premiere week. Over the following sixteen months, nine Korean chefs from the show extended their reach into Taiwan's convenience store fresh food, bubble tea, fast food chains, five-star hotel buffets, food delivery platforms, Korean restaurant chains, and even a Galaxy Z foldable phone — seven largely unrelated consumer sectors. The bubble tea brand 'Ten Sheng,' backed by Kim Tae-star, lasted twenty months before closing on December 26, 2025 — Taiwan's first systematic stress test of the 'Korean reality show chef endorsement.'
When Social Wounds Become Collective Healing: Taiwan Meme Culture as a Social Safety Valve
From 'Brother Jie, don't!' to TongShen serving hot pot, Taiwan memes are not just entertainment — they are a sophisticated social pressure-release system that transforms embarrassment, trauma, and anxiety into rituals of collective healing.
Urban Character and Regional Culture
From Taipei's international metropolis to Tainan's ancient capital charm, how cities across Taiwan shape unique local identities
ALIEN Art Centre (Jinma Guest House)
A Cold War military transit station where soldiers said goodbye before sailing to the frontlines — abandoned for two decades, then resurrected as Lonely Planet's top pick for contemporary art in Kaohsiung.
Digital Wasteland: How an Online Art-Criticism Platform with No Business Model Survived for 12 Years
In November 2011, Cheng Wen-chi launched an online writing project at an old-media institution in Taipei called ET@T. It had no print edition, no advertising, and no subscription fee. Twelve years later, it had accumulated 56 themed issues, 384 articles, 31 podcast episodes, and 10 volumes of the Nusantara Archive. Among Chinese-language art-criticism platforms of the same period with the same three conditions, no print-media parent body, no physical space, and driven by an individual editor-in-chief, there is no comparable case that survived across the same period. It endured through the precise layering of three forms of quiet infrastructure: an institutional parent body absorbing basic costs, public-sector projects filling issue-based content, and the editor's own 12 years of labor covering the remaining gap.
Taiwan Instrument Manufacturing: From Houli Saxophones to Global Music Factories
Explore the development of Taiwan's instrument manufacturing industry, from Houli saxophones' dominance of the global market to the guitar OEM kingdom, to the precision craftsmanship of music box manufacturing — and how Taiwan transitioned from contract manufacturing to building its own brands
AI Hardware Supply Chain: Where Taiwan Turns the Cloud into Machines
Generative AI looks like a cloud service, but it depends on a physical road: chip design, wafer fabrication, packaging, memory, power, cooling, motherboards, racks, and delivery. Taiwan matters not only because of TSMC, but because many checkpoints along that road are concentrated here; that shared interest is real, and so are the bills for water, power, carbon, inequality, overseas manufacturing, and geopolitical risk.
AI Supply Chain Overseas Manufacturing: Taiwan’s Capabilities Are Being Invited Abroad
Overseas manufacturing in the AI hardware supply chain is not only TSMC going to the United States, Japan, and Germany. It also includes Foxconn, Wistron, Delta, packaging and testing firms, and server suppliers being pulled toward the United States, Japan, Europe, India, Southeast Asia, and Mexico by customers, tariffs, subsidies, and geopolitics. This article explains why Taiwan’s companies go abroad through globalization, de-risking, and supply-chain bargaining: it is an extension of capability, and also the world’s attempt to reduce single-point dependence.
Taiwan Science Parks: A Bet on a Rice Field That Became the World’s Lifeline, and Its Chokepoint
In 1979, in Jinshanmian, Hsinchu, Irving Ho, an engineer who had returned to Taiwan from IBM, built Asia’s first science park on a rice field. Forty-five years later, the Hsinchu, Southern Taiwan, and Central Taiwan science parks have surpassed NT$5.8 trillion in annual revenue, and the world’s most advanced chips are mass-produced in these three parks. Yet this island’s strongest talisman is also its most fragile chokepoint: one drought, one power outage, or one geopolitical card can make the global supply chain hold its breath.
Taiwan's Drone Industry: From Taichung Toy Planes to the Blue List — One Ticket, Awarded to Thunder Tiger
On September 21, 2025, Thunder Tiger's Overkill FPV loitering munition became the first — and so far only — Taiwanese product to earn U.S. Department of Defense Blue UAS Cleared List certification. Across the entire list of 39 complete airframes and 165 components, Taiwan holds exactly one seat. In April 2026, four bipartisan U.S. senators co-sponsored the Blue Skies for Taiwan Act, demanding a fast-track pathway for Taiwanese manufacturers. The very existence of the bill reveals one thing: Taiwan has been moving too slowly, and even the United States has had to legislate a lower bar. A company that has spent forty-six years making radio-controlled toy airplanes in Taichung is now planning a second factory in Ohio.
Taiwan’s Electricity and Semiconductors: The Power Bill Behind the Sacred Mountain
Taiwan’s semiconductor leverage rests on a very concrete electricity system. Advanced fabs, EUV lithography, advanced packaging, AI server testing, and data centers all need stable, low-interruption, expandable power. This article does not treat semiconductor electricity use as a simple environmental accusation. It places it back inside supply-chain bargaining: the world needs Taiwan to manufacture AI chips, and Taiwan must answer who bears the power costs, carbon pressure, and energy-security risks.
André Chiang: Taiwanese Culinary Innovator
From Danshui Business and Industrial School to World No. 14, from an epiphany in the Seychelles to a homecoming in Taipei's Dazhi — André Chiang used his Octaphilosophy to establish a new coordinate for Taiwanese chefs on the international culinary stage.
Hsu Chiao-hsin: From Breakfast Shop Daughter to the 'NT$800 Billion Arms Deal' Legislator's Youth-Driven Traffic
Legislator for Taipei City's Seventh Electoral District. Born in 1989 into a Taipei breakfast shop family, became the youngest-ever member of the KMT Central Standing Committee at age 24 in 2013, and defeated Hsu Shu-hua with 89,727 votes to enter the Legislative Yuan in 2024. In the 2025 recall vote, 62,000 yes votes met the legal threshold but the recall was rejected; in 2026, during arms procurement negotiations, she proposed an NT$800 billion version that clashed with the party headquarters' NT$380 billion+N, and Chi Lin-lien warned her by name 'not to do things that please the enemy and grieve your own.'
Koxinga
A half-Japanese pirate's son who spent sixteen years fighting the Qing, nine months conquering Taiwan, five months founding a kingdom—then died suddenly at thirty-seven. His name has been claimed by four regimes to this day.
Red Shin (Kouki): From Eleven-Year Daily Upload Machine to Million-Subscriber YouTuber Who Reclaimed His Life
On October 15, 2023, game streamer Red Shin (Kouki), with 3 million subscribers, uploaded his final scheduled video, formally ending 14 years of creative work. This creator who rose to fame through Minecraft and set the legendary record of 11 consecutive years of daily uploads chose to retire at the peak of his career, frankly stating he had been living like a machine — revealing the brutal struggle of a top creator between algorithm and personal life.
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?
'Kuma Academy: A Civil Defense School That Hopes One Day It Will No Longer Need to Exist'
In 2021, five volunteers talked for five hours in a cafe and decided to teach Taiwanese people how to face war. After holding only a few events, they were NT$210,000 in debt. The next year, Russia invaded Ukraine, Robert Tsao donated NT$600 million, and the call went out to train three million Kuma Warriors in three years. The academy teaches tourniquets, evacuation, and fraud prevention, and states plainly that it is 'absolutely not training militia.' The more seriously it teaches, the more China puts it on Taiwan independence lists and the more it becomes a political football inside Taiwan. A school born because of war, yet hoping one day it will never be needed.
Medical Care Act: Forty Years of Institutional Regulation and Market Tension
Taiwan's Medical Care Act was promulgated in 1986, amended in 2017 to revise physicians' criminal liability, and in 2026 to write nurse-to-patient ratios into law. The statute says it aims to 'promote the sound development of medical care enterprises,' but what it governs in practice is a system where 83% of hospital beds are privatized, emergency physicians leave the field at two to three times the international rate, and more than a thousand nurses had to resign in succession before nurse-to-patient ratios were written into law. This is not the National Health Insurance Act, nor the Physicians Act. It is the foundational law for how the institution called the 'hospital' exists in Taiwan, and the unresolved forty-year tension between the public-interest nature of health care and market mechanisms.
Paraguay and Taiwan: South America's Only Diplomatic Ally, a Sixty-Nine-Year Pragmatic Partnership
Diplomatic relations established in 1957, remained with Taipei after the 1989 coup, signed an ECA in 2017, and co-founded the Taiwan-Paraguay Polytechnic University in 2018. Paraguay is Taiwan's only diplomatic ally in South America and the largest by area among its current allies; this relationship is sustained by pork, beef, education, and technology cooperation delivering tangible mutual benefit.
Taiwan's Fifth to Ninth Grade Cohorts: The 'Strawberry' Insult Has Swapped Three Generations, While the Escalator Beneath Their Feet Has Slanted
When the term 'Strawberry Generation' first appeared in print in 1993, it was criticizing the Fifth Grade cohort (born 1961–1970), who are now the nostalgic yogurt-drinkers of today. Over thirty years, the people being criticized have changed several times, but the label has remained unchanged. What has actually moved between these five cohorts is the 'escalator' of 'hard work pays off': it slowed down around 2002, its entrance was raised by housing prices, and then it split into two. The path relying solely on salaries has nearly stopped, while the path relying on parental capital continues to move.
Taiwan's Higher Education Expansion and Decline: From 58 Universities to 140, Then Closures Begin
In 1994, the Education Reform Committee called for 'widespread establishment of high schools and universities.' Within a decade, universities tripled from 58 to 145; the private sector share shot to 67%. Net enrollment rates climbed from 26% to 72% — nearly everyone could attend university. Then low birthrates arrived. In 2022, Taiwan recorded 138,000 newborns, a historic low. Universities began closing, merging, competing for students. This thirty-year experiment — from 'too few' to 'too many' to 'can't survive' — was always haunted by a question never seriously answered: is higher education a public good, or a market commodity?
Taiwan and the Nuclear Debate: Anti-Nuclear Politics Was Once the Shared Language of the Democracy Movement, but the Climate Crisis Has Reshuffled Every Side
In August 2025, 4.34 million people voted yes on “restarting Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant,” winning 74 percent of the vote, yet the proposal failed because turnout did not pass the threshold. Across four decades and three referendums, Taiwan moved from an anti-nuclear consensus to a nuclear-free homeland, then within three months personally pushed a reactor it had shut down toward restart. This debate has long since exceeded the yes-or-no question of “whether nuclear power is good.” It is about how a society decides an issue whose time pressures run in opposite directions: nuclear waste must remain stable for 100,000 years, carbon reduction must be achieved within a decade, and power shortages are immediate.
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
Volunteering and Civic Charity in Taiwan
From Tzu Chi’s relief network to neighborhood mutual aid—how Taiwan built one of Asia’s most active volunteer cultures
Taiwan Circular Economy and Resource Reuse
From a linear economy to a circular economy: exploring Taiwan's resource recycling, waste treatment, and sustainable development models
Taiwan's Industrial Transformation and Upgrading: From Manufacturing Powerhouse to Innovation Powerhouse
Taiwan's industrial structure has shifted from labor-intensive to knowledge-intensive, with policies such as the 5+2 Industrial Innovation Plan and the Six Core Strategic Industries advancing the upgrading of traditional manufacturing and the development of emerging industries.
Taiwan Enterprise: Uni-President Enterprises
How a 13-year-old child laborer built a NT$657.6 billion revenue empire from scratch at age 38
Taiwan Uniform Invoice: The 1951 Receipt That Turned Every Consumer into a Tax Auditor
On January 1, 1951, Finance Commissioner Ren Xian-Qun printed lottery numbers on every receipt across Taiwan, creating an incentive-compatible tax enforcement mechanism that turned ordinary consumers into voluntary auditors. Seventy years later, this paper slip has evolved into cloud-based e-invoices, a social welfare lifeline, and the center of an algorithmic fairness controversy — a uniquely Taiwanese experiment in digital governance.
