People
· Important figures and stories that shaped Taiwan's development 296 articles Updated 2026-10-31In 1987, when tsmc-morris-chang established Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in Hsinchu Science Park, every semiconductor company in the world designed and manufactured their own chips. No one believed a company that only did contract manufacturing could survive. Thirty-eight years later, TSMC's market value exceeds 90% of global enterprises, and the world's most advanced chips are all produced in Taiwan.
Featured
- Standard article2026-03
Edward Yang: Using the Coldest Logic of an Engineer to Film the Hottest Loneliness of the Human Heart
In the early 1980s, Edward Yang, who had just joined Central Motion Picture Corporation, wore a T-shirt printing "Herzog, Bresson, Yang," placing himself behind two masters. This man, who gave up his job as a US submarine engineer and returned to Taiwan in his early thirties to study filmmaking, later became the first Taiwanese to win Best Director at Cannes—yet his film *Yi Yi* was not screened in Taiwanese cinemas for seventeen years. He used the coldest methods to film the back of our heads, the part we dare not face.
92
- Standard article2026-03
Stan Shih: From a Duck Egg Stall in Lukang to a Brand Called Taiwan
At a 1981 electronics show in San Francisco, a plastic-shell laptop that closed like a book drew 20 U.S. distributors circling it for agency rights—marking the first time many Taiwanese touched a 'computer made in Taiwan.' The man behind it lost his father to overwork at age three and was raised by a mother who sold duck eggs and patriotic bonds. He built Acer into a top-five global PC brand, drew the Smiling Curve that entered textbooks, and stands among Taiwan’s rare tech patriarchs willing to face the camera and say, 'I am the biggest loser.'
70
- Standard article2026-10
Audrey Tang: Every Famous Decision She Made Was a Refusal of the 'Genius' Label
Knocked unconscious by a classmate at age 8, declined guaranteed admission to Jianguo High School at 14, came out as transgender at 24 but refused to be a spokesperson, and at 35, her first condition for joining the cabinet was 'no office.' On December 2, 2025, in Stockholm accepting the Right Livelihood Award, what she said on stage wasn't 'I,' but 'we.'
44 ~14 min
Digital & Media 32
- Standard article
Daptoper: From "Dark Laptop" to One Million Subscribers — The Data Curator Who Defined the Roblox Generation
In 2023, YouTuber "Daptoper" (real name Chou Chih-Hsuan) hit one million YouTube subscribers. From early Minecraft streams to pioneering the Roblox blue ocean in Taiwan, this NTHU dropout turned a self-deprecating "always late" persona and obsessive data analysis into a digital community empire spanning published books and Discord.
- Standard article
Tseng Po-en: Can Calculate Punchlines, Can't Predict Society
Born in 1990, Tseng Po-en went from wearing headphones on his desk at Chien Kuo High School, to a double major in Foreign Languages and Psychology at National Taiwan University, then an MSc in Brain and Mind Sciences at University College London, and a Master's in Integrative Biology at Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris 6). On the eve of PhD applications, he pivoted to stand-up comedy. Together with Hsieh Cheng-hao, he co-founded Satire Entertainment, pushing Taiwan stand-up from open mics at Comedy Club to the 13,000-seat Taipei Arena. Yet with that same neuroscientist's precision, he miscalculated the societal emotional weight of the Cheng Nan-jung joke, the delivery driver video, and the entertainment tax lawsuit.
- Standard article
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.
- Evolving · community
Ba Chiong: From Camera to the Avenue of Flag, When the Exposers of United Front Work Become Political Messages
In December 2024, Ba Chiong and Chen Po-yuan brought the Xiamen Taiwan Youth Innovation Base, venture capital, and influencer recruitment into Taiwan's public discussion. He then took to the streets, faced threats, and was put on a wanted list by Quanzhou. This is not simply a story of an anti-communist influencer; it is about how a creator loses neutrality between exposing, mobilizing, and being labeled.
- Evolving · community
Ceylan: Famous for Being Seen, Yet Leaving Taiwan Because of It
The story of Belgian YouTuber Ceylan living in, commenting on, and leaving Taiwan reflects how internet celebrities navigate public scrutiny versus personal freedom, highlighting the tension between foreign criticism, social response, and personal boundaries.
- Evolving · community
Cai Heipi: The Boy Who Grew Up Memorizing MRT Station Names, Packing Taiwan into 260,000 Subscribers
Born in 2002, Cai Jian-an started with "MRT Trivia" in high school; twelve years later, he stood on the stage of the Golden Road Awards, known as the "Oscars of the Transportation Industry." He changed his name, paused, and started again, handling research, maps, and editing himself—a model of long-termism for Taiwan's knowledge creators.
- Standard article
A Shen: Why are there new videos even after "permanent hiatus" for eleven years?
In July 2026, A Shen's main channel displayed one message—"Retiring, I only make videos when I feel like it"—while simultaneously uploading a new Minecraft video. After eleven years of daily uploads, why didn't the "permanent hiatus" three years ago become a permanent departure?
- Evolving · community
Ku’s Dream: From a Foreigner’s Lens to a Taiwanese Program the World Can Understand
Returning to Taiwan in 2017 and becoming a full-time creator in 2018, French YouTuber Ku navigated the challenges of Taiwanese food and the Chinese language to create *Chinese Monster*; with 100 foreign participants and a NT$5 million budget, he transformed cross-cultural observation into a Taiwanese production methodology and a test of societal responsibility.
- Standard article
Nick Star: Turning the Live Stream into a Ring and Bringing Stances to the Camera
Since 2024, Nick Star has blended boxing, gaming, video dating, and live interaction into a high-density online performance. In 2025, he used "I Am Bisexual" and cross-border live streams to push private identity and Taiwan's stance into the same frame. This article does not reduce him to a traffic-driven influencer, but traces how a creator places the ring, chat rooms, music, and controversy into a single real-time scene, explaining what public materials can and cannot prove.
- Standard article
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.
- Evolving · community
The Idiot Princess: From Mosaic to Producer, Laughter Is Not Her Whole Story
Starting from voice-over assignments at the Department of Broadcasting and Television, National Taiwan University of Arts, The Idiot Princess first hid behind a mosaic, then turned scriptwriting, filming, and editing into a solo workflow. She later built a team, produced shows, opened a café, and ventured into film, always seeking her place between "playing the fool" and speaking seriously.
- Evolving · community
Teacher Black Cat: From an Overheating Graphics Card to Returning Traffic to Readers Over Twenty Years
In the summer of 2015, an overheating graphics card forced Teacher Black Cat to abandon game streaming, yet unexpectedly left behind a Facebook fan page. From posting photos of cats and narrating history to producing podcasts and the *Black Cat Creative Newsletter*, he has traversed platforms ranging from PTT and Facebook to YouTube and email newsletters, constantly asking: Are creators serving readers, or feeding algorithms?
- Evolving · community
Cheap: The Storyteller Who Used *Age of Empires* to Teach History, Now Standing on the Crosswalk
In 2021, Cheap used war footage from *Age of Empires* to narrate the history of various nations, with his channel already boasting 810,000 subscribers. In 2023, he took to the streets of Kaohsiung to call for "returning the road to the people," and later responded to controversies surrounding alleged plagiarism and his support for Joeman. From historical storyteller to public advocate, he must face the same question: Can visibility open the door, but not replace verification, consistent responsibility, and the nuance required when others are drawn in?
- Standard article
Huang Brothers: Behind the Fresh-Faced Label, the Reality and Tenderness Forced into the Open
Beginning with a prank video in 2017, the Huang Brothers broke through Taiwan's YouTube scene with a “fresh, positive” image. Yet a forced-outing report in 2020 pushed the brothers, then at the peak of one million subscribers, to dissect their privacy before the camera, while unexpectedly tracing one of Taiwanese society's gentlest collective responses to gender equality.
- Standard article
Potter King — From 'Pickup Lines' Entertainment to 'Pink Spy' Hunter: A Digital Sovereignty Gambler Caught Between Law and Principle
The career arc of Potter King (Chen Jia-Jin) documents a Taiwanese creator's transformation from harvester of cross-strait commercial profits to defender of digital sovereignty, while simultaneously exposing the legal, property rights, and financial complexities of a creator's long entanglement with a capital system.
- Evolving · community
Guaji: From the "Electing Neighborhood Chiefs" Project to the Shutdown of "Don't Watch While Working," What Remains of the Political Experiment
Guaji advanced his plan to film a reality show about electing neighborhood chiefs into a democratic unboxing that moved from the internet into parliament. His story is not just about an influencer entering politics, but about how personal charisma transforms into public communication, and how a content team exhausted itself between traffic, political stances, and organizational costs.
- Evolving · community
Mu Yao 4 Super Play: Filming the Invisible Expertise of Ordinary Jobs into a Web Variety Show
Launched in 2015 on Macabe, *Mu Yao 4 Super Play* evolved to YouTube; its 2018 episode "One Day as Mayor’s Aide" (58 minutes) surpassed 3 million views in four days. While ostensibly featuring celebrities at work, it fundamentally changed how audiences view the expertise of technicians, aides, and concert crew.
- Evolving · community
Bailingguo News: Stuffing World News into Taiwanese Ears
How Kelly and Ken use bilingual, laughter-filled, and unapologetically opinionated chats to turn unfamiliar international news into a daily routine that Taiwanese listeners are willing to finish and must rethink.
- Standard article
Science Popularizer Tai-tai: When Science Becomes Traffic, Professionalism Becomes a Public Responsibility
Science Popularizer Tai-tai rose to fame with her background in biomedical engineering and videos on life science, later venturing into health products, online courses, and the commercialization of self-media. Her story is not just about viral success, but about why audiences trust someone who appears scientific, and how that trust must be verified, regulated, and returned to public discourse. This article traces the trajectory of Taiwan's knowledge-based creators as they navigate the tension between traffic, professionalism, and public responsibility, from channel origins and knowledge translation to medical device and food advertising controversies, and the shift from paid content to free podcasts.
- Evolving · community
Jiong Xing Ren: A Fake Beard Hides Braces, But It Made Taiwan Start Paying for Knowledge
Yu Yue evolved from a long-time film review blogger into one of Taiwan's early knowledge-based YouTubers. Through fake beards, book reviews, and a storytelling stance that refuses to position herself as an authority, she explored the value of content creation, while the success of subscription crowdfunding simultaneously challenged creator autonomy. This article examines how early Taiwanese knowledge influencers established their working methods and boundaries at the intersection of blogging, film criticism, reading, crowdfunding, and content commitments.
- Evolving · community
Qian Qian Eating: Making "Great Appetite" a Taiwanese Flavor
She was first seen for her large appetite, but later turned that traffic into content and a brand responsible for food, audiences, and Taiwanese taste.
- Evolving · community
From Night-Market Papaya Milk to Convenience-Store Korean Flavors: The Journey of Kim Bong-san
In 2023, Kim Bong-san filmed his first video after settling in Taiwan at the Tonghua Night Market, where papaya milk inspired him to bring the flavor back to South Korea. Three years later, he partnered with RT-Mart to stock Korean-style meals, spicy stir-fried chicken, and protein meals on convenience-store shelves, transitioning from travel vlogging to navigating housing loans and immigration. The most interesting part of this journey isn’t the transplantation of Korean flavors to Taiwan, but how “foreigners seeing Taiwan” eventually became something Taiwanese people could buy every day.
- Evolving · community
Master Sheng-Kai: From Steamed Egg Short Videos to Frozen New Year’s Meals, the Trust Cost of a Culinary Influencer
Huang Sheng-kai went from clearing tables at sixteen and borrowing money to open a restaurant at twenty-four, to entering millions of followers’ phones with a single steamed egg video. Master Sheng-Kai’s story is not just about how culinary entrepreneurship is amplified by content, but also about how, when cooking transforms from kitchen craft into frozen goods, audience trust becomes a brand’s mandatory quality responsibility.
- Evolving · community
This Group: The Seven Who Became Famous Together, and How They Reached the Day They Had to Part
In 2011, Zhanrong, Zhanrui, and five partners brought their performance chemistry to YouTube. From "Super Blind Covers" to 3.57 million subscribers, they turned daily life into shared memories, transforming their channel into a small company requiring division of labor, profit-sharing, and management. After announcing a hiatus in 2023, issues of money, exhaustion, platform shifts, and personal development finally surfaced. This is a Taiwanese internet history story about how collaborative creation grows into a profession, and why it often requires re-partitioning.
- Standard article
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.
- Standard article
Chen Tzu-jian (Retina): Building a Palace of Mockery on the Ruins of State Media, Then Demolishing It at Its Peak
From the inspiration born watching CCTV's Xinwen Lianbo on a cross-strait exchange trip to Fujian, to becoming the youngest daytime news anchor in CTS history at age 23, to voluntarily discontinuing a channel with 1.21 million subscribers at its peak — Chen Tzu-jian, as "Retina," completed an eight-year anti-authoritarian deconstruction project. After 2023, he shifted to PTS children's programming, hosting Hello! Can I Ask You? (Golden Bell 59 nomination) and Detective Club at Chengren High School S1 and S2 (Golden Bell 60 youth program nomination). From 2026 he is living in Tokyo for a year with his dog Yuzi, sharing Retina News and daily life — including his extreme hatred of cilantro — on Instagram and his personal YouTube channel.
- Evolving · community
Duo Duo Luo: Turning "Spotting Errors" into a Public Performance, Asking Who Has the Right to Correct Whom Behind the Laughter
In 2024, a video correcting the Japanese copy of "Ba Yao He Cha" made "Japanese Police" Duo Duo Luo’s most recognizable persona; in 2026, he gained wider attention through videos critiquing Huang Shanliao’s works. From his commentary on Japanese language, manga, and social culture in Tokyo to the judicial battles surrounding sexual harassment allegations, his approach is not merely sharp-tongued but transforms "I will point out what is wrong" into a performance where the audience participates.
- Standard article
Liu Zhiyuan: Turning the Fully English After Effects Interface into an Entry Point for Taiwanese Creators
In 2011, Lu Ziyuan began self-teaching from the fully English After Effects interface, later bringing a often-invisible behind-the-scenes technology into Taiwan’s YouTube sphere through special effects videos, a tutorial website, and Infinite Design Academy. From 100,000 subscribers in 2019 to one million in 2024, he placed creation, teaching, freelance work, team building, and entrepreneurship on the same desk, allowing viewers to see how a Taiwanese digital creator transforms software barriers into public entry points.
- Standard article
Ray Du: From a Young Exchange Student Who Hated English to the 'Block Captain' of Taiwan's YouTube World
In 2020, YouTuber Ray Du launched the New York Times advertising crowdfunding campaign that showed the world Taiwan exists; in 2021 he openly shared his battle with depression, candidly facing a low point in life. From his English awakening in Singapore to founding a creators' association, Ray Du is not only a knowledge-based influencer but also a driving force behind Taiwan's new media ecosystem.
- Standard article
Chu Ko-liang
Chu Ko-liang (1946–2017, birth name Hsieh Hsin-ta) was born in Kaohsiung's Zuoying District, left home at 14 to join a theater troupe, took the hosting stage at the Blue Diamond Grand Cabaret at 31, and became a household name across Taiwan in the 1980s with his "Chu Ko-liang Cabaret Show" videotapes.
- Evolving · community
‘Ho Fei-peng’
‘A media entrepreneur who led by eight years and suffered seven years of losses, ultimately building Taiwan’’s largest publishing group.’
- Evolving · community
Ray (YouTuber)
Xu Chen-rui (Rayasianboy), a Taiwanese high school student born in 2005, went viral after saying "My name is Ray, I'm from Taiwan" during a school trip to Japan. With over 2.7 million Twitch followers and 1.43 million YouTube subscribers, he brought the Taiwan passport, beef noodles, and bubble tea into popular US GQ videos. After signing with Adidas to launch his personal brand RUEI, he later announced his retirement to invest in dental clinics, showcasing the possibilities for Taiwan's youth to the world.
Music & Performance 30
- Standard article
Tzuyu
A Tainan girl who never talked politics. An 8-second flag on Korean TV. An election-eve apology video. And ten years later, she stood at the Dome and read from a handwritten letter: 'I didn't leave — not because I was obedient, but because I truly wanted and longed to stay.'
- Standard article
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.
- Standard article
Hebe Tien: The Singer Who Shed the Idol System, One Layer at a Time
When Hebe Tien released her debut solo album To Hebe in September 2010, the poster read 'super newcomer after ten years in the industry' — by then S.H.E had already sold over ten million records. Eleven years later, she stood on the Golden Melody stage and called out to her mother: 'Mom, I didn't waste the water bill — I won a Golden Melody Award.' From a Hakka small town in Hsinchu to the Taipei Arena stage, the idol groomed by HIM International Music spent twenty-five years actively shedding endorsements, variety shows, the China market, and the 'literary queen' label — one by one.