The Ecosystem of Peripheral Business Districts Around Taiwan's Tech Parks
Why do restaurants around the peripheries of Nangang Software Park, Neihu Technology Park, Hsinchu Science Park, Central Taiwan Science Park, and Southern Taiwan Science Park increasingly only serve lunch while dinner services shut down one after another? This article unpacks the single-peak business district phenomenon along Taiwan's technology corridor through three lenses: commuting patterns, BOT zoning controls, and shifts in overtime culture. It also tracks the structural impact of LaLaport's March 2025 opening on traditional lunch-district eateries along Sanzhong Road and Yuanqu Street.
History of Taiwan's MRT Development: An Urban Evolution Written in Blood and Money
A 209-tonne steel beam that fell and killed 4 people, NTD 1.64 billion in damages, and a Taipei Metro system that still loses money on transit operations alone — the real cost behind Taiwan's MRT network.
Taiwan's Scooter Culture
The country with the world's highest scooter density didn't choose scooters — it never had another option. Now it's accidentally become the global laboratory for electric two-wheelers.
Mini Taiwan Pulse: Drawing Taiwan as a Breathing Map Through a Curator's Eye
In 2026, data analyst Migu layered Taiwan's scattered open data on aircraft, ships, trains, buses, and garbage trucks into a breathing map. AI handles the drudgery of retrieving data, but deciding which layers belong together, what colors to use, and which layer should light up depends on a curator's eye trained in urban planning.
MediaTek: From Shanzhai King to Chip Throne
The company mocked as the 'king of knockoff phones' now outsells Qualcomm in smartphone chips by a factor of 1.5
Thu, July 23
85 articlesFour Measures Beyond Blue and Green: From a Plot of Land to a National Health Insurance Card, the Taiwan Policies That Outlived Their Own Politics
A reader, tired of blue-green bickering at the dinner table, wanted to remember the things that truly helped Taiwan. So we found eleven policies from the past seventy years, from land reform that coercively expropriated farmland under authoritarian rule, the lifting of martial law, and National Health Insurance, to same-sex marriage and the Forward-looking Infrastructure Development Program, both still contested. We deliberately set aside the blue-green yardstick and used four measures instead: livelihood, democracy, civil rights, and sovereignty. The conclusion is a little counterintuitive: policies that outlive their own partisan origins are often the ones that were 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.
44 South Village: An Arsenal Dependents’ Village, Now a Cultural and Creative Park Beside Taipei 101
In late November 1948, machinery from the Combined Logistics 44th Arsenal in Qingdao was loaded in six batches onto the Taikang and shipped to Keelung. In December, factory workers and their families arrived and moved into the former Japanese Army Xingya warehouses at Sanzhangli on Taipei’s eastern edge; Shandong dialect echoed through warehouse rooms with no walls. The following year, they built their own dependents’ housing south of the factory compound — Taiwan’s first military dependents’ village established by the Republic of China government. Field- and general-grade officers lived in West Village, company-grade officers in East Village, and Shandong technicians without military status in South Village. In 1980, the arsenal moved to Sanxia and was renamed Factory 206; West Village was demolished and became Zhongtuo public housing, while East Village residents were relocated to Zhongzhen public housing near Youth Park. Only South Village remained, because its residents were technicians and were not covered by the Ministry of National Defense dependents’ housing redevelopment regulations. In 1998, all residents moved into World Trade New Village; in 1999, a fire destroyed part of the housing; in 2001, a cultural-heritage dispute was settled with a decision to preserve four buildings; and on October 25, 2003, the Xinyi Public Assembly Hall and Military Dependents’ Village Cultural Park opened — facing the Taipei 101 then under construction.
Bangka: Qing-Era Taipei’s Busiest Place, Now the District with Taipei’s Oldest Average Age
Bangka Longshan Temple was jointly built in 1738 by migrants from the three Quanzhou counties; by 2026 it is 288 years old, 137 years older than the Qing court’s Taipei Prefecture. The 1853 Ding-Xia Jiao Conflict pushed the Tong’an people into Dadaocheng, planting the divergence that would shape northern Taiwan for two centuries. Renamed Wanhua under Japanese rule, made a district in 1990, and turned into the setting of Doze Niu’s 2010 film Monga, it now has an aging index of 320.78%, the highest in the city. On Taipei’s earliest street, the first incense stick in the temple forecourt is still burning at six in the morning.
Beitou Hot Spring Street: From Sulfur Mining in 1697 to the Hot Spring Museum in 2026, the Same Mountain Spring Through Four Generations of Residents
In 1697, Yu Yonghe came to these mountains to mine sulfur and traded cloth with the Ketagalan people for sulfurous soil; in 1896, Osaka native Hirata Gengo built Taiwan's first hot spring inn, Tenguan, at what is now No. 234, Guangming Road; in 1913, the red-brick public bathhouse designed by Moriyama Matsunosuke opened; in 1923, Crown Prince Hirohito came for a bath; in 1967, a photograph in Time magazine enraged Chiang Kai-shek; after Mayor Lee Teng-hui abolished the licensed hostess system in 1979, the wine houses went dark; in 1998, the abandoned red-brick bathhouse became a museum. The same steaming mountain spring was discovered by outsiders three times and adapted to by four generations of residents.
Changhua County: The Agricultural Giant That Beat Dupont but Can't Keep Its Young People
In 1709, Shi Shibang channeled water from the Zhuoshui River to create Taiwan's first large-scale irrigation system — 211 years before Hatta Yoichi's Chianan Canal. In 1723, the first year of the Yongzheng era, the county was carved out from Zhuluo County, bounded by the Huwei River to the north and the Dajia River to the south — this was the origin of Changhua's establishment. In 1786, Lin Shuangwen's forces besieged Changhua city, but Lukang held. In 1788, the Qianlong Emperor ordered the construction of an official-funded Mazu temple (Xinzu Gong) in Lukang. In 1922, the Changhua Roundhouse opened. In 1986, Lukang residents drove out American firm Dupont — Taiwan's first environmental movement. In April 2026, Changhua County's population stood at 1,206,458, falling below the threshold for special municipality upgrade.
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.
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.
Dalongdong: The Incense of Baoan Temple, the Bell of the Confucius Temple, and the Blue Sky with a White Sun at Yuanshan, Three Eras of Taipei Faith
From the 5,300-year-old Yuanshan shell midden to the rudimentary Baoan Temple built by Tong'an migrants in 1742; from Chen Wei-ying's 1859 provincial degree and the saying 'a xiucai every five steps, a juren every ten' to the 1925 fundraising campaign by local gentry to rebuild the Confucius Temple demolished by the Japanese; from the 1944 crash that destroyed the shrine to the 14-story Chinese palace-style Grand Hotel that Yang Cho-cheng built on the original site in 1973. Three spaces of faith stand side by side along the 1.5-kilometer axis from Dalongdong to Yuanshan, but none matches the tourist-brochure version: Baoan Temple is Taiwan's first UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Award site, restored after Liao Wu-chih refused government subsidies in 1995 and spent NT$260 million of temple funds; the Confucius Temple stands on more than 3,000 ping of land donated by the Chen Yueji family and Koo Hsien-jung so that Confucius would not be left homeless; the Grand Hotel is the red-tiled, yellow-eaved building that has received 111 heads of state. The uncles and aunties practicing tai chi on Dalong Street are standing on Taipei's most compressed slice of time.
Reading Taiwan's 22 Counties and Cities Through Data: the Most Crowded and the Most Empty Differ by 151 Times, the Oldest and Youngest by a Generation
On the same Taiwan, Taipei City, with the highest population density, has 8,975 people per square kilometer, while Taitung County, with the lowest, has only 59, a 151-fold difference. New Taipei City, the most populous, has 4.04 million people; Lienchiang County, the least populous, has 13,600, a 297-fold difference. The youngest, Hsinchu County, has an aging rate of 15.08%; the oldest, Chiayi County, has 24.11%, a gap of nearly one generation. Using official data from the Department of Household Registration at the end of 2025, this article draws a scaled, verifiable portrait of the whole country: 70% of the people are packed onto 30% of the land; the leading edge of aging is not in the cities but in eastern Taiwan, outlying islands, and agricultural counties; and without exception, in all 22 counties and cities across Taiwan, deaths already outnumber births.
Gongguan: The Japanese Empire's Laboratory, Martial-Law-Era Underground Salons, and NTU Students' Fried Chicken Cutlets: Three Centuries in 500 Meters
In 1928, the Japanese built the empire's sixth university, Taihoku Imperial University, on Taipei's southern outskirts; outside its gate, the area around Wenzhou Street, Qingtian Street, and Yongkang Street became a faculty housing district. After the war, in 1949, the dormitories were taken over for postwar Chinese migrant scholars; the small house at 1-1, Alley 16, Lane 18, Wenzhou Street became the living room of Yin Hai-kuang under house arrest; Wistaria Tea House in Lane 16, Section 3, Xinsheng South Road went from a Customs Administration official residence to a dangwai youth-culture salon; 25 Wenzhou Street was Tai Jingnong's study, where he wrote until 1990; and the 1972-75 NTU Department of Philosophy Incident implicated 13 professors on campus. In 1999, the MRT Xindian line opened, and Gongguan Circle became the dinner ATM for NTU students. The Japanese Empire's laboratory, martial-law-era underground salons, and contemporary students' fried chicken cutlets: three centuries layered into 500 meters.
Gueishan Island: The Direction of Home That Yilan People See Every Day, and the Home Island Residents Cannot Return To
Grandmother Huang Chen-yu moved from Gueishan Island to Toucheng more than thirty years ago, yet every night she still dreams of life on the island. For Yilan people on shore, Gueishan Island is the foremost of the Eight Views of Lanyang and the landmark at the Snow Mountain Tunnel exit that says, "almost home." For the Gueishan Islanders who actually lived there, it is an ancestral home exchanged in the 1970s through a relocation without compensation. Visible but unreachable; reachable but unlivable. In 1975, writer Wu Min-hsien called it "an island soon to be forgotten." Half a century later, it has not been forgotten; what is remembered is the scenery and legend, while those who lived there have been forgotten.
Guling Street: The Book Street the Japanese Left Behind, Edward Yang's Adolescents, and the Nationalist Government's Palaces
On a Saturday afternoon, students line up in front of the red-brick theater at the end of Lane 5, Guling Street. Next to it are the National Museum of History, built in 1955, and the lotus pond of the Taipei Botanical Garden, reorganized in 1921. This 1.2-kilometer street was called Sakuma-cho in 1922 and renamed Guling Street in 1947 after Lushan in Jiangxi. After 1945, the books left behind when the Japanese withdrew were laid out along the roadside and became Taiwan's first used-book street. At its 1960s peak there were more than 200 vendors. After Guanghua Bridge opened in April 1973, the vendors were cleared out and moved beneath the Guanghua overpass. On June 15, 1961, on this street, 16-year-old Mao Wu killed 15-year-old Liu Min with a scout knife. In 1991, Edward Yang made the incident into a 237-minute film. The book street was dismantled, the stalls moved, and students began buying books elsewhere. What remains are the Japanese-era red-brick former police precinct, the postwar Chinese palace-style museum, and the lotus pond that has been in the same place since 1921.
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.
Hsinchu City: The Bamboo Fortress Planted in 1733, the Cradle That Grew TSMC in 1980
In 1733, the 11th year of the Yongzheng reign, Magistrate Xu Zhimin of the Tamsui Subprefecture planted thorny bamboo all around the settlement, enclosing a circular earthen wall 1,408 meters in circumference. In 1829, the brick-and-stone city was completed; the East Gate, Yingximen (Gate of Greeting the Dawn), still stands beside its moat today. 247 years later, on December 15, 1980, Chiang Ching-kuo cut the red ribbon for Taiwan's first science park, just 5 kilometers from Yingximen. Between 1953 and 1974, 148 members of the Black Bat Squadron took off from this Wind City to conduct reconnaissance over mainland China and never came back. A provincial city of 450,000 people that held the Cold War front line, the earliest Han-built city in northern Taiwan, two top universities, and the starting point of 90% of the world's advanced semiconductor chips. The nickname 'Wind City' sounds literary, but every industry in this city is connected to the wind.