- Standard article
Cicada: Sixteen Years of Field Recordings from Typhoon Morakot in 2009 to Cross-Hemispheric Glaciers in 2025
Founded in Taipei in 2009, Cicada is an all-instrumental, vocal-free independent band. Founding pianist Jesy Chiang (M.A. in Art History, Taipei National University of the Arts) wrote the first batch of pieces after seeing news coverage of Typhoon Morakot that year. Over the next sixteen years, they turned Taiwan’s disappearing coasts, marine ecology, mountain forests, and stream sources into a series of wordless albums, moving from the west coast (Coastland, 2013) to the Pacific off the east coast (Light Shining Through the Sea, 2015) and onward to the stream sources of the Central Mountain Range (Seeking the Sources of Streams, 2022, a 15-day, 120-kilometer expedition). They scored the Japanese film A Man and received the Japan Academy Film Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Music. In 2025, Gazing the Shades of White took their fieldwork beyond Taiwan for the first time, following glaciers through Greenland, Iceland, and New Zealand before returning to Xueshan to look for traces left by ancient glaciers.
- Standard article
Crowd Lu: The Triple Crown Champion Who Was Run Over by a Bus
In 2003, a boy from Tainan rode out for a late-night snack and had his leg crushed under a bus. Bedridden and bored, he picked up the guitar his cousin had given him. Twenty-two years later, he is the youngest Triple Crown winner in Taiwan's history — Golden Melody, Golden Bell, and Golden Horse — a road walked on a guitar and a pair of legs that once broke.
- Standard article
Enno Cheng: Writing the Most Honest Songs in the Most Unfamiliar Language — Seven Years from Coming Out in 2016 to Winning Two Taiwanese Awards at the 2023 Golden Melody Awards
Born in 1987, Enno Cheng (鄭宜農) is the daughter of New Cinema director Cheng Wen-tang. She debuted as an actress in 2007 with a Golden Horse nomination, came out on Facebook in January 2016 and divorced that same month, released her first all-Taiwanese-language album 'Mercury Retrograde' in 2022, and won both Best Taiwanese Female Singer and Best Taiwanese Album at the 34th Golden Melody Awards in July 2023. She said: 'I decided to use a language I was not that familiar with, to make things difficult for myself.'
- Standard article
Waa Wei: Twenty Years of Wanting to Be Heard, from Naturally Curly's "Wawa" to Two-Time Golden Melody Queen
Vocalist 'Wawa' of Naturally Curly in 2003, going solo as 'Waa Wei' after a vocal cord injury in 2006, and winning Best Mandarin Female Singer at the Golden Melody Awards in both 2020 and 2025. From the four-language elegy 'That Place' mourning Ellen Loo, to the female resistance of the children's-voice version of 'Ophelia', to the courage grown from pain in Pearl Punishment — twenty years on the most counter-intuitive path in Mandopop: making her voice more famous than her face, letting her work outlive her persona.
- Standard article
Abao (Aljenljeng Tjaluvie): The Future Pop Singer Who Sent the Paiwan Language to the Golden Melody Album of the Year
The 2020 Golden Melody 31 Album of the Year went to the all-Paiwan electronic album 'kinakaian — Mother Tongue.' Abao (Aljenljeng Tjaluvie, b. 1981, Jinfeng, Taitung) debuted as one half of the R&B duo Abao & Brandy, worked as a nurse for a decade, then in 2019 collaborated with Dizparity to make indigenous-language future pop — rewriting the equation that 'indigenous music = preservation.'
- Standard article
Chen Chien-chi: From Accounting Major to Three-Gold-Winning Producer, the Man Who Tore Down the 'Weird Voice' Red Line in Mandarin Pop Music
Born in 1973 and a graduate of Tamkang University's accounting department, Chen Chien-chi is a rare 'absent author' in the history of Mandarin pop music: you have heard the songs he produced for Waa Wei, Lala Hsu, Hebe Tien, and Julia Peng, but you probably do not know who he is. Winner of the 2021 32nd Golden Melody Award for Best Album Producer, the 2023 Golden Horse Award for Best Original Film Song, and the 2025 Golden Bell Award for Drama Original Song — a three-Gold-winning producer who walked into pop music from the theater piano bench.
- Standard article
No Party for Cao Dong: Twelve Years from Cao Dong Street on Yangmingshan to Two Golden Melody Best Band Wins
At the 28th Golden Melody Awards in 2017, a four-piece band that had self-funded a pressing of 2,000 CDs overwhelmingly defeated Mayday and won three awards. They disappeared for seven years, a period that spanned drummer Fanfan's death in a quarantine hotel in 2021 and two years of silence. In 2023 they returned with The Clod; at the 35th Golden Melody Awards in 2024 they won the triple crown of Album of the Year, Best Mandarin Album, and Best Band, with their manager accepting on their behalf: “No Party for Cao Dong has never been only the four people standing onstage.”
- Standard article
Rainie Yang: From Weather-Girl Avatar to Self-Produced Ambiguous 2025
On September 9, 2025, on the exact 20th anniversary of the original release of "Ambiguous," Rainie Yang released a self-produced remake. This singer who debuted in 2000 with BMG virtual girl group 4 in Love, broke through in 2005 with "Ambiguous," hung upside down three meters above the Hong Kong Coliseum in 2012 until blood vessels burst across her face — spent twenty-five years negotiating on every stage who got to define her. Then she put her own name in the producer credit.
- Standard article
Constant and Change: Ten Years of 'A Band Doesn't Run on Persistence — If It's Not Fun, It Falls Apart'
A four-piece independent band formed in Taipei in 2013, whose name fuses the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus's 'panta rhei' with the changeup pitch in baseball. Lead vocalist ARNY was born in the Philippines, once played bass in Fire EX, and has 20 years in music; drummer Xiaomi has rheumatoid arthritis that left her thumb unable to bend, and still plays; bassist Jinmao says 'a band doesn't run on persistence — if it's not fun, it falls apart.' They went from playing Legacy to two audience members to 5,000 people at Taipei Music Center in 2023, with no viral moment and no breakout single — only ten years of steady evolution.
- Standard article
HUR+: From DD52 Runners-Up to Zepp New Taipei — A Nine-Member Girl Group That Never Stopped
In the 2020 idol competition finale, they lost by 2.5 points. Six years later, the champions have disbanded, and the runners-up are still here. The producer put in fifty million NT and said 'the less like a K-pop group, the better' — this is the story of a Taiwanese girl group that survived.
- Standard article
Ricky Hsiao: Twice Blind, Yet with His 'Eyes for No One' Humor He Fell His Way to a Golden Melody Award
Born in 1976, Taiwanese singer-songwriter Ricky Hsiao lost his sight twice due to congenital cataracts. He is not only a four-time Golden Melody Award winner for Best Taiwanese Male Singer, but was also a national judo bronze medalist at the Asian Para Games. He pioneered a professional path for visually impaired musicians by founding the Life Line Band, and in recent years has used self-deprecating 'dark humor' to flip the stereotyped images people project onto those with disabilities — becoming a legendary figure in the Mandopop world.
- Standard article
Lien Ying: Six Years from 'The Dance Standard a Girl Group Should Have' to a Solo EP
In 2020, a twenty-one-year-old girl from Taichung looked at Pan Wei-Po and said: 'I want everyone to know the standard of dance a girl group should have.' Six years later she has a solo EP, fans who crowdfunded a birthday stage in Dadaocheng, and simultaneous support campaigns in three countries. She is delivering on that promise.
- Evolving · community
Lin Jia-chen: From Writing Songs for Earth Group to Meme Dances at Breakfast Shops, Turning Idols' Perfection into Personal Ease
In 2022, Lin Jia-chen gained public attention as a member of the "Earth" group in *Atom Youth* and contributed lyrics to the finale song. In 2026, he released the 〈Love Me Again〉 Demo from his room, transitioning from rock shouts to breakfast shop dances in Taipei's back alleys. The most interesting part of this journey is that he did not leave the idol framework but wrote a sense of life back onto the stage within it, making group experience the foundation for personal creation.
- Standard article
Huang Shao-yong: Dropping Out of a Biochemistry PhD to Bring Mother Tongue Music to the Golden Melody Album of the Year
Backstage at the 33rd Golden Melody Awards in 2022, Huang Shao-yong won Best Arranger and pulled a recorder from his jacket to play a passage. The son of Examination Yuan President Huang Jung-tsun, the producer who terminated his NTU biochemistry doctoral program around age 30 founded Dark Paradise Records a decade ago and co-produced Abao's *kinakaian 母親的舌頭*, which won the 2020 Golden Melody Album of the Year. His work has always been one thing: arranging a path to the mainstream for the most marginalized voices.
- Standard article
LaLa Hsu: From Nurse to Golden Melody Queen, the Singer Who Rewrote the Talent Show Script
In 2008, LaLa Hsu quit her nursing job and secretly entered the third season of Super Star Avenue, nearly buying a bus ticket back to Taichung. 'Riding the White Horse' brought Taiwanese opera singing onto the talent show stage, and 2018's Psychologist won her Best Mandarin Female Vocalist and Best Mandarin Album at the Golden Melody Awards. From Giving to 'We Cannot Be Together Without Breaking Up,' she gradually transformed a life of being graded into her own subject.
- Standard article
Our Shame (Ao and Mountain): Two Tech Workers Who Said in Synthesizers What They Couldn't Say at the Office
Our Shame (凹與山) is a Taiwanese folktronica duo. Members Estelle H (lead vocals, synthesizer, producer) and Isan (drums, pad) met in high school music club and, as an unplugged folk duo during college, won the Golden Reed Award's composition division in 2015. After graduation both entered the tech industry as full-time workers. In the winter of 2018 they renamed their project from 'Wei Xiao-ao' to 'Our Shame,' with Estelle picking up synthesizers and Isan switching to pads, pivoting toward folktronica. In 2022 Estelle's closest friend died and she quit her full-time job; the band released their debut album 'Modern Problem,' which received double nominations at the 13th Golden Indie Music Awards for Best Alternative Pop and Best New Artist. On August 4, 2025, they released their second album 'Hidden Album,' bringing in Grammy-winning British mixer Jay Reynolds, Grammy-winning American engineer Brian Elgin (credits include Dua Lipa and Lana Del Rey), Japan's ASOBOiSM, and other international collaborators. The album's themes shifted from 'tech anxiety' (Modern Problem) to 'human shadows concealed by technology' — self-harm, forbidden love, cryptocurrency scams, and female embodied experiences — including a track 'Miffy' in tribute to activist Chen Mei-hui.
- Standard article
Chang Yu-sheng: From Idol to Prophet, a Musical Experiment That Crossed Generations
In 1989, the son of an army entertainment troupe leader debuted with 'Miss You Every Day' selling 350,000 copies and became an idol; in 1994, he responded to the market with a 73-minute live band recording that sold dismally but was later called prophetic. Chang Yu-sheng spent nine years grinding between his idol identity and his creative conscience — four days after 'Mouth Says No, Heart Says Yes' went on sale, he crashed his car in the Tamsui pre-dawn hours and never woke up.
- Standard article
Dwagie: The Taiwanese Rap "Principal" Emerging from Tainan's Training Studio
Dwagie (real name Tseng Kuan-jung) is a Taiwanese rapper from Tainan and the founder of Renren Yougong Lian. From the Master U message boards and Rock Records' *Shé Càn Lián Huā*, to 〈Taiwan SONG〉, *Ren*, animal rights, *The Rap Era*, and hip-hop education in Tainan, he brings Taiwanese rap, local spaces, public issues, new generation empowerment, and Taiwanese identity together under a single microphone.
- Standard article
Hello Nico: Eight Years of Silence, Then 'I Missed the Stage'
A Taiwanese indie band that won the StreetVoice annual chart with 'Flower' in 2014 and received a Golden Melody Award nomination in 2016 — then went quiet for eight years. Chan Yu-ting said: 'The hardest thing about making music is fighting with yourself.' In 2024, they came back with Plan B.
- Standard article
Kuo Chin-fa: The Bass Soul Behind 'Roasted Rice Dumpling'
From a shoemaker's apprentice in Dadaocheng to the 'Island's Bass King,' Kuo Chin-fa used 'Roasted Rice Dumpling' to sing out the hardship and resilience of postwar Taiwanese common people — and burned up his last breath on stage.
- Evolving · community
Liao Chiung-chih: From a "Bound Opera Child" to Preserving the Method of Memory for Gezaixi
Born in Keelung in 1935, Liao Chiung-chih entered the Jinshan Music Society at age 15 as a pawned apprentice. She navigated the eras of indoor theater, outdoor stages, radio, and television opera; in her later life, she transformed a genre remembered through the body into an art form that students can learn, scripts can be read, and memory can be preserved through video.
- Standard article
Shen Wencheng: From Ching Chuan Kang Mechanic to Dual-Golden Singer
Shen Wencheng is a Taiwanese dual-Golden entertainer who has worked across music and television hosting. From aircraft mechanic in the final years of the Vietnam War to the island-wide hit 'Who Knows My Heart,' he inscribed his name in both the Golden Melody and Golden Bell Awards through sincerity and humor.
- Standard article
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.
- Standard article
VH (Vast & Hazy): Fifteen Years of Directional Calibration for an 'Exit-System Band'
Formed at the Tamkang University Jin Shao Award in 2011, went on hiatus in 2014, returned as a duo in 2017, and was nominated three times for Golden Melody Best Vocal Group. In an era when the Taiwan indie scene favored noise, Vast & Hazy chose to be a shelter for nameless anxiety — and fans spontaneously named them an 'exit-system band.' In April 2026, after Yi-chi announced his move to behind-the-scenes work, Ka-ka carries the name forward.
- Evolving · community
Jody Chiang: The Taiwanese Pop Queen from Beitou Nakasi
Jody Chiang (born Jiang Shu-hui, 1961 in Kaohsiung) moved to Taipei at age nine to perform in Beitou's *nakasi* venues. Her 1992 album "Voices After Drinking" sold 1.16 million copies in Taiwan, the only million-selling Taiwanese-language album on record. After winning four consecutive Golden Melody Awards for Best Female Mandarin/Dialect Singer (2000–2003), she retired in 2015 and made a comeback at the Taipei Dome National Day Gala in 2024.
- Standard article
Jam Hsiao
Started performing in folk song restaurants at 17, rose to fame via Super Star Avenue in 2007, and released his debut album in 2008. Won Golden Melody Award for Best Mandarin Male Singer in 2013, later expanding into bands, film, and Cross-Strait stages.
- Standard article
Jay Chou
A shy young man playing the piano on a talent show, his debut album rewrote the history of Mandopop. Through his original musical style, he proved to the music industry that songwriting could be commercially successful. With multiple albums, he demonstrated that Mandopop can maintain its Eastern identity while conquering the global stage. From a young creator whose manuscripts were repeatedly rejected, he has become a true musical revolutionary who disrupted the entire industry.
Sports 25
- Standard article
Lee Yang
The young man who gritted his teeth through Division A, now gritting his teeth to fight institutional corruption in sports: two Olympic gold medals in men's doubles badminton, Taiwan's youngest-ever cabinet minister, NT$34.01 million in savings, NT$36.38 million in debt, and a NT$10 million bonus donated entirely to charity.
- Standard article
Jeremy Lin: From Being Cut Twice in 15 Days to TPBL Double MVP — A Basketball Journey
State champion in high school with zero scholarship offers, undrafted, cut twice in 15 days — then he made the world know 'Linsanity'
- Standard article
Wang Chi-lin and Lee Yang (The Lin-Yang Duo)
From middle school classmates to Olympic gold: The Lin-Yang Duo defeated China in straight sets within 34 minutes, winning Taiwan's first-ever Olympic gold medal in badminton
- Standard article
Tai Tzu-ying
Record holder for 214 weeks as world number one, Taiwan's badminton queen — from Kaohsiung's Qianzhen District to an Olympic silver medal
- Evolving · community
Lin Yu-ting: From Yingge Junior High School Boxing Team to Paris Olympic Gold Medalist
In August 2024, Lin Yu-ting defeated a Polish athlete with a 5-0 score in the women's 57kg gold medal match at the Paris Olympics, winning Taiwan's first Olympic boxing gold. This article summarizes her journey starting from the Yingge Junior High School boxing team, her defeat at the Tokyo Olympics, the disqualification of her 2023 World Championships bronze medal, and the gender controversy during the Paris Olympics, as well as her teaching career, awards after winning gold, and recent competition status for 2026. Every claim includes a source.
- Standard article
Chou Tien-chen: Taiwan's Badminton Ace, Reaching the Heights of World No. 2
The first Taiwanese men's singles player to reach world number two and the first to defeat Lin Dan. From a low point of ten consecutive losses after joining the national team and becoming a Christian following an appendicitis perforation, to being diagnosed with early-stage colon cancer at age 34 in 2023—returning to international competition just days after surgery and enduring a year-long slump before reaching the Olympic quarterfinals the following year. Chou Tien-chen does not rely on overwhelming talent, but uses a "grinding" style of defensive rallies to steadily raise the ceiling for Taiwanese badminton.