Hsinchu County: A 235-Year Yimin Faith and Taiwan’s Highest Per Capita Income Along the Same Touqian River
In the winter of 1788, Baozhong Pavilion was founded on a hillside in Xinpu to collectively bury more than 200 Hakka yimin who died in the Lin Shuangwen Rebellion. Two hundred thirty-five years later, the rotating ritual circuit of the Yimin Festival on the twentieth day of the seventh lunar month is still running among the Fifteen Lianzhuang. Five kilometers away, Zhubei City ranked first among Taiwan’s 368 townships, towns, cities, and districts in 2025 with per capita income of NT$1.442 million, magnetized by TSMC’s Baoshan Phase II 2-nanometer wafer fab. Hsinchu County is 67.8% Hakka, the highest share in Taiwan. But among the 220,000 people in the county seat of Zhubei, fewer young Hakka people can afford homes in their own hometown.
Hualien County: The Sakizaya Hidden for 129 Years, the Truku Reclaimed Through Name Rectification, and 0403 Pushed It Away Again
In 1878, Qing troops bound Komod Pazik, chief of the Takubuwan community, to a bishop wood tree and executed him by lingchi; the Sakizaya hid within the Amis for 129 years. In 2004, the Truku emerged from the Atayal classification to become the 12th recognized Indigenous people; in 2007, during the Chen Shui-bian administration's second term, the Sakizaya were recognized as the 13th. At 7:58 a.m. on April 3, 2024, those 98 seconds of the 0403 earthquake, magnitude 7.1, smashed Taroko National Park's Swallow Grotto, Tunnel of Nine Turns, and Shakadang Trail all at once. In 2024, tourists fell to just 210,000; in a normal year there are 6.6 million. On a strip of land between mountains and sea that narrows to just 5 kilometers, the fates of six Indigenous peoples have always shaken with the tectonic plates.
Kaohsiung City: In 1979, the Year It Became a Direct-Controlled Municipality, Eight Kaohsiung People Were Imprisoned in Taipei
On July 1, 1979, Kaohsiung was upgraded into Taiwan’s second direct-controlled municipality. On December 10, Human Rights Day, a Formosa Magazine speech at Dagangpu traffic circle turned into a clash under tear gas. Eight people were sentenced. On February 28, 1980, a massacre was reported at Lin Yi-hsiung’s home on Xinyi Road in Taipei. In the same year, 1979, Kaohsiung gained administrative glory and swallowed the heaviest political repression in postwar Taiwan. Its 2.71 million people are spread across 38 districts: the sandbar of Cijin, Bunun communities in Namasia, China Steel smokestacks, and Weiwuying’s aluminum-alloy roof all share one city. Over 45 years, this city stitched its wounds into a shape of its own.
Keelung 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.
Miaoli County: A Hakka Stubborn-Spirited County That Elected a Magistrate Who More Than Doubled Its Debt in Eight Years
During the Japanese period, Miaoli accounted for 95% of Taiwan's camphor output, and Sanyi built its woodcarving industry from the roots left after camphor refining. In 2002, Beihe Village in Gongguan held the first Tung Blossom Festival. In 2008, Liu Cheng-hung took over a county with NT$20.2 billion in debt; by the time he left office in 2014, the books showed NT$67.6 billion. In between came Zhu Feng-min drinking pesticide, the forced demolition of Chang Pharmacy, and the NT$120 million Hakka Round House becoming a mosquito hall. Today, 530,000 people live in this county, whose 62.5% Hakka population share is Taiwan's second highest.
Nantou County: The Only Landlocked County, with the 921 Earthquake Epicenter at Its Center
At 1:47 a.m. on September 21, 1999, the Chelungpu Fault beneath Jiji Township ruptured for 102 seconds. Across Taiwan, 2,415 people died; Nantou alone accounted for 886 deaths, and 90 percent of buildings in Zhongliao Township were damaged. On the day of the flag-raising ceremony at Wushe Public School in 1930, Mona Rudao led six Seediq communities in killing 134 Japanese civilians. In 1934, the Wujie Dam raised the water level by 18.18 meters, submerging the Thao people's Lalu Island. In 1957, Zhongxing New Village was completed as the Taiwan Provincial Government's temporary office site; after the 1998 downsizing of the province hollowed it out, only the coconut-palm boulevard remained. Some 470,000 people live in this inland county, rising from 100 meters to 3,952 meters above sea level, where Seediq, Bunun, Thao, Tsou, and Han people live together. Taiwan's deepest wounds are all here.
New Taipei City: The Ring Metropolis Around Taipei, Where 4.01 Million People Sustain the Capital’s Commute, Industry, and Memory
Fort San Domingo in Tamsui has stood for 398 years since the Spanish laid its first brick in 1628. That is 247 years before Shen Baozhen established Taipei Prefecture in 1875. Today, New Taipei City’s 29 districts surround Taipei City’s 12 districts; 4.01 million people live in Taiwan’s largest special municipality, and 390,000 commute across city and county lines to work in Taipei. But this “ring metropolis” is not Taipei’s bedroom community: it has the Banqiao Lin Family from 1853, oolong tea shipped from Tamsui to New York in 1869, Jiufen and Jinguashi as Asia’s first gold-mining district in the 1890s, the Pingxi Railway that carried coal in 1929, the Sanxia Zushi Temple carvings begun by Li Mei-shu in 1947, and the Tranan community of the Atayal people in Wulai. New Taipei is a microcosm of Taiwan’s 400 years, located just outside Taipei City.
Penghu County: Twice Rejecting Casinos, the Chrysanthemum Islands Chose More Than Frugality
On September 26, 2009, votes were counted in Magong: 17,359 opposed, and the casino side lost by 3,962 votes. Seven years later, in 2016, Penghu voted again: 81.07% opposed. An outlying island county with only 1,000 millimeters of annual rainfall, 108,000 registered residents but only 80,000 usual residents, held Taiwan's first local gambling referendum and then held another one. In the same stretch of sea, Shen Yourong forced the Dutch to withdraw in 1604; in 1622 the Dutch moved from Fengguiwei to Tainan; in 1885 the French commander Courbet died of illness in Makung Harbor. The 17.4-million-year-old basalt columns are still there: 89 islands are black volcanic rock, and one is older andesite. In winter, inside the stone walls of vegetable gardens, crops grow in the lee.
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.
Taichung City: Nearly Became 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 chosen at Qiaozitou in Changhua County (today’s downtown Taichung), where an eight-trigram-shaped walled city was planned. Construction began in 1889. After Shao Youlian took office in 1894, the provincial capital was moved north to Taipei, and work on Taichung’s provincial city stopped. On October 1, 1920, the Japanese established Taichung Prefecture here. In 1955, Tunghai University broke ground on Dadu Mountain, and Luce Memorial Chapel was completed in 1963. In the early hours of September 21, 1999, the Chelungpu Fault tore from Jiji in Nantou all the way to Dongshi in Taichung; 358 people died in Dongshi Township. On December 25, 2010, the county and city merged and were upgraded into a special municipality with 29 districts. In 2016, Toyo Ito’s National Taichung Theater opened in Xitun District. 2.86 million people live in this city that waited 123 years.
Tainan City: 261 Years as Capital, 400 Years of Monuments, and 21st-Century Chips Layered on the Same Land
In 1624, the Dutch began building Fort Zeelandia on the dunes of Tayouan; on February 1, 1662, Frederik Coyett signed the surrender papers in that fort, and on February 9 left the beach with 2,000 Dutch people. In 1665, Chen Yonghua built the Confucius Temple, later known as Taiwan's First Academy. In 1684, the Qing court established Taiwan Prefecture in present-day Tainan; in 1885 Taiwan became a province, the provincial capital moved north to Taipei, and Tainan's 261-year status as capital ended. At noon on March 13, 1947, Tang Te-chang was bound, forced onto a truck at Minsheng Green Park, paraded through the streets, and then three gunshots rang out. On December 25, 2010, city-county merger created 37 districts and a population of 1.86 million. In 2023, Southern Taiwan Science Park's annual revenue reached NT$1.5 trillion, surpassing Hsinchu Science Park. Three layers of history press down on the same middle stretch of the Chianan Plain.
Taipei City: Three Times Within One City, Longshan Temple of 1738 Looking at Taipei 101 of 2004
Wanhua has Longshan Temple, built in 1738. Three kilometers away, on New Year's Eve 2004, Taipei 101 was completed on land that had been the Japanese-era Songshan Warehouse and the postwar 44th Arsenal; at that moment it was the tallest building in the world. Walk again to Dadaocheng, where in the 1860s Li Chunsheng used one shipload of oolong tea to sustain all of northern Taiwan's external trade. In the same basin, the three times of 1738, 1885, and 2004 sit side by side. In 1875 Shen Baozhen established Taipei Prefecture; in 1920 the Japanese merged three market towns into Taipei City; in 1947 Lin Jiangmai's packet of illicit cigarettes ignited the February 28 Incident; in 1949 the Nationalist government brought 1.2 million people to Taipei; in 1967 it was upgraded into Taiwan's first special municipality; in 1990 the Wild Lily movement sat at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall for seven days and six nights. Twelve districts, living in different centuries.
Taitung County: Two Offshore Islands, One Held Political Prisoners for Thirty-Six Years, the Other Has Stored Nuclear Waste for Forty-Two Years
Taitung County's 210,000 people are scattered across 3,515 square kilometers, the lowest density in the country: only 60 people per square kilometer, one percent of Taipei's. Yet this county contains Taiwan's earliest human settlement (the Peinan Site, 5,300 years ago, with 1,600 stone coffins), is home to six Indigenous peoples (Amis, Puyuma, Paiwan, Rukai, Bunun, Tao), and has Taiwan's highest Indigenous population share at 37.5%. From 1951 to 1987, Green Island's Huoshao Island held political prisoners for thirty-six years. Beginning in May 1982, Longmen on Lanyu began receiving nuclear waste; forty-two years later, 97,672 barrels are still there. On August 25, 1968, seven Bunun children from Hongye Village defeated Japan's Kansai Little League all-star team seven to zero (not a world championship team), and Taiwan's myth of baseball as the national sport began with this deception. Two offshore islands have borne the cost of an entire island.
Taoyuan City: Taiwan's Gateway for Imports and Exports, the Largest Hakka Population, the Most Migrant Workers — All on This Tableland
On the evening of November 19, 1977, tens of thousands of people surrounded the Zhongli Police Station. Police opened fire from elevated positions, killing Chiang Wen-kuo, a student at National Central University, and 19-year-old Chang Chih-ping. Hsin-liang Hsu was elected Taoyuan County Magistrate by a landslide margin of 230,000 to 140,000 votes. One year and three months later, on February 26, 1979, Chiang Kai-shek International Airport opened, and Taiwan's gateway to the world moved from Keelung Harbor to this tableland. On December 25, 2014, Taoyuan was upgraded to a special municipality — the sixth and last of the six. Today 2.35 million people live on this 1,221-square-kilometer tableland. The Hakka population exceeds 800,000, the most of any county or city in Taiwan, and the migrant worker population of 132,158 is also the highest in the nation. Taoyuan is Taiwan's most diverse border.
Treasure Hill: The Informal Settlement Slated for Demolition for 30 Years That Became Taipei’s Coolest Artist Village
In July 1980, the Taipei City Government designated this hilltop as the planned site of Park No. 297, putting more than 200 illegal structures into a state of “waiting to be demolished.” Actual demolitions took place in 1993, 1994, and 2001, but after the 1997 Kangle Li incident, the city shifted toward “in-situ preservation,” and the international artist village opened on October 2, 2010. Thirty years of demolition rulings ultimately became an “art-residence symbiosis” settlement that has hosted more than 500 artists from over 40 countries: a Guanyin temple first renovated in 1791, a group of people who built their own homes in the 1960s, more than 20 original households that stayed, and a rotating cohort of international resident artists every three months, all living together on a small 46-meter-high hill.
Ximending: The Entertainment Street the Japanese Built in 1896 Is Still Taipei’s Youngest Street 130 Years Later
In December 1908, the Ximen Red House designed by Juro Kondo opened for business: two brick market buildings, an octagonal hall and a cruciform building, that the Japanese Empire gave Taipei as its own 'Asakusa.' Thirty years later the Japanese left. In 1961, the eight buildings of Chunghwa Market grew along the longitudinal railway, and in 1992 they were demolished together with the railway. In 1999, the pedestrian zone was designated and the Bannan Line opened, turning Ximending into Taipei youths’ open-air living room. From outside the Qing-era city walls, to a Japanese-era entertainment district, a postwar movie street, martial-law-era MTV lounges, post-martial-law hip-hop and skateboarding, and on to cosplay and gay bars in 2026 — beneath the same octagonal hall, five generations of young people have already passed through.