- Standard article
Kuo Hsing-chun: From the Injury of a 141-Kilogram Barbell to Three Olympic Weightlifting Podiums
Taiwanese weightlifter, three-time Olympic medalist (2016 bronze, 2021 gold, 2024 bronze), world-record holder in the 59 kg class, and descendant of the Amis Malan community
- Standard article
Chuang Chih-Yuan: Six Olympics, 2013 World Champion, and the Olympic Medal That Was One Step Away
Born April 2, 1981, Chuang Chih-Yuan is the longest-serving competitor in the history of table tennis in Taiwan. From Sydney 2000 to Paris 2024, he represented Taiwan at six consecutive Olympic Games. At the 2013 World Table Tennis Championships, he and Chen Chien-an won the men's doubles world title. An Olympic medal remained the one regret of his career — the closest he came was falling short in the bronze medal match at London 2012. After retiring, he became an associate professor of physical education at National Sun Yat-sen University.
- Standard article
Chi Cheng: Set 10 World Records, Still Running for Taiwan's Name 50 Years Later
Born in Hsinchu on March 15, 1944, Chi Cheng became the most outstanding female track and field athlete in Taiwan's history, known as the 'Flying Antelope.' At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, she won bronze in the 80-meter hurdles with a time of 10.51 seconds—Taiwan's first-ever Olympic track and field medal for a woman. Over her career, she set 10 world records. After retiring, she devoted herself to promoting road running. Now in her eighties, she remains active on the front lines of the campaign to compete under the name 'Taiwan.'
- Standard article
Chien-Ming Wang: From Jianxing Junior High to the Sinker That Won the Yankees Two Seasons
Born in Tainan in 1980, Chien-Ming Wang is the most representative pitcher in the history of Taiwanese baseball players in the United States. He attended Jianxing Junior High School in Tainan and made his Major League debut in 2005. In 2006, he went 19-6 and tied Johan Santana for the American League wins title, becoming the first Asian pitcher to do so; in 2007, he posted another 19-7 season. After a baserunning injury in June 2008, his career trajectory changed. In 2018, the documentary _Late Life: The Chien-Ming Wang Story_ was released; in the 2023 WBC and the 2024 WBSC Premier12, he served as bullpen coach for the Chinese Taipei team.
- Standard article
Lu Yen-hsun: From Wimbledon Quarterfinals to Five Olympics, the Man Who Took Taiwanese Tennis the Farthest
At the 2010 Wimbledon Championships, Lu Yen-hsun defeated seventh seed Andy Roddick to become the first male player from Taiwan to reach a Grand Slam quarterfinal. From Athens 2004 to Tokyo 2021, he competed in five consecutive Olympic Games without missing a single edition—the farthest-traveling player in the history of modern Taiwanese tennis. After retiring, he founded a tennis academy, continuing to wait for a young Taiwanese player who might one day surpass his Wimbledon record.
- Evolving · community
Wang Kuan-hung: The Coach Was the Last Taiwanese Swimmer to Stand on an Asian Games Podium
In the 2026 Nagoya Asian Games men's 200m butterfly final, Wang Kuan-hung touched the wall in 1:55.05, winning Taiwan's first-ever men's swimming gold at the Asian Games and the nation's second swimming gold in 28 years. His coach by the poolside, Huang Chih-yung, was the last Taiwanese male swimmer to stand on an Asian Games podium back in 1998, connecting their legacies through a single thread.
- Standard article
Cheng Chao-tsun: 91.36 Meters on the Last Throw — The Day Asian Javelin Changed Forever
Born October 17, 1993 in Taichung, Cheng Chao-tsun is Taiwan's most accomplished javelin thrower in history. In the men's javelin final at the 2017 Taipei Summer Universiade, his last throw of 91.36 meters reversed the standings and won gold, setting the Asian record and making him the first Asian athlete to exceed 90 meters — ranked 12th all-time in the world at that point. He won gold at 86.72 meters at the 2019 Asian Athletics Championships and silver at 87.12 meters at the 2019 Diamond League Shanghai. He competed injured at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics but did not advance to the final. The world record is held by Czech athlete Jan Železný at 98.48 meters.
- Standard article
Yang Chuan-kwang: Indigenous Hero from Taitung, Rome Silver Medalist, and the Asian Ironman Who Set a 9121-Point World Record
Born July 10, 1933, in Taitung's Maran Amis village, Yang Chuan-kwang was Taiwan's first Olympic medalist. He won silver in the 1960 Rome decathlon with 8334 points and in 1963 broke the world record with 9121 points, his 4.83-meter pole vault performance forcing the IAAF to revise its scoring system. He died of a stroke in California on January 27, 2007, aged 73. In April 2025, the Ministry of Culture designated him a national treasure.
- Standard article
Hong-Chih Kuo: Taiwan's First MLB Home Run and All-Star, His Elbow Said No but He Kept Pitching
Born July 23, 1981, Hong-Chih Kuo was the fourth Taiwanese baseball player to reach MLB and the first Taiwanese player in history to hit a home run in the majors and the first to be selected for the MLB All-Star Game. He served as a key left-handed reliever for the Los Angeles Dodgers, posting an elite ERA of 1.20 in 2010, but injuries repeatedly forced his elbow to stop — and every time, he came back.
- Standard article
Hsieh Su-wei: Hsinchu 1986, Taiwan's First Grand Slam Champion and Seven Women's Doubles Titles
Born 1986/1/4 in Hsinchu. Father Hsieh Tzu-long (bus driver for Taiwan Motor Transport) passed away in 2023/10. Career-high WTA singles ranking: No. 23 (2013). Seven Grand Slam women's doubles titles (2013 Wimbledon / 2014 French Open / 2019 Wimbledon / 2021 Wimbledon / 2023 French Open / 2023 Wimbledon / 2024 Australian Open). First Taiwanese woman to reach a Grand Slam singles semifinal (2021 Australian Open). 2025/7 Wimbledon women's doubles runner-up.
- Standard article
Hsu Shu-ching: Lunbei 1991, Taiwan's First Double Olympic Gold Medalist in the 53 kg Weightlifting Category
Born May 9, 1991, into a Hakka family in Lunbei Township, Yunlin County; height 159 cm. At the 2012 London Olympics in the women's 53 kg category, she won silver with 219 kg (96 + 123). After gold medalist Zulfiya Chinshanlo (Kazakhstan) failed a retroactive doping test, Hsu was upgraded to gold in December 2020. At the 2016 Rio Olympics, she won gold outright with 212 kg (100 + 112). Taiwan's first double Olympic gold medalist. Retired June 3, 2018. In 2019, received a three-year ban for a 2017 doping violation (did not affect either Olympic gold).
- Standard article
Yang Dai-Kang: Taitung 1987, Amis Outfielder from Hokkaido Nippon-Ham's Decade of Gold Gloves to Yomiuri Giants via FA
Born 1987/1/17 in Taitung City, Amis, formerly known as Yang Zhong-shou. Graduated from the junior high school of National Taitung University Affiliated Sports High School, then went to Japan to attend Fukuoka Daiichi High School. In the 2005 NPB draft, both the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters and the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks selected him with the first overall pick; the Fighters won the lottery. In 2012, he won the Pacific League Outfielder Gold Glove Award — the first Taiwanese fielder to do so. In 2016, he exercised his domestic FA rights and transferred to the Yomiuri Giants. His NPB career: 1,322 games, 105 home runs, 482 RBIs, .270 batting average. He left the Giants at the end of 2021 and moved to independent leagues.
- Evolving · community
Fu Chao-hsuan: Taiwan Men's Track and Field's 60-Year Jump
At the 2026 Nagoya Asian Games men's high jump final, Fu Chao-hsuan cleared 2.25 metres on his first attempt in the rain, defeating an Indian competitor who succeeded on the second try to claim gold. This is Taiwan's third gold medal at the Games and marks the first time in 60 years—since Wu A-min's decathlon at the 1966 Bangkok Asian Games—that a Taiwanese male track and field athlete has stood atop an Asian Games podium. He won a national games gold medal at 16, but spent years afterward navigating injury and recovery.
- Evolving · community
Hao-Yu Lee: His Goal in America Is Not to Be Taiwan's Best Player
In 2026, 23-year-old Hao-Yu Lee became Taiwan's 19th player to reach Major League Baseball, playing 114 games in his first season with 10 home runs, rewriting five single-season records for Taiwanese players. When asked about these records, he said his goal was never to be Taiwan's best player—only to try to be a good player in America.
- Standard article
Li Chih-kai
From 'Market Kai' in the documentary Tumbling Boys to an Olympic silver medal — sixteen years of tumbling through life for Taiwan's Pommel Horse Prince.
- Evolving · community
Lin Yi-chieh
From a small boy rejected by the track team to an ultra-runner who made history walking across the Sahara Desert
- Evolving · community
Wei-Yin Chen
The left-hander who signed Taiwan's highest sports contract but only received 47% of the money
- Standard article
Yang Yung-wei
2021 Tokyo Olympics judo 60kg silver medalist, the first Olympic judo medalist in Taiwan's history, and world number one in November of the same year.
- Standard article
Yani Tseng
109 weeks at World No. 1, 15 LPGA titles including 5 majors, became the youngest player in history to claim 5 major championship trophies at age 22 — surpassing Tiger Woods' record; in 2025, ended an 11-year title drought and claimed victory once again
Politics & Democracy 21
- Standard article
Lai Ching-te: From a Mining Family to a Public Health Physician at the Presidential Office
The 16th President of the Republic of China, the first political figure in constitutional history to be elected president while serving as vice president
- Standard article
Zheng Nanrong: The Equation of a Mainlander's Son Who Traded His Life for Freedom of Speech
During the 228 Incident of 1947, his father Zheng Musen was hidden by Taiwanese neighbors to survive. Forty-one years later, the couple's eldest son, Zheng Nanrong, ignited gasoline in his own magazine office. He founded *Freedom Era Weekly* in 1984, holding 24 licenses and publishing despite 18 government bans. In 1988, he published Xu Shikai's 'Draft Constitution of the Republic of Taiwan.' On April 7, 1989, he set himself on fire. His wife Ye Julan subsequently entered politics, serving as a legislator, Minister of Transportation, Hakka Affairs Council chair, Vice Premier, and Secretary-General to the President. Zheng's choice remains controversial to this day: supporters regard it as martyrdom, while critics see it as an extreme personal act. The air of free speech in Taiwan is so commonplace now that many have forgotten it once required a life to obtain.
- Evolving · community
Chiang Wan-an: Taipei Mayor with a Legal Background, Overseeing the Dome, Urban Renewal, Gonguan Roundabout, and Fiscal Allocation Act Disputes
Chiang Wan-an is a Taipei mayor from the Chinese Unification Promotion Party who practiced law in the United States and served two terms as a legislator before being elected in a three-way race in 2022. During his tenure, the Taipei Dome obtained its use permit, the city government revoked density bonuses for Jinghua City, promoted urban renewal, doubled birth incentive payments, hosted the Taipei-New Taipei World Masters Games, demolished the Peace New Life Overpass and Gonguan Roundabout, disputed with the Executive Yuan over MRT subsidies following amendments to the Fiscal Allocation Act, and apologized multiple times as mayor at 228 Incident memorial services.
- Standard article
Chen Chih-chung: Elected to Kaohsiung City Council Three Times, Two Terms Ended in Legal Proceedings
On August 18, 2008, orientation for the University of Virginia School of Law began, but Chen Chih-chung, who was preparing to pursue his J.D., never showed up and lost his admission eligibility on the very day. Later, he was elected to the Kaohsiung City Council three times from Xiaogang in Qianzhen District, with two of his terms ending at the moment a judgment became final. In between, he served 272 days in prison. The verdict rendered in April 2023 did not include a forfeiture of civil rights. A month later, the three-reading revision of the election and recall law added a blacklist clause, preventing him from registering as a candidate.
- Standard article
Ma Ying-jeou: Harvard Law PhD worked as an English interpreter in Chiang Ching-kuo's office for eight years, becoming a president known for 'integrity,' leaving behind cross-strait relations, Sunflower Festival, and 22K
On November 7, 2015, at the Shangri-La in Singapore, he shook hands with Xi Jinping for 1 minute and 20 seconds, marking the first meeting between top leaders of both sides since 1949. The same photo is remembered by Taiwanese society today in two completely different ways: one seeing a historical breakthrough, the other seeing a concession of sovereignty. His 'integrity' image from his eight years as president, cross-strait relations, 22K, and the Sunflower Festival, along with his second visit to China after leaving office and his family's statement in 2026, still have no definitive conclusion today.
- Standard article
Tsai Ing-wen: From the Night of Defeat to 8.17 Million Votes, an Eight-Year Presidency of Quietude
On January 14, 2012, Tsai Ing-wen lost the presidential election by a margin of 797,561 votes; eight years later, she won with 8,170,231 votes, setting a record for the highest vote count in Taiwan's history of direct presidential elections. From an international trade law scholar to the first female president, she left behind achievements in indigenous apologies, same-sex marriage legislation, pension reform, and maintaining the status quo, while leaving unfinished questions regarding justice, housing, energy, and cross-Strait relations. These were eight years where quiet leadership became a system, and by which the system left its own gaps.
- Evolving · community
Lin Hsien-tang: Turning a Family Study into a Public Doorway for the Taiwanese People
Born in 1881 into the Wufeng Lin family, Lin Hsien-tang chose non-armed resistance and led the Taiwan Parliament Petition Movement (1921–1934). His 378-day world tour became a lesson in self-governance. What he left behind was not only a family name, but a method connecting education, culture, and autonomy.
- Standard article
Chen Chu
From death-row prisoner at Meilidao to the South's all-powerful 'Mama Mayor' — she is the most vivid witness to Taiwan's democratic transition.
- Standard article
Shih Ming-te: Twenty-Five Years Behind Bars, He Finally Raised a Flag Against His Own Party
After the 1979 Kaohsiung Incident, Shih Ming-te — charged as the mastermind — stood at his military tribunal and refused to plead guilty, refused to beg for mercy, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He spent a cumulative twenty-five-plus years in prison, one of the most significant victims of Taiwan's democracy movement. But in 2006, the man who helped build the Democratic Progressive Party turned around and launched the anti-Chen Red Shirt Movement. On January 15, 2024 — his 83rd birthday — he died carrying that unresolved contradiction.
- Evolving · community
The Gym Boss: How a Fitness Center Grew into a Political Microphone
Chen Zhi-han rose to fame as the founder of Genghis Khan Fitness Club, known as "The Gym Boss," and used long-form live streaming to fuse fitness, business, and politics into a single personal brand. Whether this trajectory is described as a pivot, an extension, or merely the continuous deformation of a personal brand requires separating the subject's own accounts, media reports, official statements, and audience interpretations.
- Evolving · community
Tsai Tong-rong: The Man Who Brought Referendum into Law, Seeing It First Enclosed by Thresholds
In 1990, Tsai Tong-rong returned to Taiwan under the pretext of attending a funeral, bringing over twenty years of overseas political exile experience to establish the Referendum Promotion Association; in 1997, he also enabled Formosa TV to launch via private shareholding. The Referendum Act was finally enacted in 2003, yet left traces of high thresholds and party negotiations. Tsai Tong-rong’s story is thus not merely a biography of a pro-independence figure, but an account of how Taiwan inscribed "the people's decision" into law, and how, after writing it, it continued to question the law itself.
- Standard article
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.
- Evolving · community
Chiang Ching-kuo: The Man Who Pushed Open a Crack in the Door of Authoritarianism
Chiang Ching-kuo was both the helmsman of the martial law regime and the leader who initiated the lifting of martial law and political opening in his later years; understanding this contradiction is key to seeing that Taiwan’s democracy was not an endpoint bestowed by anyone.
- Standard article
Fu Kun-chi: The Spiral of Power from the East Coast's 'Hualien King' to Legislative Caucus Convener
From the 1990s stock-market magnate known as 'Kai Ju Little Fu,' to entering the legislature in 2001 and taking control of Hualien in 2009, Fu Kun-chi built on Taiwan's east coast a two-decade 'Fu family dynasty' that even the central government found difficult to shake. From serving prison time while still holding office in a stock-manipulation case and staging a sham divorce to appoint his wife as deputy county magistrate, to returning to the Legislative Yuan in 2024 as Kuomintang caucus convener and leading a delegation to China, he has embodied one of the most extreme cases of resilience and controversy in Taiwanese politics.
- Standard article
Chen Shui-bian
The tenth and eleventh President of Taiwan, the implementer of the first party rotation in 2000. From a tenant farmer's son in Tainan to the first Democratic Progressive Party president, and then to the first former head of state who was imprisoned—his trajectory encapsulates the most complex tensions of Taiwan's democratic transition: inspiration, legislative foundation, storm, and rupture.
- Standard article
Lin Yixiong: From Taiwan Provincial Councilor to the Moral Symbol of the Anti–Nuclear Four Movement
Lin Yixiong was born in 1941 in Yilan, graduated from the National Taiwan University Department of Law, and practiced as an attorney. He was elected to the Taiwan Provincial Council in 1979 and joined *Formosa Magazine* in 1979. On 2/28/1980, the Lin Family Murders occurred: his mother and twin infant daughters were killed, and the case remains unsolved to this day. After his release from prison in 1984, he earned an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. On 6/7/1998, he was elected the eighth chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party (the first directly elected chairman). He left the DPP on 1/24/2006. In 2014, he undertook an indefinite hunger strike that led to the suspension and mothballing of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant. He founded the Tzulin Education Foundation and is one of the most morally significant figures in Taiwan's democracy movement. As of 2026, he is 84 years old and living.
- Standard article
Chen Chien-jen: SARS Health Minister, Vice President, 31st Premier
Born June 6, 1951, in Qishan Township, Kaohsiung County, Chen Chien-jen is an internationally renowned epidemiologist. He took over as Minister of the Department of Health during the SARS crisis in 2003, served as the 14th Vice President from 2016 to 2020, became the 31st Premier on January 31, 2023, and stepped down on May 20, 2024, handing over to Cho Jung-tai.
- Standard article
Kao Chun-ming
A pastor who risked his life and church for a stranger he barely knew — the faith choice behind the Kaohsiung Incident
- Standard article
Ko Wen-je
The surgeon who rewrote Taiwan's political script — from ECMO pioneer to third-party presidential candidate
- Standard article
Lee Teng-hui
The paradoxical life of an agricultural economist who became the first democratic leader in the Chinese-speaking world
- Evolving · community
Lu Hsiu-lien (呂秀蓮)
From Felon to Vice President: The legendary life of the first female Vice President in the Chinese-speaking world
Tech & Business 21
- Standard article
Stan Shih: From a Duck Egg Stall in Lukang to a Brand Called Taiwan
At a 1981 electronics show in San Francisco, a plastic-shell laptop that closed like a book drew 20 U.S. distributors circling it for agency rights—marking the first time many Taiwanese touched a 'computer made in Taiwan.' The man behind it lost his father to overwork at age three and was raised by a mother who sold duck eggs and patriotic bonds. He built Acer into a top-five global PC brand, drew the Smiling Curve that entered textbooks, and stands among Taiwan’s rare tech patriarchs willing to face the camera and say, 'I am the biggest loser.'
- In-depth curation
Huang Chongren: He Studied Medicine, Spent His Life Treating the Company Like a Patient
Huang Chongren earned his PhD in the United States and didn't leave academia to work on scanners until age 38. In 2012, Powerchip went public at NT$0.29 per share, turning roughly 270,000 shareholders' stocks into wallpaper. Banks demanded an NT$8 billion personal guarantee or his resignation; he chose neither, writing to 43 banks that he wouldn't seek emergency aid, selling assets piece by piece to keep production lines running. Nine years later, the company returned to the stock market. The same no-bankruptcy logic saved the factory and allowed him to buy back his own shares at three cents each.
- Standard article
Morris Chang (Zhang Zhongmou)
Semiconductor patriarch, founder of TSMC, legendary entrepreneur who changed the global tech industry with the wafer foundry model
- Standard article
Jensen Huang
From a Kentucky boarding school to a five-trillion-dollar empire: how a Tainan boy who cleaned toilets bet on a future that would not arrive for another decade
- Standard article
Ed Chi: The Taiwanese Man Who Taught AI to "Think Step-by-Step" by Bringing Cognitive Psychology into Machines
Ed Chi is a Research Vice President at Google DeepMind and a co-author of the Chain of Thought paper. This man, raised in Tamsui, turned Piaget's schema theory into a method for machine reasoning—a breakthrough that cost only about \$5,000 because it was never a problem of computing power.
- Standard article
Ethan Tu
Founder of PTT with a 486 computer, led Cortana AI at Microsoft, then returned to Taiwan to build nonprofit AI research—a thirty-year digital journey
- Standard article
Morris Chang vs. Chang Hsin-cheng: From Semiconductor Tycoon to the "Eight-No Hermit" Defending Taiwan
In 1984, his proposal for foundry services was ignored; in 1995, he challenged TSMC with a joint-venture model. After failed expansion into China and the Hong Kong protests, this UMC founder donated NT$3 billion to national defense in 2022, completing a dramatic transformation from tech titan to anti-CCP vanguard.
- Standard article
Chi-Wei Lin: From an Internationally Awarded Physical Board Game Brand to a Software Platform for 200,000 Creators
Chi-Wei Lin (known online as CW) is a Taiwanese entrepreneur. In 2014, his educational board game won a Silver Award at the US Parents' Choice Awards, beating LEGO; a decade later, his startup Portaly became Taiwan's largest creator commerce platform, helping 200,000 people turn influence into revenue. Profitable since 2025 with zero paid marketing, it grew through organic product-led growth (PLG). From traditional industry to software to AI, each pivot meant starting from zero. He has been doing the same thing all along: helping others convert one thing into another, then openly sharing the method.
- Standard article
Jerry Yang: From Knowing Only One English Word to Founding Yahoo, the Father of the Global Portal Era
In 1978, 10-year-old Jerry Yang immigrated to the U.S. knowing only the word "Shoe." In 1994, while avoiding his doctoral thesis at Stanford, he and a partner manually categorized web pages from a trailer, creating Yahoo! and organizing the chaotic internet into a directory that launched the golden age of portals. The company's valuation once exceeded $100 billion, and in 2005 he made a "crazy bet" investing in Alibaba, reshaping the global internet landscape.
- Evolving · community
Tsai Ying-ming: Wanting to Rewrite His Own Wikipedia, the Court First Asks Who Holds the Pen
In 2024, Tsai Ying-ming sued the Taiwan Wikimedians Association after being dissatisfied with Wikipedia entries regarding his media acquisitions and cross-Strait relations; he lost in both the first and second instances. This lawsuit, ostensibly about reputation, actually dismantles the power boundaries between platforms, associations, administrators, and anonymous editors.
- Standard article
Mark Liu: The Berkeley PhD Who Succeeded Morris Chang — Six Years of Decision-Making in the US-China Chip Crossfire
In June 2018, Morris Chang retired, and Mark Liu and C.C. Wei jointly took the helm of TSMC. This UC Berkeley electrical engineering doctorate steered the world's most important chipmaker with an engineer's precision, announcing the Arizona fab, navigating geopolitical crosscurrents amid six years of US-China tech competition, and handing the reins to C.C. Wei upon his retirement in June 2024 — leaving behind a final line: 'Buy TSMC.'
- Standard article
Yeh Kuo-yi: From Shilin Commercial High School to Building a Half-Century Manufacturing Empire
Born on April 21, 1941, Yeh Kuo-yi had no university degree. Starting from Shilin Commercial High School, he founded Inventec in Shilin in 1975. Beginning with electronic calculators, he led the company to become one of the world's leading server ODM manufacturers, supplying cloud computing capacity to Facebook, Microsoft, and Google. In 2023, he handed the chairmanship to his second son, Yeh Li-cheng, and stepped back as group chairman.
- Standard article
Terry Gou: Banqiao 1950, Hon Hai Plastics 1974, and the Founder of a Contract-Manufacturing Empire
Born in Banqiao, Taipei County, on 1950/10/18. Founded Hon Hai Plastics Enterprise in 1974 with NT$100,000 and 10 employees. Entered PC connectors in 1981; renamed the company Hon Hai Precision in 1982. Handed the chairmanship to Young Liu in 2019/6. In 2021, the Yonglin Foundation worked with TSMC and Hon Hai to donate BNT vaccines. In 2023, withdrew from an independent presidential bid three hours before registration. Hon Hai ranked No. 32 on the 2024 Fortune 500; Gou was Taiwan's richest person in 2026 with US$15.3 billion.
- Standard article
Xu Wen-long: Tainan 1928, Chi Mei Corporation 1959, and the Founder of the World's Largest Violin Collection Museum
Born 2/25/1928 in Tainan, passed away 11/18/2023 (age 95). Founded Chi Mei Corporation in October 1959 (capital of NT$2 million). Began acquiring violins in 1990, amassing a total of 1,362 (the world's largest private collection). Chimei Museum officially opened on 1/1/2025 in Tainan Metropolitan Park. A passionate violinist; Chimei Museum was initially open free of charge (current policy P0 pending confirmation).
- Standard article
C. C. Wei: From Texas Instruments Engineer to TSMC Chairman and CEO
From Texas Instruments engineer to Morris Chang’s successor, C. C. Wei steered TSMC into 2nm and global expansion, becoming Taiwan’s foremost semiconductor leader.
- Standard article
Lin Bai-li: Shanghai 1949, Founder of Quanta Computer and the Notebook ODM King Who Has Fought Cancer for Two Decades
Born April 24, 1949, in Shanghai. Co-founded Quanta Computer with Liang Ci-zhen and others in 1988. Diagnosed with lung adenocarcinoma in 2005 (has been fighting cancer for over 20 years). Quanta's 2025 revenue exceeded NT$2 trillion; a key NVIDIA server partner; listed on the Fortune 500. His son's succession has drawn attention. Still serving as chairman in 2026.
- Standard article
Steve Chang: A Fu Jen Catholic University Math Graduate Who Sold Antivirus Software to the World
Born in 1954, Steve Chang graduated from the Department of Mathematics at Fu Jen Catholic University, then went to the United States to earn a master's degree in computer science from Lehigh University. In 1988, at age 34, he co-founded Trend Micro with Eva Chen in Los Angeles. On August 18, 1998, Trend Micro listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (ticker: 4704) and on Nasdaq the same year, becoming the first Taiwanese software company to list in Japan. In 2007 he founded Social Ventures Taiwan, and in 2019 established the Ming-Yi Foundation, pivoting from information security to social enterprise.
- Standard article
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.
- Standard article
Wang Yung-ching: From Rice Mill to the Two-Decade Battle for the Sixth Naphtha Cracker, and the Posthumous Inheritance Drama
Born in 1917 to a poor farming family in Xindian, Taipei, he dropped out of school at 15 and borrowed 200 Japanese yen from his father to open the "Shinko Rice Mill." In 1954, he founded Formosa Plastics, later earning the title "God of Management." In 1973, he proposed the Sixth Naphtha Cracker to the government; despite repeated rejections, he persisted for nearly two decades before winning approval, with mass production beginning in Mailiao, Yunlin, in 1998. He died in New York on October 15, 2008, at age 92, and the ensuing family inheritance dispute continued until around 2022.
- Standard article
Lee-Feng Chien: Before Google Came to Taiwan, He Was Already Searching for Taiwan
Before many Taiwanese graduate students encountered Google, the researcher behind their online thesis retrieval system was Lee-Feng Chien. From a pioneer of Chinese retrieval at Academia Sinica to Google Taiwan's employee number one, he transformed a one-person office into an R&D hub of over 2,000 people in fourteen years. After retiring in 2020, he became one of the most blunt critics of Taiwan's talent crisis: "Taiwan will find no talent within five years and no consumers within ten."
- Standard article
Tony Hsiao: From Game Product Manager to INSIDE Founder, the Mayor of Taiwan's Internet Scene
In 2009, six internet people launched a collaborative blog, and INSIDE — Taiwan's pioneering tech commentary media — was born. Tony Hsiao (fOx) simultaneously co-founded iCook, Taiwan's largest recipe platform. Both of Taiwan's most recognized internet properties became his work — and both sold to the same buyer.
Art & Design 19
- Standard article
Jimmy Liao: The Images Treated as Healing Were Brought Back from a Glass Tank by a Leukemia Survivor
In 1995, 37-year-old advertising art director Liao Fu-bin was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and waved to friends through glass from a sterile room. After he was discharged, the “little people” he had once used to earn a living came alive, and he began drawing A Fish with a Smile, The Moon Forgets, Turn Left, Turn Right, and Sound of Colors. Behind what Taiwanese people remember as healing, youth-culture, and Jimmy Square in Luodong, Yilan, was a man who had gone through hell, translating death and loneliness into forms that could be read. Those works later grew into a domain spanning film, musicals, circus, and public art, with a 25th-anniversary special exhibition still being held in Hong Kong in 2026.
- Standard article
Aaron Nieh: Taiwan’s First AGI Member, from Golden Melody Album Packaging to National Identity Systems Across Two Decades
Aaron Nieh (born 1977) is the first Taiwanese designer admitted to Switzerland’s Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) and a three-time winner of the Golden Melody Award for Best Album Packaging. His design work spans pop-music covers (Jonathan Lee, Yoga Lin, Lu Wei), book publishing, civic movements (the 4 a.m. New York Times advertisement during the 2014 Sunflower Movement; the 2020 anti-Tedros “Taiwan Can Help” campaign that crowdfunded NT$10 million in eight hours), political campaigns (Tsai Ing-wen’s 2016 “Light Up Taiwan” campaign and the main visuals for two presidential inaugurations), state-owned enterprise identity systems (the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Tourism Administration, CPC, Taipower), and art spaces (Taichung Green Museumbrary, Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale). Aaron Nieh Workshop operates from Taipei and Kaohsiung’s Pier-2 warehouses; he studied in graduate programs in Belgium and London and completed none of three master’s programs; he has said of himself, “before he was designer Aaron Nieh, he was citizen Aaron Nieh.” Starting in 2024, he won four consecutive state-owned enterprise identity projects, and on the day Taipower’s new logo went online in 2026, a controversy erupted over alleged “political patronage.”
- Standard article
Wanwan: The Bald Figure Who Gave a Generation of Office Workers a Face, and Hu Chia-wei, Who Let It “Become a Historical Figure”
In the days when offices still relied on MSN to communicate, office workers who did not dare speak up to their bosses changed their profile pictures to a naked bald figure with one curled hair on its head, letting it shout “I want to get off work” for them. Hu Chia-wei, who drew it, went from a design assistant earning NT$9,000 a month to, by accident, the creator of Taiwan’s first blog to surpass 100 million views and the founding figure of illustrated online writing. The bald figure stays forever innocent and ageless, but the person who drew it grows up; so she let the character exit together with her and “become a historical figure.”
- Evolving · community
Tsai Jui-yueh: From a Green Island Cell to a Dance Studio That Could Not Be Burned Away
Born in Tainan in 1921, Tsai Jui-yueh left for Japan at sixteen to study dance, was imprisoned in 1949 after her husband Lei Shih-yu fell to political persecution, and kept teaching dance on Zhongshan North Road after her release. What she left behind was more than a set of steps: a studio that was rescued, burned, and still rehearses today, and the standing question of how Taiwan preserves the memory of the wounded.
- Evolving · community
Jason Wu: From Barbie's Closet to Who Can Like What in the Classroom
Born in Taipei in 1982, Jason Wu began making clothes for dolls at age five and had Michelle Obama wear his white gown in 2009. Taiwan's classrooms use his story to discuss gender stereotypes, but we should ask more: Why must children succeed before they are allowed to freely like dolls?
- Evolving · community
Wang Da-hong: The Architectural Poet Who Brought Bauhaus Spirit to Taiwan and Gaze Upon the Eastern Soul with Modernity
Emerging victorious from the 1965 Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall competition, Wang Da-hong studied under Bauhaus master Walter Gropius and spent his life reconciling tradition with modernity through minimalist, disciplined architecture.
- Evolving · community
Chen San-huo: Handing Broken Vases to Fate, Keeping the Temple Roof's Jian-nian Alive
After the 921 Earthquake, Tainan artist Chen San-huo picked up a shattered vase in Fengyuan, transforming from a temple restoration apprentice into a "rooftop artist" who creates with broken ceramics. Instead of making Jian-nian look like the original, he let fragmentation, chance, and recycled materials redefine its shape.
- Evolving · community
Wei Tsung-cheng: Bringing Sanxia’s Yokai to Ximending, Guiding Mazu Out of the Comic Panels
In 2009, *Emperor Ma Descends* propelled Wei Tsung-cheng from the doujinshi circle into professional manga. His 2010 serialized work, *Ming Zhan Lu* (Record of the Netherworld), brought Sanxia, Ximending, Taoism, and Mazu into a shonen adventure. Counterintuitively, he did not design “Taiwaneseness” first and then fill in the story; instead, he drew markets, buses, and local legends, allowing the locale to grow from daily details into a world capable of appearing on lantern festivals and gezaixi stages. This gave his manga characters life beyond the page, becoming an entry point for understanding the Taiwanese manga industry and the representation of faith.