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.
Yongkang Street: Where Japanese Professors Once Lived, Mainlanders Fled to, and Japanese and Korean Tourists Now Find Their Taipei
At 7:30 in the morning, under the old trees beside Yongkang Park, an elderly mainlander grandfather sits on a stone bench holding the morning paper. In 1922, the Japanese planned Shōwachō here; Taipei Imperial University faculty lived in Japanese-style dormitories at No. 7 Qingtian Street. After 1947, mainlander officials and National Taiwan University professors took over the same dormitories: Ma Ting-ying moved into Qingtian 76, and Chou Te-wei moved into what is now Wistaria Tea House. In 1958, Yang Bing-yi opened Din Tai Fung as a cooking-oil shop on Section 2, Xinyi Road; in 1972 it switched to selling xiaolongbao. Today, in the queue stretching to the bend at Jinshan South Road, Japanese and Korean are heard more than Mandarin. Three generations of residents are layered onto the same 600-meter street.
Yunlin County: What Yilan Chose to Reject, Yunlin Paid for with Thirty Years of Its Lungs
On December 13, 1987, Chen Ding-nan kept the Sixth Naphtha Cracker out of Yilan in a CTS studio. On June 26, 1991, the Executive Yuan approved moving the Sixth Naphtha Cracker to the waters off Mailiao, Yunlin. Construction formally began in July 1994, Phase I fired up in 1998, and 2,255 hectares have since been reclaimed from the sea. In 2011, a team led by Chan Chang-chuan at National Taiwan University's College of Public Health found that residents within 10 kilometers of the Sixth Naphtha Cracker had a cancer incidence 1.29 times Taiwan's average. Yet within the same county, Beigang Chaotian Temple has worshipped Mazu for 332 years since 1694, the 33rd year of the Qing Kangxi reign, and U.S. aid steel held up the 1,939-meter Xiluo Bridge on January 28, 1953. One county is at once home to one of Taiwan's oldest Mazu temples, its most important rice granary, and its largest petrochemical kingdom.
Zhongshan North Road Tiaotong: A Road the Japanese Built to Reach a Shrine, Ultimately Taken Back by Japanese Firms
On April 17, 1923, 19-year-old Japanese Crown Prince Hirohito rode by carriage from Taihoku Station along a 15-meter-wide road toward Taiwan Shrine at Yuanshan. The road was called Chokushi Kaido. In 1941, it was widened into a 40-meter, five-lane boulevard. In 1945 it was renamed Zhongshan North Road to commemorate Sun Yat-sen. In 1951, after the Korean War brought U.S. forces to Taiwan, Section 3 of Zhongshan North Road became an 'American concession.' In 1972, after Taiwan and Japan severed diplomatic relations, Japanese firms did not leave; in 1979, U.S. forces left; in the 1980s, Japanese firms took over Tiaotong. A road the Japanese built to reach a shrine was ultimately taken back by Japanese trading houses.
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.
Dragon Boat Festival: A Toolkit Ancient People Used to Fight Death, Which Taiwanese Turned into an Annual Reunion
In the 2025 Comprehensive Assessment Program for Junior High School Students, one question asked fifteen-year-old students to design an experiment refuting the superstition of “balancing an egg at Dragon Boat Festival.” That scene condensed the secret of the entire holiday: mugwort, realgar wine, noon water, and the upright egg were all originally tools ancient people used to fight plague and death. Science has punctured their medicinal claims one by one, but Dragon Boat Festival in Taiwan is more alive than ever. The medicine has expired, yet Taiwanese still take it every year.
Shopping Design: A Magazine That Teaches You to Curate Design, Ultimately Asking You to Judge Itself
Launched in 2006 with a white-themed first issue, Shopping Design has spent two decades turning 'design' from an exhibition-bound noun into a daily verb for browsing and selecting goods. What it truly taught Taiwan is that 'discernment' can be cultivated as a skill—and it expanded this skill into an annual Top 100 list, a quarterly magazine, a carnival, and even onto its parent company's single 'magazine publishing + advertising services' license. Thus, this magazine that teaches you to discern ultimately asks you to discern itself.
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.
Taiwan Advertising History: The Product Is Forgotten, But We Still Hum the Jingle
In 1968, the Tatung electric cooker's jingle sounded on television. Half a century later, people in Taiwan can still continue with 'Tatung, Tatung, domestic goods are good,' yet almost no one remembers that the melody was originally Sanyo's. From the print advertisements of the Japanese colonial-era Taiwan Nichinichi Shinpō, to the martial-law decades when only three television stations bound the whole country's attention to the same channels, and then to 2016, when digital advertising spending surpassed television, Taiwan's most remembered advertisements often leave the products they sold forgotten, while preserving the sound of an entire era.
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?
Taiwan Soundscape: Garbage Trucks Playing Classical Music, MRT Birdsongs, and an Island Often Heard but Rarely Listened To
In the same year, Taipei Metro invited Summer Lei and CinCin Lee to turn arrival music into art, while removing the melody from its door-closing warning tone and changing it back to birdsong. Sound was aestheticized and functionalized at once. The sounds Taiwan seeks to eliminate through the Noise Control Act are, in fact, the landmarks by which we recognize that 'this is home.' A question from a master’s student in soundscape studies: understanding Taiwan can begin by asking, 'What sounds have we become accustomed to ignoring?'
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.
Taiwanese Noodle Culture
From danzai noodles to beef noodle soup, from yangchun noodles to dry mixed noodles, Taiwanese noodle culture blends Hokkien, Mainland Chinese, and innovative elements to form a unique noodle culinary tradition
Paul Chiang: After Forty-Five Years Away from Taiwan, Only After Coming Home Could He Paint the Best Work of His Life
In the winter of 1967, twenty-five-year-old Paul Chiang rushed to Paris to find Giacometti, only to discover that his idol had died the previous year. Over the next forty-five years, he sealed off the windows of his New York SoHo studio to search for the light within; in 1975, his Lamagna Gallery exhibition failed to sell a single painting. In the year his father fell in the 1990s, he returned to the incense smoke of Longshan Temple and painted the “Centennial Temple” series. He settled in Jinzun, Taitung in 2008 at the age of sixty-five; by the time the Paul Chiang Art Center opened in 2025, he was eighty-three.
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.
The Li Poetry Society: A Group Forced to Forget Japanese Sustained Taiwan’s Longest-Running Chinese Poetry Journal
In 1958, a 36-year-old Taiwanese former Japanese soldier published his first post-war Chinese poem under the pen name 'Huan Fu,' eleven years after he stopped writing in Japanese. Six years later, he and eleven others met in a living room in central Taiwan to transform this generation's experience of linguistic loss into a poetry society called 'Li'—a journal that has never ceased publication for 60 years, bringing local poetics from the margins into junior high school textbooks.
Taiwan Travelogue: A Book 'Translated by Her Younger Sister,' from SpringHill to the London Prize Stage
On the day her younger sister Yang Jo-hui died in June 2015, Yang Jo-tzu opened the account books she had left behind and began keeping records, taking three days to decipher the code of check marks and circles. Five years later, SpringHill Publishing released Taiwan Travelogue under the byline 'written by Chizuko Aoyama, translated by Yang Shuang-zi' - the translator's name was that of her deceased sister. From the 2024 National Book Awards in New York to the 2026 Booker Prize in London, she translated a nonexistent book in her sister's name.
Yeh Ting-Hao: The Audiovisual Artist Who Forced Accidents Out of 'Incorrect' Uses of Technology, Leaving Behind an Entire Ecosystem at 43
Born in Taoyuan in 1981, trained in computer animation at Fu Jen Catholic University's Department of Applied Arts and in technological art at Taipei National University of the Arts, Yeh Ting-Hao was known to friends as PUTA. From helping found Lacking Sound Festival in 2007, forming the audiovisual duo HH with Yao Chung-Han in 2013, co-running TouchDesignerTW in 2017, and taking over Fluid Noise in 2018, he was always doing one thing: taking tools apart so more people could use them. He died prematurely on November 12, 2024, at the age of 43. What he left behind was not a list of personal works, but the entire ecosystem of Taiwanese audiovisual art.
Sodagreen: It Took Them Twenty Years to Realize They Had to Litigate for Their Own Name
Formed by four students on the stage of the 2001 National Chengchi University Golden Melody Awards; discovered by Lin Weizhe at the 2003 Keelung Sea Music Festival; after completing the Vivaldi Project's fourth installment and touring Beijing and Berlin, they were sued in 2019 and only reclaimed their name at the Taipei Arena in 2023—Sodagreen spent twenty years learning that the first step for a Taiwanese indie band to debut is to register their band name.
Sunset Rollercoaster: From a Photo Booth Background Shot to Coachella, 14 Years of Singing Taipei Sunsets in English
In 2010, a 19-year-old student casually chose the Mac Photo Booth preset 'Sunset Rollercoaster' as his MySpace profile picture. Fourteen years later, the band became the first Taiwanese band in more than two decades to be invited to Coachella. All-English lyrics, subtropical City Pop, and no reliance on the music industry system: from a casually selected silhouette of a roller coaster, they created one of the ways Taiwan has been heard most clearly by the world.
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.
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.
Taiwan AI Academy: The Unfinished Phone Call and Ten Thousand AI Engineers
On March 27, 2020, Chen Sheng-wei solemnly called the editor-in-chief of CommonWealth Magazine: he wanted to create a free programming course for the public. Two days later, he fell while inline skating; 13 days after that, he died at age 44. When he passed away, Taiwan AI Academy (AIA), which he had founded in 2018, had already trained more than 6,000 people. At the same time, the National Development Council’s “AI Small Country, Big Strategy” called for NT$16 billion over five years; Chen built his own school with NT$180 million in private fundraising from six companies, including Formosa Plastics, Chimei, and Inventec. Eight years later, alumni exceeded 10,000. AIA is the most un-Taiwan-like piece of Taiwan’s industrial upgrading puzzle.
Taiwan BIM and Construction Technology: Twelve Years of Government Case-by-Case Gradualism Rewritten by an Eighteen-Month Protocol
On May 23, 2014, the Public Construction Commission of the Executive Yuan launched the “Platform for Promoting BIM in Public Works,” adopting the eight-character policy of “case-by-case application and gradual progress.” Eleven years and seven months later, a Taiwan developer working in Tokyo pushed a repository called REVIT_MCP_study to GitHub, where it drew more than seventy stars and more than eighty forks. In the twelve years between those moments, Taiwan’s architecture and construction industry traveled a long road from hand-drawn blueprints to 3D models, from individual experiments to national standards, and from tool upgrades to occupational redefinition.
The Daan River Heaven Sword: East Asia's Tallest Tree Hid for Seven Hundred Years in a Place We Could Not Reach
During the 2023 Lunar New Year, the Tree Finder team spent seven days tracing the Daan River upstream. In a deep valley near its headwaters, a place almost no one can reach, they lowered a tape measure from the crown of a Taiwania tree: 84.1 meters, the tallest tree in East Asia. It was 4.6 meters taller than LiDAR had predicted. On a country swept by typhoons every year, where slopes collapse and floods surge, life of this height should not, in theory, still exist. Yet precisely because it grew in a valley humans could not reach, it escaped the era of large-scale logging and survived for seven hundred years. The same inaccessibility that kept it alive also meant that only after scanning all of Taiwan with lasers did we see it for the first time that year.
Tawny Fish Owl: One Pair per Six Kilometers of Stream, a Nocturnal Raptor in a 1,800-Meter Michelia Tree
In April 2026, National Pingtung University of Science and Technology assistant professor Hung Hsiao-yu located Taiwan's highest known Tawny Fish Owl nest in a tree hollow of a Michelia compressa with a diameter at breast height of about 1.5 meters beside Qijiawan Creek, at roughly 1,800 meters above sea level. Taiwan's largest owl was first recorded only in 1916 by the Japanese scholar Nagamichi Kuroda. Sun Yuan-hsun's laboratory at National Pingtung University of Science and Technology has followed it for thirty years; across 91 territories, each pair needs an average of 6.2 kilometers of stream. A stretch of stream not yet poured in concrete, a giant tree not yet fallen: the Tawny Fish Owl lives in the narrow space where two things in Taiwan's mountain forests have not yet disappeared.