- Evolving · community
Zhuge Silang: How the Red-Clothed Boy Survived Censorship and Returned to Taiwanese Childhoods
In 1958, Ye Hongjia drew Zhuge Silang in *Manga King*. This red-clothed, sword-wielding youth first became a child hero in the post-White Terror publishing market, then was forced into silence by comic censorship. From manuscripts and *wangzai* (paper) cards to the 2022 animation, Zhuge Silang leaves behind not just nostalgia, but a history of how Taiwanese originality was suppressed, preserved, and is now being seen again.
- Standard article
Chen Chun-Liang: Design Poet and Modern Translator of Eastern Aesthetics
Chen Chun-Liang was born in Tainan in 1958 and founded Freeimage Design Co., Ltd. on his 29th birthday, earning the title 'Design Poet' in the industry. He reinterprets modern design language through calligraphy, negative space, and Eastern imagery, with work spanning publication design, corporate identity, and national celebrations. In 2005, his 'Heaven Round, Earth Square' state banquet tableware won the Grand Jury Award at the Macau Design Biennale. A long-time contributor to design education, he is one of the most influential graphic designers in Taiwan since the 1980s.
- Standard article
Fang Hsu-chung: From a Pingtung Military Dependents' Village to the Visual Director Behind Taiwan's Three Major Awards Ceremonies
Joe Fang Studio founder Fang Hsu-chung was born in 1978 in Gonghe New Village, Donggang, Pingtung. He studied in the art and design department at the private Fu-Hsin Trade and Arts School and later in the evening division of the metalwork group in the Department of Crafts and Design at National Taiwan University of Arts. In 2013, he founded Joe Fang Studio. Beginning in 2016, he successively directed the key visuals for the Golden Melody Awards, Golden Bell Awards, and Golden Horse Awards, Taiwan's three major awards ceremonies, and has been nominated seven times for the Golden Melody Award for Best Album Packaging. From the material textures of old objects in his military dependents' village childhood to the contemporary narratives of the three major awards ceremonies, he uses visual design to place Taiwan's memories alongside its times.
- Standard article
Hsiao Ching-yang
Grammy winner for Best Recording Package; a representative figure of Taiwanese design on the world stage who achieved victory through a father-daughter collaboration.
- Standard article
Stan Lai: The Cross-Strait Theater Bridge-Builder Behind Performance Workshop and the Wuzhen Theatre Festival
Stan Lai was born on 1954/10/25 in Washington, D.C.; his father Lai Chia-chiu was a diplomat. He earned a PhD in Dramatic Art from UC Berkeley in 1983. In 1984, he co-founded Performance Workshop with his wife Ding Nai-chu, Lee Li-chun, Lee Kuo-hsiu, and others. Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land premiered in 1986, and its 1992 film adaptation starred Brigitte Lin. In 2007, he received the 11th National Award for Arts, an honor he has received twice. In 2013/5, he co-founded the Wuzhen Theatre Festival with Chen Xianghong, Huang Lei, and Meng Jinghui; it is one of the most influential Chinese-language theater festivals across Taiwan and China. Theatre Above opened in Shanghai in 2015. The BBC has praised him as “the best Chinese-language playwright and director in the world.”
- Standard article
Fang-Yi Sheu: Yilan 1971, from Martha Graham Dance Company Principal to 2024 Golden Horse Film Festival Visual Dance Designer
Born in Yilan in 1971. Graduated from the Dance Department of Taipei National University of the Arts. Went to the United States in 1995, joined the Martha Graham Dance Company, and was promoted to principal dancer in 1999. Returned to Taiwan in 2007 to found LAFA (ended in 2010). Documentary 'Salute' released in 2020. Designed the visual dance for the 2024 Golden Horse Film Festival. Interviewed in 2025 on the topic of bodily aging.
- Standard article
Ming Hua Yuan: Founded in Tainan in 1929, the Four-Generation Chen Family's Taiwanese Opera Empire
Founded by Chen Ming-chi in Tainan in 1929, relocated to Chaozhou, Pingtung in 1962. The second generation, Chen Sheng-fu, introduced modern theater technology, bringing Taiwanese opera to the National Theater. Eight sub-troupes under the banners of Heaven, Earth, Xuan, Huang, Sun, Moon, Star, and Chen. In 2024, *San Xi* toured for the fourth time to mark the 95th anniversary.
- Standard article
Li Kuo-hsiu
Founder of Performative Productions, the King of Comedy in Taiwan; passed away from colon cancer on July 2, 2013, at age 57.
- Evolving · community
Huang Sheng-yuan: Treating Yilan as a City Under Slow Repair, Building Architecture Without Walls
In 1994, a Taipei-born Yale architecture master's graduate moved to Yilan and spent the next thirty years doing one thing: treating the entire city as a slowly evolving construction site. His "vascular bundle plan" removed walls and reopened buried moats, erasing clear boundaries between public buildings and streets. The Luodong Cultural Workshop took fourteen years to complete, spanning two changes of government. In 2017, Fieldoffice became the first Taiwanese architecture team invited to tour Europe, and Huang himself received Japan's Yoshizaka Takamasa Prize—the first time it was awarded to a foreigner.
- Standard article
Shen Sheng-Po
Trained in computer science, Shen Sheng-Po brought code into Taiwan’s contemporary art scene. In just 34 years, he left behind not only digital artworks, but also a way of treating programming as lived experience and free software as an artistic ethic.
- Standard article
Zhu Zong-qing
A percussionist who returned from the Vienna Conservatory and spent four decades bringing a niche art into Taiwan's musical mainstream; he founded Taiwan's first professional percussion ensemble, built a complete pedagogical system, and rooted rhythm and vitality across society from concert halls to campuses, earning the National Award for Arts and the title "Father of Taiwanese Percussion."
Literature 17
- Standard article
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.
- Standard article
San Mao: The Woman Who Wrote Escape as Freedom
Born Chen Ping in 1943 in Chongqing, she moved to Taiwan in 1948. After dropping out of junior high due to public humiliation by a teacher, she spent seven years in seclusion before resuming writing. In 1973 she married José in Spanish Sahara, her desert prose made her famous, and she became the window through which Taiwanese people under martial law imagined the outside world. José died in a diving accident in 1979. Her sole screenplay, "Red on the Rolling River," won eight Golden Horse Awards in 1990. She died by suicide at Taipei Veterans General Hospital on January 4, 1991, at age 47.
- Standard article
Lai He: The "Mazu of Changhua" in Local Attire, and His Uncompromising Scales
Before New Year's Eve in 1943, the renowned Changhua physician Lai He habitually burned the debt records of his poor patients. Known as the "Father of Taiwan New Literature," he used his scalpel to save lives and his pen as a sword against injustice under colonial rule; his work "A Pair of Scales" remains a cultural symbol of Taiwan's resistance against systemic violence.
- Evolving · community
Chen Sī-hóng: The Writer Who Fled from Yǒngjìng to Berlin, Yet Is Always Caught Up by His Hometown
For over twenty years, he fled from Yǒngjìng, Changhua, only to write back to his family, gender, body, and the hometown that refuses to disappear, from the distance of Berlin and the world.
- Evolving · community
Chung Chao-cheng: A Man Who Never Finished a College Degree, Yet Wrote the Long River of the Taiwanese People
Born in Longtan, Taoyuan in 1925, Chung Chao-cheng had his studies in the Chinese Department of National Taiwan University interrupted by a Japanese-language education and illness, yet he went from elementary school teacher to novelist, editor, and Hakka activist. With _Lubinghua_ he wrote about rural Taiwan, and with two trilogies he preserved the historical memory of the Taiwanese people. His literature lives not only on the bookshelf but also in a life-and-literature park in Longtan.
- Evolving · community
Hong Ching-fu: The Early Fallen Literary Giant of Local Color Literature
Hong Ching-fu (1949–1982), who came from a poor farming family in Erlin, Changhua, taught at Danan Elementary School and Shekou Elementary School in Taichung during the day, while at night he documented the disintegration of traditional Taiwanese villages amidst industrial transformation and the spirit of ordinary people. His works, such as *Black-Faced Qingzai* and *Sanxi*, shook the post-war literary scene, and his writings were selected for high school textbooks, yet he passed away suddenly in a car accident on a typhoon night at age thirty-two, leaving behind one of Taiwan's most sincere and profound rural portraits.
- Standard article
Chen Ying-zhen: The Unificationist Literary Conscience from Zhunan to Beijing
Chen Ying-zhen (1937–2016), born Chen Yung-shan, was a prominent writer and political intellectual known for his works on social realism and his leadership in the China Unification Alliance.
- Evolving · community
Hong Ni: Three Names Sharing One Pen, From Fangyuan Library to HahaTai Streets
Hong Jie-ni (洪婕倪), born in Changhua Haixian and raised in Fangyuan, operates under the names "Jenny" for street interviews in HahaTai, and "Hong Ni" when organizing family life, migrant experiences, baking apprenticeship, and growth. Between short stories like *Is the Watermelon Sweet?* and *The Melon Seller*, lies an author's method of placing public work and intimate writing on the same life map.
- Evolving · community
Lung Ying-tai: Born in Daliao in 1952, the Public Intellectual from The Wild Fire to Taiwan's First Minister of Culture
Born on February 13, 1952, in Daliao Township, Kaohsiung County. She holds a master's degree in English and American literature from Kansas State University, though accounts of her doctoral degree differ (P0). The Wild Fire first appeared in December 1985, went through 24 reprints in 21 days, and surpassed 100,000 copies within four months. She served as Taiwan's first Minister of Culture from 2012 to 2014 (appointed by Ma Ying-jeou), and Big River, Big Sea — Untold Stories of 1949 was published in 2009.
- Standard article
Xi Mu-rong: A Poetic Symphony of Grasslands and Modernity
Author of *Seven Miles of Fragrance* and *Youth Without Grievance*, she is a best-selling Chinese-language poet, descendant of the Mongol people.
- Standard article
Bai Xianyong: Taipei People (1971) and Twenty Years of Youth Edition Peony Pavilion Tours
Born in Guilin, Guangxi in 1937, he is the son of Bai Chongxi. In 1956, while studying at National Taiwan University's Department of Foreign Languages, he co-founded Modern Literature with Wang Wenxing and others. In 1971, he published 14 short stories in Taipei People. In 1983, he published Nie Zi (The Sinful Child). He started the Youth Edition Peony Pavilion in 2003, which premiered in April 2004, celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2024. He received the National Arts Prize in 2003.
- Standard article
Chu Tien-wen: 1956 Taipei, from *San San Journal* to *A City of Sadness* and the Golden Lion at Venice
Born in Taipei in 1956, daughter of novelist Chu Hsi-ning. In 1977, co-founded *San San Journal* with Hu Lan-cheng and others. Longtime screenwriter for Hou Hsiao-hsien; her landmark work *A City of Sadness* won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1989. In 1994, her novel *Notes of a Desolate Man* won the top prize in the novel category of the China Times Literary Award. Screenwriting credits include *Good Men, Good Women* and *Goodbye South, Goodbye*.
- Standard article
Huang Chun-ming: Born in Luodong, 1935 — Chronicler of Small Figures from 'The Days of Watching the Sea' to 'The Sandwich Man'
Born February 13, 1935, in Luodong, Yilan. 'The Days of Watching the Sea' (1967) and 'The Sandwich Man' (1969) represent the core concern of Taiwan's nativist literature for ordinary people. The Nativist Literature Debate of 1977. Recipient of the Wu San-lien Literary Award and the National Award for Arts. His second son, Huang Kuo-chun (a writer), died by suicide on June 20, 2003. Hou Hsiao-hsien adapted his work for the screen in 1983. Still living as of 2026.
- Standard article
Huang Zhen-nan
Huang Zhen-nan is a Taiwanese cultural historian, book collector, and writer. Through his 'Huoshuilaifang' page, he shares Taiwan's history and old-book culture. He is the author of works such as *The Most Hilarious History of Taiwan*.
- Standard article
Li 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.
- Standard article
Zhong Lihe: Meinong 1915, the Writer Who Fell in a Pool of Blood
Born on December 15, 1915, into a Hakka family in Meinong, Kaohsiung. Went to Northeast China in 1938 and returned to Taiwan in 1946. Representative works: *Lishan Farm* (novel), *The Native* (short story, written in 1959), and *A Couple in Poverty*. Known as 'the writer who fell in a pool of blood,' often called the 'Father of Taiwanese Nativist Literature' (a title that is disputed). Died of hemoptysis on August 4, 1960, at the age of 44.
- Evolving · community
Lim Tsiong-bin: Author of "Don't Despise Taiwan" and a 9,000-Line Taiwanese-Language Epic
In 1987, at age 32, Lim Tsiong-bin wrote "Don't Despise Taiwan," a poem later set to music and performed at the 2016 National Day ceremony. In 1991, Hsu Ching-chun won the Golden Melody Award for Best Taiwanese-Language Female Singer with this song; Lim won Best Dialect Song Lyricist but did not attend the ceremony. His Taiwanese-language epic *Tears of Rouge* spans 9,000 lines and 110,000 characters—the longest poem in Taiwan's literary history. In 1991, he co-founded the Sweet Potato Poetry Society with Lin Tsung-yuan and Huang Chin-lien, Taiwan's first organization dedicated to mother-tongue writing.
Historical Figures 16
- Evolving · community
Charles Le Gendre: The Treaty-Maker and the Traitor Were the Same Man
In 1867, the American merchant ship Rover wrecked off the Hengchun Peninsula, and 14 crew members were killed by the Paiwan people. U.S. Consul Le Gendre made eight trips to Taiwan, signing an agreement with indigenous chief Tauketok without the participation of the Qing government. He then took his encyclopedic knowledge of Formosa and defected to the Japanese government. Five years later, Japan used his intelligence to launch a military expedition against Taiwan.
- Standard article
Robert Swinhoe: When a Diplomat Became a Naturalist
In 1856, a 19-year-old British interpreter recorded the first bird he spotted on the western coast of Formosa. Four years later, 52 academic papers introduced the world to what lived on this island for the first time. He died in London at 41, but the species he named live on today in Taiwan's mountains and forests.
- Standard article
Mona Lodo: The Anti-Japanese Hero Minted on a 20 Dollar Coin, and the World Without China or Japan
In 2001, the Central Bank of Taiwan put the face of the anti-Japanese hero Mona Rudao on a 20 dollar coin. However, the mint could not find any photos in domestic historical records, so they eventually found one in a Japanese magazine. From the Wushe Athletic Meet in 1930 to a skeleton that served as an anthropological specimen for nearly forty years, three regimes needed him. The world he truly defended—the one with Rainbow Bridge, Wenmian, and Gaya—never had China or Japan.
- Standard article
Yoichi Hatta: From Hydraulic Legend to the "Biting Canal," the Colonial Imprint of a Technocrat
In the 1920s, Japanese engineer Yoichi Hatta built the Wushantou Reservoir and the Chianan Canal on Taiwan's Chianan Plain. While this world-class project brought agricultural abundance, its colonial-exploitative nature and heavy burdens on farmers also led some farmers to call it the “biting canal.” This article examines Hatta's achievements and faults, the two sides of his management philosophy, and the complex imprint this history left on Taiwanese society.
- Standard article
Wu Baifu (Momofuku Ando): From Puzi, Chiayi to Tables Worldwide, a Global Legend of Taiwanese Genes and Japanese Packaging
In 1961, Momofuku Ando purchased Chang Kuo-wen's patent application rights for instant noodles for 23 million yen. This was not merely a commercial transaction, but a transnational contest over the right to define an invention. This entrepreneur from Puzi, Chiayi transformed the spirit of Taiwan's traditional shredded-chicken noodles into a Japanese national food, and through Cup Noodles fundamentally changed eating habits around the world. This article examines in depth his entrepreneurial beginnings in Japanese-ruled Taiwan, the insights he gained from postwar imprisonment, and the entanglements of identity and family between Taiwan and Japan.
- Standard article
Shao You-lian: The Conservator in Liu Ming-chuan's Shadow, and the True Anchoring of Taipei as Provincial Capital
Was he the culprit whom history marked as having “ended the New Policies,” or the most pragmatic fiscal gatekeeper of Qing-era Taiwan? Taking over after Liu Ming-chuan's ambitious building program, Shao You-lian completed the railway from Taipei to Hsinchu amid extreme fiscal constraint, formally anchored Taiwan's provincial capital in Taipei, and left later generations with a difficult debate: is consolidation a step backward, or another form of governance closer to reality?
- Evolving · community
Shen Baozhen: A Fort, a Mountain Road, and the Qing Court’s Forced Gaze upon Taiwan
Following the 1874 Mudan Incident, Shen Baozhen arrived in Anping with warships, academies, and surveying technologies from the Fuzhou Ship Administration; he built the Everlasting Gold City, established Hengchun County, advocated lifting the Taiwan migration ban, and pushed Taiwan into the Qing Court’s maritime defense and provincial governance imagination. Yet as roads, forts, and shrines were established, the land and autonomy of Indigenous peoples were also rearranged.