Au Sow Yee: The Malaysian Curator Who Brought the "Archipelago" into Taiwan’s Art World
In 2003 she left Kuala Lumpur for Taipei to study at Taipei National University of the Arts, thinking she was only passing through; fourteen years later, in Taipei, she began replacing the Cold War name “Southeast Asia” with “Nusantara,” or “archipelago,” bringing the Malay world’s self-naming into Taiwan’s curatorial discourse. From the fictional-place trilogy The Mengkerang Project and The Kris Project entering the Singapore Art Museum collection, to her 2024 collaboration with Chen Yow-Ruu interviewing stateless children in Malaysia, she once said in an NML interview: “It is precisely because of my ‘absence’ that I could make this work.”
Chen Chien-nien: The Golden Melody King in the Police Station, the Grandfather’s Songs the Grandson Turned into Ocean
Born on August 1, 1967, in the Nanwang community of the Puyuma people in Taitung. After graduating from the police academy in 1986, he was assigned to Guanshan, Taitung, and served in the police force for 30 years and 10 months. In 1999, at age 33, he released his first album of original songs, Ocean. At the 11th Golden Melody Awards in 2000, he defeated Jacky Cheung, Wang Leehom, David Tao, and Harlem Yu to win Best Mandarin Male Vocalist; at the same ceremony, “Myth” also won Best Composer. On the awards stage, he was still a police officer. In September that year, he requested a transfer to Lanyu to avoid the turmoil, and stayed there for 17 years until retirement. His maternal grandfather, Baliwakes Lu Sen-bao, wrote “Beautiful Rice Ears”; it took the grandson thirty years to take hold of that musical line.
Cheng Chou-yu: The Wanderer Who Wrote “Error” and Finally Registered His Household in Kinmen
In 1955, the 22-year-old Cheng Chou-yu wrote in On Dreamland, “My clattering horse’s hooves are a beautiful error,” and Taiwanese readers read it as a love poem for seventy years. In his later years, however, he clarified that it was an antiwar poem, depicting the scene of his mother in China’s interior during the War of Resistance, waiting in vain for his father to come home. In 2005, after retiring from Yale, he returned to Taiwan and moved his household registration into that of Cheng clan relatives in Kinmen County. At 4:44 a.m. on June 13, 2025, he died in the United States of heart failure at the age of 91.
Chi Huai-hsin: The Taiwanese Researcher Who Taught AI to Think Step by Step and Brought Cognitive Psychology Into Machines
Chi Huai-hsin is a vice president of research at Google DeepMind and a co-author of the chain-of-thought paper that taught AI to reason step by step. Raised in Tamsui, this Taiwanese researcher turned the concept of how humans learn in cognitive psychology, Piaget's schema theory, into a method for teaching machines to reason. And the breakthrough that changed AI cost only about US$5,000, because it was never a problem that compute could solve.
Howhow: The Person Who Laid Sponsored Content Out in the Sun, and the Increasingly Expensive Honesty He Sustains Alone
In 2015, a YouTuber with fewer than 100,000 followers was flown to New York by Samsung. He thought he was being hired as a photographer and saved the contact as "great benefactor." Chen Tzu-hao later turned the advertising that creators most want to hide into his signature with the line "straight into the sponsored-content topic!" Sustaining 1.54 million subscribers by writing, directing, acting, and editing alone, he nevertheless dislikes loneliness and has always wanted a team; the long-form videos he insists on making now sit precisely in the lane most heavily crushed by short-form video.
Huang Shanliao: No one looked at the champion's clothes, so he started selling 'a sentence of comfort'
In 2014, a son of a Kinmen snack shop walked the runway of the London Graduate Fashion Week in a military-style design called 'Kinmen 1969' and won the international first prize. When he returned to Taiwan to look for a job, HR treated his resume as fake because 'no reports could be found online.' He angrily created his own media, then switched to writing healing short sentences of no more than 28 characters, selling over 300,000 copies. No one looked at the cabinet of clothes telling the history of the war zone, so he changed to selling 'a sentence of comfort': Taiwan's attention market buys sentences that can be read in a glance, not things that are made.
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.
Samuel Yin: The Science Prize He Built Is Worth More Than a Nobel
At 4:21 a.m. on May 26, 2026, Samuel Yin, chairman of the Ruentex Group, passed away at Taipei Veterans General Hospital at the age of 76. From a brawling teenager whose wounds were dressed by Wang Jin-pyng at Chin Teh Middle School, to the man who walked into a dust-covered Peking University in 1989 and funded the founding of the Guanghua School of Management, to the 2012 donation of a NT$3 billion trust fund to establish the Tang Prize — with each category carrying a prize of NT$50 million, exceeding the Nobel. A Taiwanese businessman who just left the world a prize more valuable than a Nobel.
Su Beng: How a Dumpling Shop Sustained Four Decades of Taiwan's Revolution
Su Beng, whose birth name was Shih Chao-hui, once worked as an underground intelligence agent for the Chinese Communist Party in China. After witnessing the massacres of land‑reform campaigns, he became disillusioned, returned to Taiwan to plot the assassination of Chiang Kai-shek, and fled to Japan when the plot failed. In Tokyo’s Ikebukuro he opened a noodle shop called “Shin Chinmi,” selling dumplings by day and writing Taiwanese history by night. The shop’s income funded the Taiwan independence movement for forty years and produced the nation‑awakening work *Four Hundred Years of Taiwan History*.
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.
Chinese Taipei: The Ticket That Lets Taiwan Compete but Can’t Print Its Own Name
At the 1960 Rome Olympics, the Taiwan delegation entered the opening ceremony holding a white banner reading “UNDER PROTEST,” the only opening‑ceremony protest in Olympic history. From Chiang Ching‑kuo’s refusal of the IOC‑offered “Taiwan,” to Hsu Heng‑ko’s legal victory and the Lausanne Agreement that secured the plum‑blossom flag and anthem, to the 2018 athletes’ referendum that rejected a name change—this name has not changed in forty years, yet the athletes who must rely on it to step onto the podium are caught in a dilemma, not the politicians arguing over the name.
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.
National Museum of Taiwan History: The Eighth Gallery Is Called "You, Too, Are Someone Who Writes History"
The National Museum of Taiwan History, which opened in 2011, calls the eighth gallery of its permanent exhibition "You, Too, Are Someone Who Writes History." This national third-level agency has released 140,000 collection items under the Open Government Data License, version 1.0, while Director Chang Lung-chih has publicly positioned the museum as a project of "co-writing and co-creation by all." When this national museum meets a community-driven open-source knowledge base in the age of AI, collective memory gains a second curatorial form.
PanSci: From the Black Hole of Science News to the Knowledge Industry Inside the Algorithm
In 2011, Cheng Kuo-wei and Hsu Ting-yao turned a canceled project into PanSci. Later academic research would treat it as an important node in the democratization of science communication in Taiwan; but its real problem has been that public scientific discussion must first survive through advertising, courses, video, and algorithms.
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.
National Housing and Housing Justice: The Cheap Homes Built by the Government, and Whose Asset Escalator They Ultimately Created
In 1985, Chenggong National Housing cost NT$67,000 per ping and still had no buyers; an old borough chief scraped together a NT$400,000 down payment and bought a unit. Forty years later, the same address is nearing NT$1 million per ping. National Housing was supposed to be a tool to help people afford homes, but it was never fitted with a gate to recapture appreciation. Public subsidy ultimately became private assets for early buyers. In 2026, Taoyuan put that gate back in, effectively admitting National Housing’s mistake.
Taiwan’s Stray Animal Culture: From Twelve Nights to the Death of a Leopard Cat, the Trolley Problem of Animal Protection and Wildlife Conservation
In 2013, Twelve Nights moved the entire island to tears; in February 2017, Taiwan became East Asia's first zero-culling country. Eight years later, at six o'clock on the evening of May 11, 2023, a young leopard cat died in the jaws of a free-ranging cat. The Ministry of Agriculture's 2022 survey counted 159,697 free-ranging dogs nationwide, and automatic cameras operated by the Leopard Cat Association of Taiwan found dogs at 91% of leopard cat activity sites. Animal protection and wildlife conservation are not opposites. The issue is that this island still has more than a million lives with no one to take responsibility for them. This article does not take sides; it examines a question Taiwan has not yet finished answering.
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.
Taiwan Design Research Institute: The Agency That Sneaks Design into Health Centers and Ballot Papers
In 2022, after the renovation of the ticketing area at Zhongshan Station on the Taipei MRT, someone commented, "Well done, don't do it again." An institution that survives on the Golden Pin Awards, a design exhibition attended by millions, and an international ranking places its biggest gamble where you "don't feel"—the waiting area of a health center in Xizhi, the font on your ballot paper. From "Made in Taiwan is synonymous with counterfeit" to "Design power is national power," the Taiwan Design Research Institute aims to prove that this manufacturing island can decide what things look like, including how the government meets its people.
Taiwan and Eswatini: Africa's Last Diplomatic Lifeline Hangs on One Person
At 9 a.m. on May 2, 2026, Lai Ching-te landed in Mbabane aboard an A340 special aircraft loaned by the king of Eswatini. It was the first time a Taiwanese president's flight permits had been revoked under Chinese pressure, with the king of a diplomatic ally ultimately sending a plane to Taipei to receive him. From the establishment of diplomatic relations on the same day as Eswatini's independence in 1968 to Taiwan's last remaining ally in Africa; from an absolute monarch whose birth year completely overlaps with the history of those diplomatic ties to the 46 lives lost in his own country's 2021 crackdown; from red-fleshed guavas entering SUPERSPAR to China's zero-tariff treatment for 53 African countries deliberately skipping Eswatini. These 58 years of relations between Taiwan and Eswatini are the most concrete textbook on what it means to be a 'sovereign state' and also an unanswered question.
Taiwan's Sports Development and the Olympics: A Team Called “Chinese Taipei”
In Montreal in 1976, Canada demanded a name change to “Taiwan,” and Chiang Ching-kuo treated it as a national humiliation and withdrew the team. In Paris in 2024, on the night the “Lee-Yang” pair defended their men’s doubles title, the whole arena sang the National Flag Anthem lyrics beneath the plum blossom flag. From the “Taiwan” that could not enter to a world beginning to call the team Taiwan, every generation of gold medalists has carried the weight of this cap called “Chinese Taipei.”
The Reporter: Ten Years of Turning Investigative Journalism from a Line of Business into a Public Good
From 4 recurring donors to 8,000 each month, from the Blood-Stained Fishing Grounds trilogy to the 2026 united-front special report, the costs The Reporter has burned through over a decade--eight months undercover, reporting across three countries, comparing years of violation records--are exactly the things people least want to pay to read in the algorithmic age. Taiwan's civil society, through monthly deductions from strangers' accounts, has rescued investigative journalism from a line of business in commercial media and turned it into a public good that is constantly being sustained, even as it burns through resources ever faster.
AAMA Taipei Cradle Program: A Group That Could Have Retired, Handing Over Craftsmanship in the Slowest Way
In 2012, a group of people who could have retired sat down in a small room in Taipei and promised to accompany an entrepreneur for two years: no equity, no interference in daily operations, only handing over craftsmanship. Thirteen years and fifteen cohorts, the list includes Appier, Social Enterprise Stream, and Portaly; the founders still say the road is only half done. The slowest inheritance is written into the system, shortcuts cannot be copied—the names on the wall, most are still on the way.
SLP Taipei Startup Leadership Program: A class that started at NT$6,000, now NT$58,000 still hard to get
In 2012 a group of entrepreneurs self‑funded a class in Taipei; the first cohort’s one‑time fee was NT$6,000, less than NT$100 per hour. Fourteen years later the same program became an institutionalized community where over a hundred applicants compete for thirty spots and the fee approaches NT$58,000, yet the website still claims that “all funds are used for participants.” This is a mutual‑aid history of Taiwan’s startup scene sustained by personal connections and pragmatism.
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.