- Standard article
Chiang Wei-shiu: The Healer Who Diagnosed Colonial Pathologies Through "Clinical Lectures"
In 1921, physician Chiang Wei-shiu published the "Clinical Lectures," personifying Taiwan as an "intellectually malnourished child of world culture" and diagnosing its ailment as intellectual malnutrition. He founded the Taiwan Cultural Association and the first legal political party, the Taiwan People's Party, spending over ten years in prison while weaving a network of awakening between Da'an Hospital and Chunfeng Dehui Building, leaving behind the legacy: "Compatriots must unite; unity is truly powerful."
- Standard article
Liao Tianding: The Habitual Thief in Police Files, the Righteous Outlaw in Taiwanese Opera Booklets
Born in Qingshui in 1883, Liao Tianding died in Bali in 1909. Official records document his thefts and murders, while folk culture—through newspapers, opera booklets, temples, and video games—transforms him into a righteous outlaw who robs the rich to help the poor.
- Standard article
Liu Ming-chuan: Lighting Taiwan's First Electric Lamp, a Modernizing Pioneer Running Through Power and Controversy
From the son of a salt smuggler to Taiwan's first governor, Liu Ming-chuan spent six years in Taiwan not only promoting railways and postal services, but also lighting the Qing Empire's first electric lamp inside Taipei City. Yet his strategic decision to abandon Keelung and reinforce Huwei, along with his impatient policies toward Indigenous administration and land-tax reform, also left deep debates and shadows in the long course of history.
- Evolving · community
Tsai Pei-huo: The Man Who Made Taiwanese a Public Issue
Tsai Pei-huo was more than a Japanese-era figure who left behind a few books and songs. Starting from positions as teacher, student abroad, journalist, and social movement participant, he connected education, Taiwanese written language, cultural enlightenment, and self-governance demands into a single question: how can the people of Taiwan gain the ability to read, write, organize, and speak. This article uses verifiable archival materials, work databases, cultural associations, and the Taiwan Parliament Establishment Petition context to trace how a public intellectual found pathways to language and politics within and beyond the colonial system.
- Evolving · community
Shi Lang: From Zheng’s General to Qing Commander, Unable to Solely Decide Taiwan’s Fate
In the 1683 Battle of Penghu, Shi Lang led Qing forces to defeat the Zheng navy; but this general, who moved from Zheng Chenggong’s camp to the Qing court, faced controversies over his legacy that extended beyond the battlefield, involving whether Taiwan was worth keeping and who had the authority to write this history.
- Standard article
Du Congming
Taiwan's first medical doctorate holder who developed the gradual smoking cessation method helping 11,498 people quit opium in 17 years; founder of Kaohsiung Medical University
- Evolving · community
King Duck Zhu Yigui: Taiwan's First Insurgent Leader to Proclaim Himself King
An exploration of the 1721 Zhu Yigui Incident, tracing the legendary journey from a duck farmer to an independent king and its profound impact on Qing dynasty governance in Taiwan.
- Evolving · community
Rather Burn Out Than Rust Out: Mackay and His Beloved Formosa
From extracting 20,000 teeth to founding girls' schools, how Canadian missionary George Leslie Mackay became a "true Taiwanese" and rewrote the history of medicine, education, and scientific exploration in northern Taiwan.
- Standard article
Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga)
A mixed Chinese-Japanese pirate’s son who fought the Qing for sixteen years, conquered Taiwan in nine months, and founded a kingdom in five — only to die at thirty-seven. His name has since been claimed by four different regimes.
Film & Theater 12
- Standard article
Edward Yang: Using the Coldest Logic of an Engineer to Film the Hottest Loneliness of the Human Heart
In the early 1980s, Edward Yang, who had just joined Central Motion Picture Corporation, wore a T-shirt printing "Herzog, Bresson, Yang," placing himself behind two masters. This man, who gave up his job as a US submarine engineer and returned to Taiwan in his early thirties to study filmmaking, later became the first Taiwanese to win Best Director at Cannes—yet his film *Yi Yi* was not screened in Taiwanese cinemas for seventeen years. He used the coldest methods to film the back of our heads, the part we dare not face.
- Standard article
Ang Lee: Behind Two Oscars, the Son Who Never Properly Said Goodbye to His Father
On the Oscar stage in 2006, Ang Lee became the first Asian in history to win Best Director, yet in Mandarin he said, 'Thank you all for your concern.' The world remembers Taiwan's pride and his two golden statuettes, but what he spent a lifetime filming was repression, fear, and the father who had always opposed his filmmaking and suddenly died two years earlier. From an unemployed son-in-law who cooked at home for six years to a two-time Venice Golden Lion winner, his real opponent was never the film set. It was the self he could not get past.
- Standard article
Tsai Ming-liang
Born in 1957 in Sarawak, Malaysia, Tsai Ming-liang moved to Taiwan in 1977 to study drama. He established his personal style with the 1992 film "Rebels of the Neon God," and in 1994 his film "Vive L'Amour" shared the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, making him the third Chinese director to win the award after Hou Hsiao-hsien and Zhang Yimou. Using extremely long takes, sparse dialogue, and a slow pace, he writes of urban loneliness and alienation; from "Vive L'Amour" to the Walker series, he developed a distinctive slow cinema aesthetic.
- Standard article
Hou Hsiao-hsien
The film poet who rejected close-ups yet conquered the world: a visual revolutionary against cinematic grammar
- Standard article
Takeshi Kaneshiro: The Pan-Asian Screen Icon Who Mastered the Art of Disappearing
From a Taipei commercial actor at seventeen to Wong Kar-wai’s muse and Asia’s heartthrob, Takeshi Kaneshiro spent his career perfecting the art of disappearing.
- Evolving · community
Ruby Lin: From the Face of Ziwei to the Calculator of a Producer
In 1998, *My Fair Princess* made Ruby Lin the face of Ziwei; in 2009, she established her own studio; in 2015, she won the Golden Bell Award for Drama Program with *16 Summer Days*; and in 2021, she brought the Tiaotong of Lin Sen North Road to Netflix with a NT$250 million budget. Her journey from New York acting classes and a Shih Hsin University master’s degree back to the set reveals that her true transformation was not leaving the camera, but beginning to bear responsibility for every frame and every person in a production.
- Standard article
Niu Cheng-ze
A child star born in 1966 who entered the industry at age 11 with "The Clown"; after transitioning to directing, he achieved massive success with "A Bongo in Taipei" (艋舺), but his career was overshadowed by a 2018 sexual assault case and subsequent legal battles.
- Standard article
Wei Te-sheng: Yongkang 1969, the Taiwanese Epic Filmmaker from Cape No. 7's Record-Breaking Box Office to the Venice Main Competition
Born August 16, 1969, in Yongkang Township, Tainan County (now Yongkang District, Tainan City). Graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Far East Junior College (now Far East University of Science and Technology). In 2008, Cape No. 7 grossed approximately NT$530 million (a Taiwanese box office record). In 2011, Seediq Bala was selected for the main competition of the 68th Venice International Film Festival, competing for the Golden Lion, and won Best Feature Film at the 48th Golden Horse Awards. Currently preparing the Taiwan Trilogy epic project.
- Standard article
Brigitte Lin
Born in 1954 and raised in a military dependents' village, she was discovered by talent scout Yang Chi in Ximending in 1972; after being cast in the adaptation of Qiong Yao's *Window*, she became the goddess of the Qiong Yao film era with her pure image, forming classic on-screen pairings with Qin Han and Qin Xianglin that captivated the Chinese-speaking world. In 1992, she redefined martial arts cinema with her subversive portrayal of Dongfang Bubai, spanning two distinct eras of film.
- Standard article
Chen Yu-hsun
A Taiwan comedy director from a military dependents' village background who established a creative grammar for local comedy through five feature films, adept at exploring profound life issues through Taiwanese-style humor and humanistic warmth in absurd situations; deeply inspired by Hollywood comedy masters, he won the Golden Horse Award for Best Narrative Feature with "My Missing Valentine," earning the most substantial external validation for this grammar.
- Standard article
Sylvia Chang
Sylvia Chang (born 1953) began her career as a radio DJ at 16 and a singer-host at 17; she won three Golden Horse Awards for Best Actress (1981, 1986, 2022) and has directed sixteen works over fifty years.
- Standard article
Gwei Lun-mei
Born in 1983, a graduate of Tamkang University's Department of French, she debuted in 2002 with *Blue Gate Crossing*; gained widespread fame in 2007 with *Secret*, and won Best Actress at both the Golden Horse Awards and the Asia Pacific Film Festival in 2012 for *Girlfriend, Boyfriend*, later gaining international recognition through films like *Black Coal, Thin Ice*.
Music 12
- Standard article
Teresa Teng: A White Headband in Happy Valley, a Plastic Bag of Kinmen Air, a Five-Minute Gap in Chiang Mai
On May 27, 1989 — eight days before the Tiananmen crackdown — Teresa Teng walked onto a Hong Kong racetrack stage wearing a white headband reading "Democracy Lives" and a hand-written placard reading "Oppose Military Rule." She sang a song she had never sung before. She never set foot on the Chinese mainland again. From a Yunlin military village to five frontline tours of Kinmen, from three consecutive Japan Cable Grand Prix titles to a Chiang Mai presidential suite, the woman the Chinese-speaking world called its "love-song queen" spent 42 years turning tenderness into a political stance.
- Standard article
Jonathan Lee: After Writing Others' Innermost Thoughts in Plain Speech, Only in Hill Did He Finally Speak of Himself
Jonathan Lee, born in 1958 into a gas shop family in Beitou, feared going back to deliver gas, so he spent his life writing songs. In plain, everyday language, he wrote out the emotional lives and life obstacles of a generation of women singers including Sarah Chen, Winnie Hsin, and Sandy Lam, earning comparisons to Bai Juyi as a writer who could 'peer into people's hearts.' Yet this man who best understood others' private thoughts did not directly speak in song about his own middle age and his father until Hill at age 55 and A Newly Written Old Song at age 60. Meanwhile, even as he 'made a living off women's songs,' his real-life romantic choices also gave him a reputation as a 'scumbag man.'
- Standard article
David Wong: A Song Written in Two or Three Hours, and a Lifetime Spent Trying to Forget It
In a Honolulu arena in 1979, 15-year-old David Wong watched a heavy metal concert, went home, and taught himself on a guitar his teacher had given him. He spoke little Chinese; through lyricists Yao Ruo-long and Chen Chia-li, he translated his feelings into song, building a career from scratch in Mandopop with a raspy voice. “You Made Me Drunk” was written in two or three hours, yet he spent the rest of his life trying to forget it. He habitually called Chang Hsueh-liang “grandfather,” though by lineage he was in fact Chang's grand-nephew. He spent his life trying to escape being defined by family background and one divine hit, yet the world remembered him through those two things alone.
- Standard article
Lo Ta-yu: Singing for the Rootless, Having Moved Nineteen Times and Still Searching for His Way
In a medical school anatomy lab in Taichung during the 1970s, a radiology student used to practice singing in secret because "the echo was great there, and no one would know I was singing." He later wrote songs like "Lukang, Small Town," "Orphan of Asia," and "Pearl of the Orient," asking "Who am I" on behalf of an entire generation. Yet, despite singing for the rootless, he himself moved from Taipei to New York, Hong Kong, and Beijing, moving house nineteen times in twenty-nine years. At seventy, he describes himself merely as a "remarkable survivor."
- Standard article
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.
- Standard article
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.
- Standard article
A-mei: Puyuma Singer, from 1996's *Sisters* to 2024 Taipei Dome Five Shows
Born August 9, 1972, in Taitung County's Beinan Township, A-mei is a Taiwanese Puyuma singer and one of the most successful female artists in Mandopop history. Her 1996 debut album *Sisters* sold 1.21 million copies in Taiwan and 4 million across Asia. In 2015, her 'Utopia' tour ran 10 consecutive shows at Taipei Arena. In December 2024, ASMeiR MAXXX at Taipei Dome spanned 5 shows with a production budget of NT$200 million and live hot-air balloon releases. Career cumulative sales exceed 50 million.
- Standard article
Bobby Chen: From Changhua, Debut Album in 1988, and Thirty Years of New Year's Eve as His Calling Card
Born on October 29, 1958, in Xizhou Township, Changhua County, Bobby Chen is one of Taiwan's most distinctive singer-songwriters in independent music. He released his debut solo album Crowded Paradise in 1988, began holding annual New Year's Eve concerts in 1994, and turned the final night of each year in Taiwan's music scene into an annual ritual. After oral cancer surgery in 2020, he returned to the stage; in 2025, his 31st New Year's Eve concert, Big Wave, still went on.
- Standard article
Deng Yuxian: Hakka 1906, Four Songs of the Four Months — Thirty-Nine Years of the Father of Taiwanese Ballads
Born July 21, 1906, into a Hakka family in Longtan, Taoyuan; original name Deng Bingyan. Graduated from normal school and was recruited by Columbia Records in 1933. His four masterworks — 'Four Seasons Red,' 'Moonlit Night Sorrow,' 'Longing for Spring Breeze,' and 'Flowers in the Rainy Night' — are still sung today. In 1939, he took a teaching position at Qionglin Public School in Hsinchu. He died June 11, 1944, at Zhudong Hospital, aged 39.
- Standard article
Wu Bai: From Garlic Village, Liujiao, Three Decades of Taiwanese Rock Without Discount
Born Wu Chun-lin in 1968 in Garlic Village, Liujiao Township, Chiayi County. Formed 'Wu Bai & China Blue' in 1992; 'Norwegian Wood' in 1995 established his Taiwanese rock identity. Released 'Nail Flower' in 2016, winning the Golden Melody Award for Best Taiwanese Album in 2017. Released new album 'Pure White Starting Point' in 2025, with the ROCK STAR 2 tour spanning both sides of the strait.
- Standard article
JJ Lin: Born in Singapore, 1981; From "Jiangnan" to the Mandopop King of JJ20
Born in Singapore in 1981, he debuted via Hype Records' training program in 1999. His albums *Music Journey* (2003) and *Second Paradise* (2004) sold over 1.2 million and 1.8 million copies across Asia respectively; he is a Golden Melody Award winner for Best New Artist and two-time Best Mandarin Male Singer. The JJ20 World Tour performed 77 shows from 2022 to 2024.
- Evolving · community
Jolin Tsai
Winner of the 1998 "New Voice Battle" singing competition, she became a Mandopop queen through successive albums and tours; "Rose Boy" earned her three Golden Melody Awards for Song of the Year.
Political Figures 10
- Standard article
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?
- Evolving · community
Bi-khim Hsiao
Born in Japan, schooled in Tainan, raised in New Jersey, and educated at Oberlin — how did this “Cat Warrior” become the most successful Representative to the United States in the history of Taiwan, and then take the vice president’s seat?
- Standard article
Han Kuo-yu
The first directly elected mayor in ROC constitutional history to be recalled, then became President of the Legislative Yuan four years later. What kind of political trajectory is this?
- Standard article
Shen Bo-yang: He researched Chinese cognitive warfare, then China put him on a satellite map
In 2021, Shen Bo-yang co-founded the Black Bear Academy with strategic scholar Ho Cheng-hui, with a NT$600 million donation from Robert Tsao supporting the goal of training three million civil defense volunteers in three years. In February 2024, he entered the legislature as a DPP at-large legislator. On October 28, 2025, he became the first Taiwanese elected politician to be investigated by China on charges of "secession," with CCTV airing an "exposé" special warning "the next one is you." 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; he spent Valentine's Day on a flight to France. On May 13, the DPP officially nominated him to run for Taipei mayor, seeking to lead the very city whose coordinates had been marked on a satellite map.
- Standard article
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%.
- Standard article
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.
- Standard article
Hsu Chiao-hsin: From Breakfast Shop Daughter to "NT$800 Billion Arms Procurement" Legislator's Youth-Oriented Traffic Appeal
Taipei City Seventh District Legislator Hsu Chiao-hsin, born November 18, 1989 in a Western-style breakfast shop in Xinyi District that operates year-round, was originally named Hsu Mei-feng and changed her name due to the Chu Mei-feng sex tape scandal. On November 13, 2013, the 24-year-old took the seat as the youngest member of the KMT's 19th Central Standing Committee. On January 13, 2024, she was elected legislator with 89,727 votes, defeating Hsu Shu-hua. On July 26, 2025, a recall case received 62,633 supporting votes meeting the threshold but was still rejected. On April 27, 2026, arms procurement negotiations put forward an NT$800 billion version, clashing with party central's NT$380 billion plus N. Ji Lin-lien pointedly said not to do things that please enemies and pain allies. Three cases — the Chinese spy mix-up, IPEF, and classified Ukraine aid documents — each deconstruct this path of youth-oriented traffic.
- Standard article
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.
- Standard article
Chiang Kai-shek
His bronze statues are being removed, but the foundations he laid — whether you call them construction or shackles — still support every road, every school, and every election on this island.
- Evolving · community
Chen Hsing-yu: From the Pressed President’s Daughter to Dr. Chen in a Tainan Clinic
From being pursued by media in New York in 2009 to opening a dental clinic in Tainan in 2016, how did Chen Hsing-yu return her life to the profession of dentistry under the gaze of a political family?
Popular Figures 10
- Evolving · community
Park Seong-eun (朴星垠)
From exchange guest to official Fubon Angels member, she has become a new generation representative of the "Five Korean Pillars" through rapid adaptation and stage stability.
- Evolving · community
Jin (金針菇)
By narrating her life in Taiwan, she has built a million-scale influence, transforming "Koreans in Taiwan" from news headlines into a sustainable content genre.
- Evolving · community
Ahn Ji-hyun
From Korean pro cheer to lead foreign performer of TSG Wing Stars—she brings cross-border performance experience to the Kaohsiung home park; the 2026 Taipei Dome series also became a public node for observing her injury adjustments and sideline role.
- Evolving · community
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.'
- Evolving · community
Byun Ha-yul
From a CTBC Brothers Korean cheer pillar to a cross-season regular—beyond high popularity, she has also spoken in public interviews about how family health affects her mood, showing the real pressure side of cheer work.
- Evolving · community
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.
- Evolving · community
Lee Da-hye (李多慧)
From KBO cheerleader to a leading figure in Taiwan professional baseball, she represents a new Hallyu model of turning "away-game popularity" into "long-term local development."
- Evolving · community
Lee Ju-eun (李珠珢)
From "AI Goddess" craze to a full-scale career in Taiwan, her path has redefined the vision of how Korean cheerleaders remain in the CPBL.
- Evolving · community
Nam Min-jung
A Korean member who stayed seasons with Fubon—turning "short-term heat" into "predictable appearances" as professional cheer.
- Evolving · community
Park Min-seo
Joining the Wing Stars under the name "Mingo," she serves as both performance director and a Korean foreign player within the TSG Hung-Ying home system, representing an alternative path toward the "institutionalization of foreign players" in CPBL cheerleading.
Education & Society 9
- Standard article
Audrey Tang: Every Famous Decision She Made Was a Refusal of the 'Genius' Label
Knocked unconscious by a classmate at age 8, declined guaranteed admission to Jianguo High School at 14, came out as transgender at 24 but refused to be a spokesperson, and at 35, her first condition for joining the cabinet was 'no office.' On December 2, 2025, in Stockholm accepting the Right Livelihood Award, what she said on stage wasn't 'I,' but 'we.'
- Standard article
Liu 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.
- Standard article
Lu Kuan-wei: He Passed the Medical Licensing Exam but Never Put on a White Coat, Betting Instead on Something Harder to Prove Than Saving Lives
He passed the medical licensing exam but never put on a white coat. Instead, he took over the Junyi Academy platform founded by Fang Hsin-chou, hoping to use online self-directed learning to narrow Taiwan's educational divide. But global research points almost unanimously in the other direction: these tools help most the children who already have what they need. Twelve years later, there is still no independent evidence proving that his wager has paid off. How he faces that inability to prove success is more worth remembering than what he gave up.
- Standard article
Stanley Yen: From the Mailroom to Taiwan's Godfather of Tourism — Then He Gave It All Up
High school diploma. Mailroom clerk at 23. General manager at 28. President of Asia's finest boutique hotel at 32 — where he invented a system that greeted every guest by name before they stepped out of the car. 600,000 copies of a bestseller. Then at 62, he quit to build schools in rural Taitung. Then cancer. Then an art center on the Pacific coast.
- Evolving · community
Lü Jie: From an Avoided Question on the February 28 Incident to Twenty-Eight Lessons on Taiwan History
From discussing seafood at a shop to the lecture podium, Lü Jie uses storytelling to drive curriculum reform, while insisting that students return to historical sources, facts, and perspectives.
- Standard article
Huang Guang-xiong: The Man Who Built a College of Education on a Chiayi Field
In 1996, Huang Guang-xiong traveled south from NTNU to Chiayi, founding the Graduate Institute of Education at National Chung Cheng University — which he later expanded into the College of Education. He spent half a century translating Western curriculum theory into Taiwan, co-translated a landmark qualitative research textbook, led the research and planning for the nine-year integrated curriculum guidelines, and coordinated a three-year interdisciplinary team to design a moral education program centered on 'respect and care.' He passed away in 2021 at age 84.
- Standard article
Yang Shen-Keng: The Education Philosopher Who Brought Two Oxygen Tanks to His Student's Dissertation Defense
On December 13, 2020, Yang Shen-Keng took leave from National Taiwan University Hospital, brought two oxygen tanks, and — accompanied throughout by his wife and son — traveled to NTNU to serve as oral examiner for a doctoral dissertation. Eight months later he passed away. This Athens University Doctor of Philosophy, Taiwan's first lifetime National Chair Professor in education, and Golden Tripod Award recipient built the academic foundations of Taiwanese educational philosophy over 44 years.
- Evolving · community
Yeh Bing-cheng
Professor of Electrical Engineering at NTU who created the PaGamO gamified learning platform to combat rote learning, winning a global education innovation award in 2014.
- Evolving · community
Huang Kuo-chen
Founder of Pin Xue Tang, promoting reading literacy education in Taiwan and dedicated to overcoming the educational dilemma of "being able to pass exams but unable to think"
Science & Academia 9
- Standard article
Wu Ta-you: The Academia Sinica President Who Recommended Yang and Lee to the US, and His Eleven Years Laying Taiwan's Scientific Foundations
Theoretical physicist and president of Academia Sinica; mentor to Nobel laureates Yang Chen-ning and Lee Tsung-dao; the foundational figure who built Taiwan's scientific enterprise
- Standard article
Hsu Cho-yun: Ninety-Five Years of History, Written with Two Fingers—and Wang Leehom’s Maternal Granduncle
Born in Xiamen in 1930, Hsu Cho-yun came to Taiwan with the Nationalist government in 1949 and moved to Pittsburgh in 1970. Born with limb disabilities and a lifelong wheelchair user, the historian nevertheless typed nearly forty books with the only two fingers through which he could exert force. Winner of the sixth Tang Prize in Sinology in 2024, he donated the entire NT$50 million award to establish the Hsu-Sun Scholarship. He was Wang Leehom’s seventh maternal granduncle and Li Chien-fu’s uncle. Before his death in August 2025, he left one final declaration: “At the moment I draw my last breath, I will still be learning.”
- Standard article
Lin 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.'
- Evolving · community
Chen Wen-yu: How a Seed Became an Ambassador for Taiwan's Agriculture
From the Fengshan Experimental Station to the Fengshan No. 1 seedless watermelon and Nongyou Seedlings, Chen Wen-yu turned breeding into a form of Taiwan's soft power that allows farmers to secure better lives first.
- Standard article
Yang Wei-cher: From Calculus to the Mother Tongue, the Performing Artist of the Mathematics World
Yang Wei-cher, professor emeritus in National Taiwan University's Department of Mathematics, is known for teaching in shorts, riding a bicycle, and lecturing in Taiwanese. The son of renowned painter Yang Chi-tung, he once defied his father's wishes by abandoning medicine for mathematics, and in 1997 sparked a controversy over whether teaching in Taiwanese was 'unconstitutional.' He was not only a driving force behind the Mathematical Olympiad, but also a steadfast resister in the Chen Wen-chen Incident, practicing 'performance art' throughout his life between logic and cultural subjectivity.
- Standard article
Paul Ching-Wu Chu: Co-discoverer of High-Temperature Superconductivity at Tc=93K, Breaking Through the Liquid-Nitrogen Temperature in 1987
Born in Hunan in 1941, Paul Ching-Wu Chu is a Taiwanese American physicist. In January 1987, he and Maw-Kuen Wu jointly discovered yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO) with Tc=93K, crossing the liquid-nitrogen temperature threshold and opening the era of high-temperature superconductivity. From 2001 to 2009 he served as president of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In March 2026, he published a new Tc=151K breakthrough in PNAS and remains active in research at age 85.
- Standard article
Chi-Huey Wong
World authority in glycoscience, 2014 Wolf Prize in Chemistry recipient, former president of Academia Sinica who was close to the Nobel Prize before the OBI Pharma controversy
- Standard article
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
- Evolving · community
Li Yuan-che
1986 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry who pioneered a new field in chemical kinetics with crossed molecular beam technology; Taiwan's first Nobel Prize winner in science.
Society & Public Good 3
- Standard article
Chen Shu-chu: A Taitung vegetable vendor who donated tens of millions over fifty years of vegetable earnings, a charitable life
Born in 1950, a vegetable vendor at Taitung Central Market. At age 13, her mother died in childbirth; she dropped out of school and began selling vegetables. For over fifty years since, she donated her vegetable earnings bit by bit to schools, orphanages, and hospitals, totaling tens of millions of New Taiwan dollars. In 2010, she was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people worldwide, with director Ang Lee personally writing the recommendation; she later received the Ramon Magsaysay Award. She says she is 'just a vegetable seller.'
- Standard article
Chang Chung-jen and Chang Chung-yi: Life Begins After the Body Is Separated
Born in Kaohsiung in 1976, Chang Chung-jen and Chang Chung-yi spent their first three years at Chung Shan Medical Hospital. In 1979, a 36-person team from National Taiwan University Hospital completed a 12-hour separation surgery. The true, long story began only after they left the operating table: pain, prosthetics, work, family, and media scrutiny transformed two names into distinct lives over 40 years, prompting Taiwan to reconsider the distance between medical breakthroughs and individual autonomy.
- Standard article
Yang You-ren
Founder of Step30 International Christian Care Association, Ten Outstanding Young Persons of Taiwan 2017, who collected 100,000 pairs of used shoes for East African children with a single poster
Art & Creation 3
- Standard article
Chi Po-lin
How a government clerk who could not afford helicopters on his salary mortgaged his house to create Taiwan's most successful documentary
- Evolving · community
Li Mei-shu
An artist who spent 36 years building a temple, bringing academic aesthetics into folk religion
- Evolving · community
Lin Hwai-min
A novelist with no professional dance background who entered a dance studio while studying creative writing in the US, went on to found Cloud Gate Dance Theatre—the first professional modern dance company in the Chinese-speaking world—and has been active on the international stage for over half a century.
Internet 2
- Evolving · community
Iron Bull: The "Brother Jie" from an Anti-Sexual Assault PSA Became His Ten-Year Life
Wu Chia-wei, who played "Brother Jie" in the Ministry of Education's anti-sexual assault PSA *If I Had Known Boys Could Be Sexually Assaulted Too* in 2012 as an amateur, unexpectedly went viral. He initially rejected the role and even considered becoming an excavator operator; now, the meme has become his livelihood, propelling "Brother Jie" onto the stage of Taiwan's first meme musical. A lesson the PSA failed to teach in full was taught by the meme for ten years.
- Standard article
A-Han: The Hualien Boy Who Performed an Entire Alley by Himself, Then Got Scolded Back by the People in It
Hualien-born Tseng Wen-han, a graduate of TNUA's Department of Animation, performed an entire Taiwanese alley by himself through Ruan Yuejiao, Liao Lifang, and Liao Lizhu. Then, in 2022, a Ghost Festival advertisement was pulled: the Vietnamese daughter-in-law he played was protested by actual Vietnamese daughters-in-law.
Literature & Poets 2
- Standard article
Ya Hsien: Ceasing Poetry After "The Abyss," Spending His Latter Life as a Pillar of Literary History in the United Daily News Supplement
In 1968, at age 36, Ya Hsien stopped writing after compiling ninety poems into his collection *The Abyss*. From 1977 to 1998, he served as editor-in-chief of the *United Daily News* (UDN) Supplement for 21 years, transforming the editorial desk into Taiwan's most important post-war literary public space. He passed away in Vancouver, Canada, on October 11, 2024, at age 92—his 56-year silence after ceasing publication proved longer than a thousand volumes of poetry; his refrain "Hallelujah, I am still alive" became an obscure, poetic symbol that evaded censorship during the Martial Law era.
- Standard article
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.
Internet Culture 2
- Evolving · community
JiuJiu Shoe: Deleting the Most Popular Translation Videos Marked the Start of Becoming an Independent Knowledge Creator
In 2013, Hsieh Jen-chieh, then in a National Central University dorm, translated foreign memes before deleting his most viral old works to rebuild his channel from scratch. He gradually synthesized his chemistry training, literature review skills, script design, and Taichung lifestyle into a sustainable method for Taiwanese knowledge creation.
- Evolving · community
3 Degrees C: Cutting the Cold Shower Experience into a Million-Subscriber Path
The story of Hsieh Meng-hang, from a cosmetology student to a million-subscriber YouTuber, who merges memes, challenges, and video production into a single creative practice.
Musicians 2
- Standard article
Kowen Ko: Growing Up Across the Sea, Singing Only for Those Willing to Sit Down
In 2013, a college student was pranked by classmates into entering a singing competition, winning first place with two self-accompanied Coldplay covers. With a voice described as "uncle-like" and a leisurely pace that refuses to rush, he carved out a small but deep niche in Taiwan's indie music scene. He grew up separated by the sea, wrote songs in Mumbai with a broken guitar, and sang to residents outside a century-old general store in Taichung. Chen Jianqi produced three albums for him over nine years without ever rushing him; in 2025, his rewritten and performed version of "God's Reply" for a Hakka TV drama won a Golden Bell Award.
- Standard article
Mavis Fan: From 'Health Song' Little Witch to 100% Band Frontwoman — Thirty Years of Refusing to Be Defined by Any Single Era
In 1996, 19-year-old Mavis Fan became everyone's Little Witch with 'Health Song.' In 1998 she shaved her head and released Darling to announce 'I'm making my own music'; in 2001 she turned to jazz with Cabaret; in 2007 she formed the 100% Band. In 2025 at 48, Visitor is her new album with the band after 16 years apart — across thirty years she has dismantled, piece by piece, 'the dream others gave her.'
Food & Artisans 2
- Standard article
André Chiang: He Never Waited for a Definition to Settle Before Turning Away
In 1997, a young French restaurant chef at The Sherwood Taipei invited two French three-star chefs to Taiwan for a ten-day collaboration, then bought a ticket to follow them to France. From peeling potatoes in southern France for two years, to pushing his Singapore restaurant to the 14th spot on the world rankings before voluntarily closing it the following year, to opening Taipei’s most difficult-to-book RAW and turning away again in its tenth year—André Chiang’s most irreplaceable move is to turn off the lights and ask the next question whenever he is about to be defined by a title: What exactly is the taste of Taiwan?
- Standard article
Wu Pao-chun: A Promise to a Paiwan Child
A rural kid from Pingtung with only a junior high education and no French. He won the world’s first Master Baker gold medal in Paris with a lychee‑rose loaf—inside it held a promise made ten years earlier to an indigenous child.
Others 37
- Standard article
Huang Shan-liao: No One Looked at the World Champion’s Clothes, So He Started Selling 'One-Line Comfort'
In 2014, the son of a Kinmen snack shop owner walked the London Graduate Fashion Week runway in a military-inspired design called 'Kinmen 1969,' winning the international grand prize. Upon returning to Taiwan to seek employment, however, HR treated his resume as fake because 'there were no reports about it.' He angrily started his own media outlet, then pivoted to writing healing short sentences of no more than 28 characters, cumulatively selling over 300,000 copies. No one looked at the cabinet of clothes telling the history of the battlefields; he changed to selling 'one-line comfort.' Taiwan's attention economy buys sentences you can read in a glance, not things that are made.
- Standard article
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.
- Standard article
Wu Ming-yi: Writing a Vanishing Taiwan Back into Existence Through Compound Eyes
From _Notes from the Annihilation of Butterflies_ to _The Stolen Bicycle_, from the vanished Zhonghua Commercial Building to the Booker Prize longlist—Professor Wu Ming-yi of National Dong Hwa University uses natural history and fiction to let the world simultaneously see an island’s insects, bicycles, and war memories. International translation and cross-media are the consequences of compound eyes growing; one does not find the trophy first and then fill in the island. The nationality line is only for thickness.
- Standard article
Che-Yu Wu: From Pinball Machines to the White Walls of Venice, a Clockmaker Approaching the Soul with 0 and 1
A Taiwan boy obsessed with systems, starting from pinball machines, Flash animations, and biological simulators, making his way to the Venice Biennale, Art Blocks, and a trilogy of solo exhibitions at Taipei 101. In between: NFTs worth hundreds of millions, FTX wiping everything to zero overnight, and a fresh departure through Camus's absurdism. He calls himself an 'ancient clockmaker,' insisting on designing the mechanisms by hand in an era of rampant AI generation, and devotes part of his time to writing Markdown — leaving a true SSOT for Taiwan in the AI age.