National Highways: From MacArthur Freeway to Hsuehshan Tunnel, Fifty Years of Power and Speed on Taiwan's Expressways
In 1964, the MacArthur Freeway was only 23 kilometers long; today Taiwan's national highway network exceeds 1,000 kilometers. From the Chiang Ching-kuo–championed Sun Yat-sen Freeway, the politically mocked Formosa Freeway, the world's most difficult-to-dig Hsuehshan Tunnel, to ETC reshaping every driver's toll-paying habits—each ribbon of asphalt records postwar Taiwan's political will, engineering limits, and civic resistance.
Sat, July 18
4 articlesThe Soundscape of Taiwan
From 'Für Elise' played by garbage trucks to the Bunun Pasibutbut eight-part harmony — understanding Taiwan through its ears
The KMT Government's Relocation to Taiwan and Postwar Reconstruction
Yen Chia-kan came from Fujian and witnessed the history of the KMT government's 1949 relocation to Taiwan. 1.2 million soldiers and civilians, 38 years of martial law, land reform: how did this history reshape Taiwan?
Jinguashi: Many Layers of Lives Stacked on One Mountain—from Alluvial Gold and POWs to Arsenic Soil Still Not Cleaned
On November 14, 1942, 523 Allied POWs walked into the copper mines of Jinguashi, beginning a period where some endured for three years while others never made it out. This mountain is remembered mostly through the orange night lights of the Thirteen Levels Ruins, the 220-kilogram gold brick you can touch, and the secluded sea views when detouring from Jiufen to nearby spots. But this same mountain also buries gold earned by local miners at the cost of their lungs, bones of over five hundred foreign POWs, and a patch of arsenic soil that remains unremediated today. Only seeing these together reveals the full Jinguashi.
Taiwan’s Stock Market and Capital Market: From the 1990 Collapse at 10,000 Points to the World’s Sixth Largest in 2026, an Island with 44% of Its Net Worth Staked on One Stock
On April 28, 2026, Bloomberg flashed the headline “Taiwan Overtakes Canada.” An island whose 1990 collapse from the 10,000-point level wiped out the retirement savings of 160,000 people climbed, thirty-six years later, to become the world’s sixth-largest stock market — but of its US$4.47 trillion in market capitalization, nearly half rested on a single semiconductor company.
Thu, July 16
3 articlesLi Ang: Lukang 1952, the Trailblazer Who Opened the Path of Taiwanese Feminist Literature with 'The Butcher's Wife'
Born in April 1952 in Lukang, Changhua, under the birth name Shih Shu-tuan. In 1983, 'The Butcher's Wife' was serialized in United Daily News, shocking the literary world with its subject matter of domestic violence. 'The Enchanted Garden' followed in 1991. In 2004, she was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Her works have been translated into English, French, German, Japanese, and other languages, making her one of the most internationally recognized female writers from Taiwan.
Tzu-Hsien Tung: From Taipei Tech to Pegatron, Apple's Largest Manufacturing Partner
Born June 25, 1960, Tzu-Hsien Tung graduated from the Department of Electronics at Taipei Tech (now National Taipei University of Technology), not NTU Electrical Engineering. He joined ASUS in 1988, led the spin-off on January 1, 2008, and founded Pegatron Corporation, becoming a contract manufacturer for Apple, Sony, and Nintendo. He invested in Eslite Bookstore in 2019. In 2025, he continued to publicly advocate for a 'nuclear–renewables coexistence' energy policy.
Prehistoric Era and Indigenous Peoples: From Changbin 20,000–30,000 Years Ago to the Austronesian Dispersal Origin
Earliest human activity in Taiwan: Changbin Culture approximately 20,000–30,000 years ago (Paleolithic era, Baxian Cave site). 16 officially recognized indigenous peoples. One possible origin of the Austronesian language family (9 of 10 major Austronesian branches found in Taiwan). 2024 latest research: dispersal from Taiwan accounts for approximately 20%, with an additional dispersal route from Indonesia, pending academic consensus. 17th-century Kingdom of Middag as a cross-tribal alliance; Shihsanhang Culture in the Iron Age.
Sun, July 12
7 articlesLiu An-ting
In 2008 she left Taichung Girls' Senior High School for Princeton. In 2013, at 23, she quit her New York consulting job to return to Taiwan and found TFT — Teach for Taiwan. In 2016 she asked a graduating class at National Cheng Kung University: 'What do you do with your luck?' That line became a collective mantra for an entire generation. But the other line she says most often is: 'Don't believe in me as an individual.' After TFT's tenth anniversary in 2024, she passed the chairmanship to Lin Yen-hsi and became a board director. Her best work is not TFT itself — it is making TFT able to exist without her.
Becoming a Teacher: Forty Years of Reform and Collapse in Taiwan's Teacher Training System
In February 1994, the Legislative Yuan passed the Teacher Education Act, transforming the monopoly of normal schools into an open, pluralistic system — hailed at the time as a milestone in Taiwan's educational history. Thirty years later, the numbers are sobering: the original nine education universities were merged down to just three; in the 2020 academic year, enrollment shortfalls across teacher training institutions hit an all-time high; the teacher certification pass rate dropped to 52% in recent years; nearly half of teacher candidates treat teacher training as a backup plan; and 42% quit before obtaining their teaching certificates.
Learning Poverty: Sitting in the Classroom Without Learning Anything
In 2019, the World Bank introduced the term 'Learning Poverty' to describe something harder to see than being out of school: a 10-year-old child who arrives at school on time every day, sits quietly, and hands in all their assignments — yet cannot read a simple age-appropriate story. The World Bank's February 2023 update maintained the global learning poverty rate at 70%. Taiwan ranked in the global top five in PISA 2022, and the math scores of the most disadvantaged 20% of students caught up with the OECD average — on the surface, a major turnaround. But the same PISA report shows urban students scoring 571 versus rural students at 517, a gap of 54 points; a 2019 survey by the Boyo Foundation across 13 rural middle schools found that in 6 of them, 70% of students scored C in English, and in 5 of them, 70% scored C in math. Taiwan's version of learning poverty hides in this gap, still unmeasured.
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.
Taiwan Indigenous Education and Language Revival: Elementary Schools Hold the Line, Middle Schools Fail to Catch
In 2012, Paiwan teacher Camake Valaule at Taimali Elementary School in Pingtung used a voice recorder to collect ancient songs from elders and led children to the Golden Melody Awards. In 2017, the Indigenous Peoples Language Development Act elevated indigenous languages to national language status. In 2019, the Indigenous Peoples Education Act inscribed a ten-year target for teacher ratio requirements. The number of indigenous experimental schools at the elementary level grew from 25 to 38. But once students reach middle school, the entire system collapses: there are only 6 indigenous experimental middle schools across Taiwan, the gross enrollment rate for indigenous college students is 56.3%, 35.3 percentage points below the general population. Camake passed away in 2021 at age 42. Elementary schools hold the line; middle schools fail to catch. The gap remains.
Taiwan's Rural Education: What Children Lack Is Not Inspirational Stories, But an Unbroken Support System
Rural education is not simply 'schools in the mountains are farther away.' From teacher turnover and multi-age teaching to transportation, housing, family support, community connections, and society's singular imagination of success, the real difficulty is that the entire support system often unravels layer by layer once a child leaves the classroom.
Teach For Taiwan: How a Princeton Graduate Came Home and Convinced 400 Young People to Enter Remote Classrooms
In 2014, Liu An-ting started with NT$2,000 and nine people. Eleven years later, more than 400 TFT teachers have entered Taiwan's most remote elementary schools, accompanying over 7,000 children forgotten by the system. This is not an inspirational charity story — it is an ongoing debate about who should be responsible for inequality.
Sat, July 11
3 articlesTaiwan Island Historiography: How a Repeatedly Ruled Island Reclaimed Its Own Subjectivity
Taiwan island historiography takes Taiwan out of the timeline of outside regimes and asks how people on this island lived, migrated, were ruled, survived, and rebuilt memory. It does not turn Taiwan into a naturally exceptional island; it reminds us that identity can also grow from shared life, shared wounds, and shared responsibility.
Megaport Festival: The Taiwanese Music Festival That Grew Out of Kaohsiung Harbor
Megaport Festival is a major Taiwanese outdoor music festival founded beside Kaohsiung Harbor in 2006. Growing from the Formoz Festival team, Chthonic members, and TRA Music’s curatorial experience, it brings southern Taiwanese bands, Taiwanese Hokkien live stages, international lineups, NGO issue villages, and harbor-city landscapes into one field, making Kaohsiung’s waterfront a key site where Taiwan’s live-band culture, city identity, and public issues meet.
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.
Wed, June 10
2 articles2026 Nine-in-One Elections: Stress Testing Democratic Infrastructure in the Age of AI Cognitive Warfare
On November 28, 2026, all 22 cities and counties across Taiwan will simultaneously open polling stations to elect nine categories of office, filling over 11,000 elected executive and representative positions. This election is unlike any before — the difference is not the candidates, but the environment in which it takes place: the CCP's escalation of state-level AI cognitive warfare, 123+ spoofed news websites, and prosecutors listing AI disinformation as one of four key election investigation priorities. This is not an election information roundup — it is a historical positioning and structural pressure analysis of this election.
The Councilor System: Why It Differs from the Legislator System, and SNTV's 30 Years in Local Politics
In 2008, legislators switched to the single-member district two-vote system, while that same year's city and county councilor elections still used the SNTV system from the 1980s — the same country, the same voters, different offices on the same ballot, yet governed by two entirely different sets of rules. This is not a bug; it is the greatest unfinished business in Taiwan's electoral reform history, bound up with local factions, party interests, and the costs of complementary reforms. A structural map of how the two systems operate, why one was reformed and the other was not, and what this means for small parties and diverse representation.
Tue, June 9
2 articlesTaiwan Environmental Movement History
The development trajectory of Taiwan's environmental movement from the anti-pollution protests of the 1980s to recent plastic reduction campaigns, witnessing the intertwining of societal environmental awareness awakening and democratization.
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?
Thu, June 4
3 articlesTaiwan Agricultural Landscapes and Industry Belts
The shift in agricultural landscapes from north to south traces Taiwan's transformation from the "Taiwanese Granary" to "precision agriculture."
The Evolution of Taiwanese Hokkien Songs: From "Old Man's Music" to Indie Darling
Tracing the evolution of Taiwanese Hokkien songs from the nakashi era, the golden age of Hung I-feng and Jody Chiang, to the new-generation bands such as Eggplant Egg, Sorry Youth, and Collage — exploring how Hokkien music has regained the identity of younger generations.
Taiwan's Political Landscape and Electoral System
From the constitutional framework, central and local electoral mechanisms, to the deeper party-political culture, a comprehensive analysis of how Taiwan maintains a vibrant and institutionally rigorous democratic society amid complex geopolitics
Mon, May 25
5 articlesWhen Plague Became Fireworks: The Accidental Evolution of Taiwan's Festival Culture
A small town ritual of setting off firecrackers against plague 140 years ago became one of the world's most dangerous folk festivals
Chiayi Turkey Rice: A City's Identity in a NT$30 Bowl
After World War II, the American military brought turkeys to Chiayi. A chef named Lin Tien-shou shredded the turkey meat, poured braised sauce over it, and piled it on white rice. Seventy years later, this NT$30 bowl was voted No. 1 in the Council of Agriculture's Top Ten Signature Rice Dishes of Taiwan. Chiayi people can argue all Lunar New Year about which restaurant makes the best version — but on one point they never argue: turkey rice belongs to Chiayi.
Night Market Culture
164 official night markets, one for every 38,000 people in Tainan — from kerosene lamp stalls under temple eaves to food destinations that put Taiwan on Michelin's radar
Lin Hwai-min
A novelist who created the first contemporary dance company in the Chinese-speaking world and kept it alive for 50 years
Taiwan Mahjong: Grandma Won't Teach You, but Celebrity Mahjong Will
On the second day of Lunar New Year, Grandma sits at the table, plays a hand you cannot decode, and wins. You ask how the scoring works; she says children should be seen and not heard. So you open the computer and let Wu Zong-xian teach you. Celebrity Mahjong (明星三缺一), released by IGS in 2001, accidentally became the mahjong teacher for an entire generation of Taiwanese.
Sun, May 24
5 articlesPoisoned Potatoes: Beyond 200 ppm, There Are 30 ppm, 14 Days, and 15 Years of Food Safety Scars
On April 29, 2026, Chen Bin-hua, spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the PRC, criticized the Lai Ching-te administration for 'once again making public health a tribute to curry favor with the US' using the term 'poisoned potatoes.' The core of the controversy spans three layers: the 150-fold gap between the EU's 0.2 ppm and Taiwan's 30 ppm CIPC residue limits; how 85 border staff can 'check every single potato' out of 300 million; and the 15-year food safety scars accumulated since the 2011 plasticizer scandal—the foundation this narrative precisely steps on.
Taiwan Anime & Manga Culture
'Doraemon,' 'Slam Dunk,' and 'Sailor Moon' were the shared language of Taiwanese teens in the 1980s and '90s; Fancy Frontier has held over 40 editions since 1999, drawing over 100,000 attendees per event; doujinshi and cosplay nurtured the creators of 'Detention' and 'Devotion'—Taiwan's anime and manga culture is not an imitation of imported entertainment, but the shared memory and creative soil of two generations.
Pa Chiung: From Hualien Truku Youth to the 'Spy-Master' Wanted by the CCP for One Million Yuan
In November 2025, the Quanzhou Public Security Bureau in Fujian issued a wanted notice — targeting Taiwanese influencer Pa Chiung. This Truku youth from Xincheng Township, Hualien, who once won an award for his travel videos, transformed in just six years from a local creator into a figure Beijing calls a 'Taiwan independence thug' — and has continued exposing CCP united-front operations on the international stage.
The 2026 Cheng-Xi Meeting: Ten Minutes Between KMT and CCP Leaders After a Decade Apart
On April 10, 2026, Cheng Li-wun met Xi Jinping in Beijing, becoming the first major political party leader of the Republic of China to meet the CCP General Secretary in ten years. The meeting lasted ten minutes. Meanwhile, 100 PLA vessels were in the Taiwan Strait. What exactly was this 'peace mission' touring?
Taiwan Enterprise: Foxconn Precision Industry — The Same Balance Sheet Behind 8 Trillion Revenue and an Internal Anti-Corruption War
On the morning of April 30, 2026, Time magazine listed Foxconn among the 100 most influential companies in the world; that same evening, prosecutors and investigators walked into Foxconn's Tucheng facility with search warrants. From a 1974 mother's rotating credit association loan of NT$100,000 to 2025 revenue of NT$8 trillion — with cloud and network products overtaking consumer electronics — the hardest thing for Foxconn to manage is not geopolitics, not AI server rack shipment rhythms, but its own people.
Wed, May 20
13 articlesChiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall
It is the most colossal political totem at the heart of Taipei — and the most democratic dance practice space. From authoritarian sanctuary to the storm's eye of transitional justice, this building records the most violent tremors in Taiwan's soul.
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.
Jiaobei: Hearing the Voice of the Gods Behind a 50% Probability
From Chiayi craftsman Huang Yi-xun's devotion to the 'bamboo-root jiaobei' to the Pingtung Citian Temple legend of 20 consecutive sheng-bei and a NT$3 million prize, this article explores the probability and warmth behind how Taiwanese people communicate with the divine.
Taiwan's Funeral Culture and Views on Death
From the wailing of professional mourners to the garden of Yongli Cemetery — Taiwan spent fifty years moving from burial to cremation, then another ten moving from columbaria to a spot beneath a tree.
Tchoukball: Taiwan's Invisible 43-Year World Champion
In 1977, a professor returning to Taiwan from the UK brought back a net frame he had purchased for £30, inadvertently planting the roots of a Swiss-invented 'gentleman's ball' in Taiwan's schoolyards. Over 40 years later, Taiwan's team sits firmly at No. 1 in the world, the international federation is headquartered in Kaohsiung, and yet the sport remains largely unknown to most Taiwanese.
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.
C. C. Wei: Born 1953, from NCTU Electronics to Yale PhD to TSMC Chairman and President
Born in 1953. B.S. and M.S. in Electronics Engineering, National Chiao Tung University; Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Yale University. Career path: Texas Instruments → STMicroelectronics → Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing (Singapore) → joined TSMC in 1998. In 2012, appointed co-COO of TSMC alongside Mark Liu. On June 5, 2018, succeeded as Vice Chairman and President following Morris Chang's retirement. On June 4, 2024, assumed the chairmanship after Mark Liu's retirement; currently serves as TSMC Chairman and President.
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.
San Mao: The Person Who Wrote Escape as Freedom
Born Chen Ping in 1943 in Chongqing, she moved to Taiwan with her family in 1948. She dropped out of junior high after being publicly humiliated by a teacher, and resumed writing after seven years of self-imposed isolation. In 1973, she married José in Spanish Sahara; her essays became a hit, serving as a window for Taiwanese people in the Martial Law era to imagine the distant world. José died in a diving accident in 1979. In 1990, her screenplay for 'Red Dust' won eight Golden Horse Awards. On January 4, 1991, she hanged herself at Taipei Veterans General Hospital at the age of 47.
Wang Shaudi: The Boys Over Flowers and Taiwan Television's Gentle Revolution
General's son turned rebel, rebel turned godmother of Taiwanese television — Wang Shaudi spent forty years proving that making television can be a social movement
Taiwan and Lithuania: A Partnership Negotiating Between Democratic Values and Geopolitical Realities
From the breakthrough of establishing a representative office in 2021 to the Lithuanian new government's 2026 reflection on a "strategic mistake," Taiwan–Lithuania relations have shifted from a warm value-based alliance to pragmatic interest-based negotiation. A "disunity between the presidency and the cabinet" has emerged in Lithuania over the renaming dispute, while Taiwan, through deepening semiconductor and laser cooperation, seeks to sustain this landmark international friendship amid political pressure and economic commitments.
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 Energy Transition and Green Energy Industries
From reliance on nuclear power to a diversified renewable mix, how Taiwan is reshaping its energy structure on the road to net zero by 2050
Fri, May 8
3 articlesLin Chi-er: From Taipei to Low Earth Orbit, the Taiwan-Born Physician Who Played Bagpipes in Space
Born in Taipei in 1973, Lin Chi-er (Kjell N. Lindgren) is the first NASA astronaut born in Taiwan. After graduating from the Air Force Academy, a misdiagnosis of asthma derailed his pilot training. Eleven years later, a retest overturned the diagnosis. He was selected as one of nine astronauts in NASA's 20th class from 3,565 applicants, and has spent a cumulative 312 days in orbit. In April 2026, he returned to Taiwan under the 'Freedom 250' banner and told the Presidential Office: 'My NASA astronaut career began in Taiwan.'
Puma Shen: He Studied China’s Cognitive Warfare. Then China Marked Him on a Satellite Map
In 2021, Puma Shen and strategic studies scholar Ho Cheng-hui co-founded Kuma Academy. Robert Tsao donated NT$600 million in support, with the goal of training three million civil defense volunteers in three years. In February 2024, Shen entered the legislature as a Democratic Progressive Party legislator-at-large. On October 28, 2025, he became the first elected Taiwanese politician placed under investigation by China for “splitting the state,” while CCTV paired the case with an “exposé” warning: “You could be next.” On New Year’s Day 2026, a Chinese Weibo account used commercial satellite imagery to publish the coordinates of his home and workplace in Taipei; on Valentine’s Day, he was on a plane to France. On May 13, the DPP formally drafted him to run for mayor of Taipei, the very city whose coordinates had been marked on a satellite map.
Chang Chih-chi: The 'Information Curator' Seeking Dialogue in a Polarized Age — from Simpleinfo to Shasha77, Seven Years of Daily Updates
Known for seven years of daily updates and 1.65 million subscribers on 'Shasha77,' this information designer translates complex social issues into accessible explainers. He continues searching for the possibility of dialogue in a polarized Taiwanese society.
Mon, May 4
63 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.
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.
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.
Hsuehshan Tunnel: From "Mission Impossible" to Taiwan's Engineering Miracle of Blood and Tears
On December 15, 1997, a catastrophic water inrush nearly claimed 300 lives and turned a billion-dollar tunnel boring machine into scrap metal. Listed in the Encyclopædia Britannica as one of the most difficult engineering projects in the world, this tunnel is more than a transportation artery — it is a miracle of blood and tears carved through quartzite harder than steel, built by 25 fallen workers and countless unsung heroes.
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.
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.
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 Mountains and Hiking Culture
268 peaks above 3,000 meters are packed onto a single island, yet it took Taiwanese people half a century before they were allowed to freely climb their own mountains.
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.
Chuang Chu Yu-nu: From Free Meals for Dock Workers to a Ten-Dollar Buffet That Sold Seven Houses
In 1951, Chuang Chu Yu-nu set up a stove by Kaohsiung Harbor to feed impoverished dock workers for free. Hailed as the "guardian of the poor," she ran an all-you-can-eat buffet at NT$10 for over fifty years, selling seven houses to keep it running and turning "letting people eat their fill" into a lifelong faith.
Henry Lee
Built a forensic legend from a handful of bone fragments — yet a 'bloodstain' on a towel sent two men to prison for thirty wrongful years
Stefanie Sun: Beat Jay Chou by One Vote, AI Cloned 1,000 Songs, She Said 'Being Yourself Is Enough'
On June 9, 2000, a Singaporean woman debuted in Taiwan with 'Rainy Day,' and her first album sold 330,000 copies to top the year's chart. The following year at the Golden Melody Awards, she beat Jay Chou for Best New Artist by a single vote; four years later, with Stefanie, she became the first artist in Golden Melody history to win both Best New Artist and Best Female Vocalist. In 2023, AI used her voice to sing over 1,000 songs. Her answer was: 'Being yourself is enough.'
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.
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.
Cognitive Warfare: The AI Industrialization Phase of Taiwan's Information Battlefield
In December 2024, the 'China United Front Documentary' surpassed 2 million views. In Q4 2025, 1,076 CCP state media accounts on Douyin published 560,000 videos, using facial recognition to identify 57 Taiwanese individuals. In October 2025, Shen Pei-yang was formally investigated by the Chongqing Public Security Bureau for the 'crime of splitting the country.' Cognitive warfare has entered a new phase of AI industrialization and 'using Taiwan to criticize Taiwan,' but the term 'cognitive warfare' itself is also facing internal tensions regarding its potential for abuse in Taiwan.
Mainlanders in Taiwan: From Kidnapped Youths to Taiwanese Identified with the Land Beneath Their Feet
In 1949, more than one million people carrying trauma and homesickness crossed the sea to Taiwan. They were both a high-risk group for being treated as “political prisoners” by an authoritarian government that distrusted them, and “war refugees” who had been forcibly seized and cut off from their homelands. This article reveals how the mainlander community, through four psychological traumas, completed a spiritual migration from “exiles” to “settlers.”
Two Sides of Shengli Road: Hukou Memories from the Armored Corps Coup to the "Big Parking Lot"
On Shengli Road in Hukou, Hsinchu, one side of the camp wall held tanks and political storms, while the other held residences, a commissary, and a vanished movie theater. This is a local history of neighborhood, accident, and social justice.
Taiwan's Forestry History: A Century's Pivot from Resource Extraction to Land Stewardship
From the camphor smoke of the late Qing era, to the ringing of steel rails under Japanese rule, to the great timber-cutting age that shook the mountains in the postwar years. This article traces the global geopolitical logic behind Taiwan's forestry policies and uses data to set the record straight on a century of forestry.
Withdrawal from the United Nations: The 17 Minutes in 1971 When Taiwan Went from “China” to International Orphan
On October 25, 1971, the moment Chou Shu-kai stepped down from the podium in the UN General Assembly hall, the Republic of China went from a founding member of the United Nations to an observer still kept outside its doors. Half a century later, that decision, framed as “the Han and the bandits cannot coexist,” continues to reverberate: in 2025, the United States passed legislation reaffirming that Resolution 2758 never addressed Taiwan’s representation.
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.
Sun Moon Lake: Taiwan’s Heart, Submerged and Revealed beneath an 18.18-Meter Rise in Water Level
In 2026, Sun Moon Lake is the world’s largest pumped-storage power battery, and also the Thao people’s lost ancestral-spirit homeland. Since the 18.18-meter rise in water level in 1934 transformed its landscape, this lake has stood between tourist destination and energy heart, carrying a century of ethnic migration and electric-power miracles.
Taiwan Hot Springs Landscape
Beitou, Zhiben, Jiaoxi - the beautiful intersection of hot spring culture and geological science
Yushan: From 'Mount Niitaka' to the Highest Point of Taiwan's Soul
In 1897, Japanese colonizers named it 'Mount Niitaka,' symbolizing the empire's ambition to surpass Mount Fuji in altitude. More than a century later, Yushan remains Taiwan's highest peak: from a sacred mountain of Indigenous peoples, records in Qing-era texts, and the crown on colonial maps, to today's contested mountaineering shrine and testing ground for environmental ethics.
Bahamut: Taiwan Gaming and Anime Community
The birth, survival, and staying power of Taiwan's largest ACG community — and why it keeps growing in an era when Facebook and TikTok have swept everything else away.
Dcard
A website built by a kid from Tainan in a National Taiwan University dormitory to make it easier to make friends — it became Taiwan's most influential social platform for young people, and has been growing up while simultaneously facing the question of whether Dcard is dying.
Islam in Taiwan: From Quanzhou Guo-clan Ancestors to the Faith Mosaic of 300,000 Migrant Workers
In 2025, Taiwan's Muslim population surpassed 300,000. The island's Islamic imprint spans four centuries. From the ancestral-sacrifice taboos of the Lukang Guo family clan, to the Eid al-Fitr celebrations filling Taipei Main Station's black-and-white checkered hall, Taiwan is experiencing a faith reconstruction — from 'concealing ancestral origins' to 'a foreign home.'
National Theater and Concert Hall: From Authoritarian Symbol to People's Cultural Palace
When it opened in 1987, the National Theater and Concert Hall was a palace-style building memorializing Chiang Kai-shek, with iron gates keeping citizens out. In 2003 Ju Tzong-ching tore down those gates; in 2004 it became Taiwan's first administrative juridical person. The 4,172 pipes of the Dutch Flentrop organ are buried behind the wall. Artistic Director Liu Yi-ru says cultural venues must see the 'invisible barriers.'
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.
The Evolution of Taiwan Mandarin — Four Hundred Years of Linguistic Stratigraphy
How many layers of history are hidden in a single bento? Follow the journey of this word and explore the language that has naturally grown on this island over four centuries.
Taiwanese Glove Puppetry (Budaixi): From Temple-Square Bans to the Palm-Held Universe of Thunderbolt Fantasy
On March 2, 1970, Huang Jun-hsiung's Shih Yen-wen brought Taiwan's factories to a halt and emptied classrooms, scoring a 97% TV rating; four years later the government banned it on grounds of 'disrupting normal work schedules.' This palm-held art, having endured Kominka suppression, TV bans, and the videotape revolution, finally cracked open the global anime market with Thunderbolt Fantasy.
Taiwanese Shadow Puppetry: From Mituo, the 'Shadow Puppet Cradle,' to Kominka's Saru-Kani Gassen
The roots of Taiwanese shadow puppetry are in Mituo, Kaohsiung — legend says that Master A-wan, who came with Koxinga 300 years ago, left the craft in this small town. In 1937, the Kominka movement forced masters to perform Saru-Kani Gassen in Japanese, and the troupe was selected as the 'First Service Corps' and survived to this day. The Donghua Shadow Puppet Troupe, six generations strong, is the oldest family puppet theater still performing in Taiwan.
Ah-Po Iron Eggs: From an Accident at Tamsui's Ferry Dock 'Seaside Grand Hotel' to Tamsui's Hardest Collective Memory
In 1983, a Min Sheng Daily report turned a black braised egg from Tamsui's 'Seaside Grand Hotel' into an overnight sensation. This 'accidental' food — hardened by sea wind blowing the eggs dry between braising sessions — not only witnessed the rise and fall of Tamsui's ferry dock, but left behind a lasting dispute over trademark rights between founders Ah-yan-po and Yang Bi-yun.
Oil Rice (油飯): From 'Conspicuous Glutinous Rice' to the Weighty Gift Carrying a Life's Milestone
On Taiwan's streets in 2026, a portion of oil rice remains many people's first choice for celebrating a new birth. This dish — rooted in the traditions of Han Chinese migrants, evolved in Taiwan into a sweet-and-savory 'connoisseur's ratio' — combines glutinous rice and shallots into the most substantial blessing Taiwanese families offer at life's turning points.
Puli Shaoxing Wine: A 'Taiwan National Liquor' Invented by an Exiled Regime in 1952
Built in 1917, but the first vat of shaoxing wine wasn't brewed until 1952 — the timing falls right after the Nationalist government's retreat. The Puli Distillery's story is an experiment in crystallizing political nostalgia into a commodity, using glutinous rice and well water. Today, when you pick up a Hua-Tiao Chicken instant noodle at 7-11, you're holding a flavor of Taiwan's postwar history.
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.
Zongzi (Rice Dumplings)
Taiwan's zongzi is not a single food — it is four different island memories layered together: Hoklo, Hakka, mainlander, and indigenous. Every bite is a journey to where we came from.
Q Series: How a Laptop Maker Planted the Seeds of Taiwan's TV Drama Revival
In 2016, tech industry magnate Tzu-Hsien Tung put up the funds for Wang Shaudi to lead Taiwan's most accomplished directors in doing something that defied commercial logic: no blockbusters, only new talent.
Taiwan New Media Art
Sixteen key artists and forty years of digital art revolution — from 1980s video art pioneers to a Venice VR Grand Prize. How Taiwan wrote poetry in code and carved its name into the international art map.
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.
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.
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.
Facebook: From the 'Vegetable-Stealing' Craze to the Double-Edged Sword of Digital Democracy — The Blue Coordinate That Defined Two Decades of Social Life in Taiwan
In 2009, Happy Farm ignited a vegetable-stealing frenzy across Taiwan; in 2014, it became the mobilization nerve of the Sunflower Student Movement. Facebook in Taiwan has lived two identities — 'infrastructure' and 'cognitive battlefield' — and the 2025 censorship controversy gave it yet another title: the departure point of the FB refugees.
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.
Orchid Island Ecosystems: The Life Code at the Edge of the Kuroshio
Orchid Island doesn't belong to Taiwan — at least, not biologically. This little island at the northernmost tip of the Philippine volcanic arc is filled with tropical life carried by the Kuroshio Current, and in the millennia of Tao indigenous wisdom, has found a balance between humans and nature.
Taiwan Island Natural History: A Living Dialogue Between Island and World
From Ice Age land-bridge migrations to the DNA of paper mulberry carried by Austronesian peoples, Taiwan is not merely a biological refuge but a crossroads of evolution. Through the eyes of naturalists, rediscover how this island conducts a living dialogue with the world.
Taiwan Pangolin
The most trafficked mammal in the world has found a safe home in Taiwan
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.
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.
Cho Jung-tai: From Hsieh Chang-ting's Legislative Aide to the Premier Who Refused to Co-sign the Fiscal Revenue and Expenditure Act
The 31st Premier of the Republic of China. Starting in 1987 as Hsieh Chang-ting's legislative aide, he spent 38 years serving as someone else's secretary-general and deputy. After taking office as Lai Ching-te's first premier in 2024, he faced a minority government, Trump's tariffs, NT$1.25 trillion in arms procurement, and the total defeat of the Great Recall. In December 2025, he became the first premier in constitutional history to refuse to co-sign the Fiscal Revenue and Expenditure Act.
Rather Burn Out Than Rust Out: Mackay and His Beloved Formosa
From extracting over 20,000 teeth to founding Taiwan's first school for girls, how Canadian missionary George Leslie Mackay became a 'true Taiwanese' and spent three decades reshaping the history of medicine, education, and scientific exploration in northern Taiwan.
Whyte (壞特?te): The Honor Student Who Spent Nine Years in Medical School — and Pressed Pause
On August 21, 2021, Whyte stepped onto the stage at the 32nd Golden Melody Awards wearing a black hat and sunglasses. She looked into the camera and said: 'Please don't be afraid.' Her legal name is Lin Chih-yi. She is from Hsiangshan, Hsinchu. She attended Hsinchu Girls' Senior High School and spent nine years in the medical program at the National Defense Medical Center — including one year on leave during her third year and one additional year before graduation (her two-year internship took three years to complete because she missed shadowing rotations). She completed her internship training and earned her medical degree. At the time of the award, she was still working in operating rooms wearing a surgical mask. On the most academically competitive track in Taiwan, she pressed pause.
Hung Hsing-fu: A Prematurely Fallen Giant of Nativist Literature
Born in 1949 into a poor farming family in Erlin, Changhua, Hung Hsing-fu published his first short story at age 18. Working as an elementary school teacher, he wrote nativist literature until his death in a car accident at 33. In just 15 years, he produced classics such as Black-Faced Ching-tzai, Our Land, and The Last Show, capturing the true face of Taiwan's rural villages during the transition from agriculture to industry and commerce. Playfully dubbed 'Hung Hsing-fuski' by his literary friends, he became an indelible voice of the Taiwanese countryside in postwar Taiwanese literature.
Ji Lin-lian: From a Chen Shui-bian–Favored General to the Vice Chairman Who Wanted Han Kuo-yu Expelled from the KMT
On the afternoon of April 29, 2026, at a KMT Central Standing Committee meeting, 78-year-old Vice Chairman Ji Lin-lian said before the media cameras: 'You can kill me, but I will never believe that Brother Guo-yu would do anything to betray the party for personal gain. If he did, Huang Fuxing would surely step forward to put righteousness above family and recommend expelling Brother Guo-yu from the party.' This remark prompted Chen Shui-bian to lament publicly, 'I had no idea he had changed so much,' because it was Ah-Bian himself who promoted Ji to two-star general 20 years ago.
Jody Chiang: The Queen of Taiwanese Pop Who Rose from the Sulfur Smoke of Beitou, and Her Nine-Year Secret War
From singing in Beitou's cabarets at age 10 to becoming a Taiwanese-language pop diva with record-breaking sales in the millions, Jody Chiang used her voice to reshape the status of Taiwan's popular culture — yet at the peak of her career, she chose to retire after a secret battle with cancer.
Kao Chun-ming
A pastor who risked his life and church for a stranger he barely knew — the faith choice behind the Kaohsiung Incident
Kuo Cheng-kuang
He is a senior scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, specializing in what astronauts eat and drink — but in the records of his homeland Taiwan, he was once listed as a 'terrorist' on a government blacklist.
Lai Ho: The 'Changhua Mazu' in a Native Shirt, and His Unyielding Steelyard
On the eve of Lunar New Year's Day 1943, the Changhua physician Lai Ho burned his poor patients' unpaid bills, as was his annual custom. This doctor celebrated as the 'Father of Taiwanese New Literature' wielded a scalpel to heal the sick and a pen to expose injustice under colonial repression; his story 'A Steelyard' remains to this day a cultural symbol of resistance against the violence of power.
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.
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.'
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.
Lim Giong: From the Platform of 'Moving Forward' to Cannes for The Assassin — Three Decades of a Hokkien Rock Defector
On December 7, 1990, 26-year-old Changhua native Lin Chih-feng turned Hokkien song from melancholy into rock with 'Moving Forward'; three years later he had almost stopped singing. From Goodbye South, Goodbye to The Assassin, four Golden Horses, a Cannes Soundtrack Award, and the 2018 National Award for Arts — over thirty years he folded up his superstar identity to become the man behind the synthesizer for Hou Hsiao-hsien and Jia Zhangke.
Lin Liang: Shallow, Yes — But Shallow with Flavor
From the eldest son who lost his father on the banks of the Jiulong River in 1944, to the 95-year-old grandfather who passed away peacefully in his sleep in December 2019. Over 73 years, Lin Liang proved that children deserve to be treated as complete readers.
Lu Hsiu-yan: From 10,000 Bottles of Guguan Air to the 'Arms Procurement as Insurance' Doctrine — The Undefeated Queen
On 2018-12-25, she spent her own money to commission 10,000 glass jars of 'Guguan Air' and distributed them to citizens attending her inauguration, putting her campaign slogan into the hands of her readers. After 8 consecutive undefeated elections, two terms as Taichung mayor, and 6 terms as a legislator, Eric Chu publicly asked her to take over as KMT party chair in August 2025. She replied, 'The more difficult the times, the more Mom stays home.' But an April 2026 poll showed that her presumed frontrunner status for 2028 had been overtaken by Chiang Wan-an, 25% to 19.7%.