- Standard article
Tanya Chua: The Singaporean Who Made Taiwan Her Home Base, Four-Time Golden Melody Queen
From being told to shut up by a keyboard player in a Singapore bar in 1996 to winning four awards at the 33rd Golden Melody Awards in 2022, Tanya Chua spent 26 years forging herself into the only four-time recipient of this award in the Mandopop industry. She was not born in Taiwan, but the Golden Melody Awards, her residence, collaborators, and most famous songs are all rooted in Taiwan—a foreign artist's sense of local belonging is the choice made when she canceled her Warner contract in 2006, moved to Taipei, and established "Tianya Music Studio."
- Standard article
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.”
- Standard article
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.
- Standard article
Chiu Chi-hung: Rising from Web 2.0 Failure to Reshape Taiwan's Digital Advertising Ecosystem with an Engineer's Mindset
NCTU computer science PhD Nathan Chiu took lessons from the failure of his Web 2.0 platform funP and founded cacaFly in 2009. By applying an engineer's data-driven approach to advertising, he built Taiwan's leading digital ad agency for Facebook, Google, and other international platforms — while also engaging in politics as a Taiwan Statebuilding Party committee member and Taipei City mayoral advisor.
- Standard article
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.'
- Standard article
Su Chiao-hui: Stitching New Taipei Together with Law and Detail — A Curator Working Under the Shadow of 'Charge Ahead'
From the daughter of a Formosa Incident defense attorney to a legislator rated Outstanding sixteen times, Su Chiao-hui has worked to shed the 'daddy's girl' label by using the Cancer Prevention Act and the Sports Industry Development Act to give legislation a human temperature — while on the local level, using MRT funds, water supply lines, and campus improvements to piece together her own political map.
- Standard article
Chun Wen-chi: 12 Years of Pushing Taiwan's Art Scene into the Malay Archipelago
In May 2017, Malaysian artist Okui Lala arrived in Taipei as the first resident for "No Man's Land," presenting a video of her and her mother-in-law praying in Teochew. This scene epitomizes Chun Wen-chi's 12-year journey with "No Man's Land"—accumulating 56 issues, 384 articles, and 10 volumes of the "Nusantara Archive," using "archipelago" to replace "Southeast Asia" and push Taiwan toward the Malay world.
- Standard article
Freddy Lim: From Shocking Headliner to the Legislative Yuan, Singing Taiwan’s History into the Public Sphere
Freddy Lim, frontman of Chthonic, embeds the 2/28 Incident, White Terror, Musha Incident, Taiwanese mythology, and Taiwanese-language metal into public memory, co-founding the Da Gang Open Air Concert as a southern cultural hub. Music, Taiwanese identity, cultural practice, institutional politics, family life experiences, and his post-office public role are interconnected in his life, forming a path from the stage to society, the legislature, and the international arena.
- Standard article
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.
- Evolving · community
Joeman: From Esports Analyst to Million-Subscriber Creator, A Long-Term Figure in the Lens
From esports analyst and MSI product manager to a channel built on unboxings, comparisons, travel, and team-produced shows; Joeman’s path also documents how Taiwanese YouTubers navigate traffic, division of labor, trust, and public responsibility.
- Standard article
Su Tseng-chang: From Formosa Incident Defense Lawyer to the 'Charge Ahead' Premier
In 1979, he defended political prisoners under the shadow of martial law; in 1997, he pulled off an upset victory thanks to Lu Hsiu-yi's legendary kneeling gesture. Su Tseng-chang's 'charge ahead' executive drive spanned Pingtung, Taipei County, and the Executive Yuan — from blocking African swine fever to putting air conditioning in every classroom. He led with forceful determination amid controversy, becoming one of the most representative 'electric fireballs' of Taiwan's democratic transition.
- Standard article
Yoga Lin: From a 25/25 'Creep,' to 17 Years Learning He Didn't Need to Be Perfect
On July 6, 2007, 20-year-old Yoga Lin scored a perfect 25 out of 25 from judges with Radiohead's 'Creep' to win the first season of 'Super Star Avenue.' He then failed three times to win the Golden Melody Best Male Vocalist award, and from 2018 was stopped by irritable bowel syndrome for six years. Not until 2024's 'Love, Lord' — on which he co-produced with three others — did he finally say: 'The old me was very demanding, always hoping to deliver the best performance.' It took 17 years to learn one thing: stop chasing perfection.
- Standard article
Du Pan Fang-ge: Three Languages, a Performance of Peace
A cross-linguistic generation Hakka female poet and relative of the 228 victims Chang Shih-lang. Her poem "Peace Performance" transforms a folk ritual into a record of survival under White Terror—for those whose language was seized by the regime, the harshest line in their mother tongue is written for their own people.
- Standard article
From Underground to the Presidential Office: Nymphia Wind and the History of Taiwan's Drag Queens' Self-Empowerment
How a Taiwanese boy who was bullied for his gender expression brought the drag art form — once considered a subculture — to the international stage, and used the banana as a symbol to show the world Taiwan's diversity and confidence.
- Standard article
Yin Hai-Guang: The Philosopher Who Planted Liberalism in Taiwan from a House on Wenzhou Street Lane 18
In 1949, a young man from Hubei named Yin Fu-Sheng arrived in Taipei from Nanjing, took the pen name Yin Hai-Guang, and became the sharpest editorial voice at Free China magazine and a philosophy professor at National Taiwan University. He used logical positivism to give students intellectual immunity, and used editorials to challenge Chiang Kai-shek's third-term bid. After being placed under house arrest on Wenzhou Street, he died of stomach cancer at 49 in 1969 — leaving behind the most complete spiritual prototype of Taiwanese liberalism.
- Standard article
Fujui Wang: Thirty Years from 200 Photocopied Zines to a 12-Channel Speaker
In 1993, 24-year-old Fujui Wang used his salary as a programmer to run off 200 copies of the experimental music zine *NOISE* on his own photocopier, selling each copy for NT$15 to NT$30. Thirty years later (2020), he hung a polyhedral 12-channel omnidirectional speaker at Project Fulfill Art Space, and the work was the faint frequencies of an artificial blood vessel inside his body after a serious illness. From a one-person DIY label to a museum gallery, he spent thirty years turning the word "noise" from a codeword in the marginal zine underground into a legitimate term in the vocabulary of sound art in Taiwan.
- Evolving · community
Blue Pigeon: Bringing the White Coat’s Distance into the Lens
From a medical YouTube channel launched in 2017 to vaccine explanations during the pandemic, Wu Chi-ying places a physician’s expertise, performance, and public communication on the same table.
- Standard article
Chao Tzu-chiang: The Undefeated Soul Behind the Grandma's Apron
In 1984, Chao Tzu-chiang joined the Lanling Theater Workshop after spotting a 'free all year' ad — launching a legendary career across theater, film, and children's art. As the 'Fruit Grandma,' he warmed the childhoods of countless kids, yet in real life he founded the 'If Theater for Children' carrying over ten million NT dollars in debt, and showed his iron will to 'never surrender' through COVID and financial crisis alike. This is a performer's thirty-year practice of guarding dreams for Taiwan's children.
- Standard article
Hsu Mei-hua: Ten Years of an Anonymous Civic Pseudonym, from Anti-Tsinghua Unigroup to the Great Recall
"Hsu Mei-hua" is not a real name but a pseudonym that appeared at two critical moments in Taiwan's civil society — in 2015 as one of the "Four Horsemen" who helped block China's Tsinghua Unigroup from acquiring Taiwan's semiconductor packaging giants, and in 2025 as the most counter-intuitive "funding hub" of the Great Recall wave: handling not a single cent herself, yet coordinating over twenty million New Taiwan dollars in civic donations.
- Standard article
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.
- Standard article
Steve Chen: From Leaving Taiwan at Eight to Returning with a Brain Tumor
He left Taiwan at eight, built a platform in America at twenty-seven, sold it for $1.65 billion after two decades, and then returned with his wife and children after being diagnosed with a brain tumor.
- Standard article
Tsai A-Ga: From Pioneering Influencer to Social Work Mission — The Man Who Used 18 Years of Traffic to Transform Lives
In 2022, Taiwan's first million-subscriber influencer Tsai A-Ga sold his house to establish the 'Home Sweet Home Social Welfare Association,' converting 18 years of accumulated influence into social mission. From a 2008 flag-burning video to his son Tsai Tao-gui setting a 'youngest million-subscriber' record in 2022, Tsai A-Ga has navigated traffic, controversy, and betrayal — while always holding onto the social worker soul that wants to light hope for disadvantaged children.
- Standard article
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.
- Evolving · community
Ding Richang: An Unfinished Blueprint for Taiwan's Coastal Defense Behind a Single Telegraph Line
In 1876, Ding Richang crossed the strait to govern Taiwan, integrating telegraphs, railways, coal mines, land reclamation, Indigenous pacification, and coastal defense into a single blueprint. While the telegraph line was completed in 1877, the railways and ironclad warships were stalled by funding, institutional constraints, and time. This article cross-references memorials, official archives, academic research, and local relics to explain how this late Qing official identified Taiwan's systemic issues, and why a comprehensive blueprint could only see a small fraction realized.
- Evolving · community
Huang Tu-shui: A Modern Taiwanese Sculpture That Returned from Disappearance
He learned Western sculpture in Tokyo, yet gradually found Taiwan through the gaze of a foreign land; a marble work missing for seven decades brought this chapter of art history back into view.
- Standard article
Barbie Hsu: From Quirky Teenage Girl to the Fierce Queen of 'Two Deaths, One Critical Injury'
Debuted in 1994 with S.O.S, rose to pan-Asian stardom in 2001 via Meteor Garden, established her beauty icon status with My Beauty Diary in 2005, passed away in February 2025 at age 48. She used the relentless pursuit of beauty to push back against a life that kept slipping out of control, and in the storm of her marriage left behind — through her declaration of 'two deaths and one critical injury' — the most incisive portrait of modern womanhood's predicament.
- Standard article
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.
- Standard article
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.
- Standard article
Su Beng: A Dumpling Shop That Funded Forty Years of Taiwan's Revolution
Su Beng, born Shi Chao-hui, once did underground intelligence work for the CCP in China but became disillusioned after witnessing land reform massacres; he returned to Taiwan to plot Chiang Kai-shek's assassination, failed, and smuggled himself to Japan. In Tokyo's Ikebukuro he opened a noodle shop called "Shin-Chin-Mi," selling dumplings by day and writing Taiwanese history by night, using the shop's income to fund forty years of the independence movement and producing the seminal *Taiwan's 400-Year History* that awakened Taiwanese national consciousness.
- Evolving · community
Chang Wei-wen: The Taiwan Buffalo of the Taiwan Literary Movement
How did a mechanical engineering graduate become one of the most radical advocates for Taiwan's native language? From protesting Huang Chun-ming in 2011 to becoming a Vietnam studies expert, Chang Wei-wen embodies the belief that language is identity.
- Standard article
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.
- Standard article
Wang Xiao-di: The Sexagenarian Boy and Taiwan Television's Gentle Revolution
From a general's son to a rebellious youth, from a rebellious youth to the godmother of Taiwanese TV dramas — Wang Xiao-di spent forty years proving that making television can be a social movement.
- Standard article
Yu Yonghe
In 1697, a Hangzhou scholar volunteered to travel to the pestilential land of Taiwan to collect sulfur. He walked from Tainan all the way to Beitou, producing the earliest work of nonfiction literature about northern Taiwan.
Curatorial Reading
The same year, Taiwan lifted martial law that had lasted for thirty-eight years.
These two seemingly unrelated events share the same backdrop: an island long under compression that, once given space, grows things at an unexpected speed. Taiwan's human stories are this repeated dialectic of compression and release.
Film & Theater
When the first Taiwan New Cinema film premiered at Cannes, some audience members left because those fixed long shots were so different from the editing rhythms they were accustomed to. But those who stayed saw another possibility: cinema could be this slow, this still, this honest.
hou-hsiao-hsien and yang-dechang redefined the narrative syntax of Chinese-language cinema in the 1980s. Hou's "A City of Sadness" broke martial law-era historical taboos, becoming the first Taiwan film to win the Venice Golden Lion. Yang's "A Brighter Summer Day" dissected the spiritual state of Taiwan's urban middle class during the transition period with four hours of epic scope. ang-lee progressed from his father-son trilogy to Hollywood, with two Academy Awards for Best Director proving that Chinese directors could handle universal emotions. tsai-ming-liang's extreme art films hold a unique position in European art cinema circles, using static long shots to confront urban loneliness.
wei-te-sheng-taiwanese-epic-filmmaker's "Cape No. 7" helped Taiwan cinema regain audience confidence. 齊柏林 used aerial documentary "Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above" to awaken environmental consciousness, continuing to shoot for this island until his final moments.
ang-lee | hou-hsiao-hsien | yang-dechang | tsai-ming-liang | wei-te-sheng-taiwanese-epic-filmmaker | 齊柏林 | niu-cheng-ze-controversial-filmmaker-monga-director | chen-yu-hsun-taiwan-comedy-film-magician | brigitte-lin-legendary-actress | gwei-lun-mei-versatile-taiwanese-actress | sylvia-chang
Literature
Taiwan literature was never purely an aesthetic matter. When pai-hsien-yung-literary-master wrote "Taipei People," the displacement of the mainlander community in his stories corresponded to the rupture of entire modern Chinese history. When huang-chun-ming-taiwanese-literary-master wrote about Yilan countryside, the survival resilience of those small characters reflected Taiwan society's dramatic changes.
zhong-lihe-nativeland-eternal-seeker transitioned from Japanese to Chinese writing, remaining poor and ill throughout his life but never stopping his pen, called "the plowman who fell in a pool of blood." chen-yingzhen was imprisoned for seven years on political charges, later focusing on the underclass from a leftist perspective. li-ang's "The Butcher's Wife" shocked the literary world with female body politics. Chu T'ien-wen progressed from "A Small Town Called Hibiscus" to "Notes of a Desolate Man," her prose precise as clockwork mechanisms, while also serving as screenwriter partner for Hou Hsiao-hsien films, creating a unique landscape where literature and cinema converge.
wu-ming-yi's "The Stolen Bicycle" was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, exploring the relationship between humans and nature through ecological writing, translated into over twenty languages. lung-ying-tai's "Wild Fire" ignited social criticism in 1985. These voices prove that good literature is never disconnected from reality.
pai-hsien-yung-literary-master | wu-ming-yi | lung-ying-tai | ximurong | Chu T'ien-wen | li-ang | huang-chun-ming-taiwanese-literary-master | zhong-lihe-nativeland-eternal-seeker | chen-yingzhen | huang-zhen-nan-book-collector-historian
Music
In the 1930s, deng-yu-xian-taiwanese-song-composer's compositions "Longing for Spring Breeze" and "Rainy Night Flower" remain the deepest melodies in Taiwan's collective memory. These songs were given different meanings across different political eras; the fate of a song reflected the fate of an island.
teresa-teng's voice crossed the Cold War iron curtain. In an era when cross-strait exchanges had not yet begun, her cassettes flowed from Taiwan into mainland China. "Listen to old Deng during the day, young Deng at night" — her cultural penetration exceeded political propaganda. Lo Ta-yu and Jonathan Lee represent two extremes of Chinese creative music: Lo used "Lukang Town" and "Asian Orphan" to directly confront social contradictions; Jonathan Lee dissected middle-aged hearts with "Hill" and "Song for Myself."
In the 2000s, jay-chou redefined the sound of Chinese popular music, fusing R&B, hip-hop, and Chinese traditional elements. a-mei became a diva with her indigenous heritage and explosive vocals, later advocating for LGBTQ rights. mayday grew from underground band to Asia's largest Chinese rock group. wu-bai's Taiwanese rock injected raw vitality into local music.
deng-yu-xian-taiwanese-song-composer | teresa-teng | Lo Ta-yu | Jonathan Lee | jay-chou | a-mei | mayday | wu-bai | 蔡依林 | jj-lin-singaporean-mandopop-king | crowd-lu-indie-folk-treasure | jam-hsiao | bobby-chen-indie-music-pioneer
Arts & Design
lin-hwai-min founded Cloud Gate Dance Theatre in 1973, the first contemporary dance company in the Chinese-speaking world. Over forty-six years, Cloud Gate integrated tai chi, calligraphy, and Peking opera movements into contemporary dance, creating a unique Eastern dance vocabulary. Outdoor performances in Chihshang rice paddies transformed contemporary dance from elite art into public culture. Xu Fang-yi emerged from Cloud Gate to become a top dancer on New York's international stage, praised by The New York Times as "the embodiment of power and beauty."
stan-lai-theater-innovation-master's collective improvisation made "Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land" a Chinese theater classic, while "A Dream Like a Dream" challenges theatrical time limits with its eight-hour epic scope. Ju Tzong-ching transformed percussion from niche to mainstream, establishing teaching systems nationwide.
In visual design, Aaron Nieh defines 21st-century Taiwan design aesthetics with minimalist yet powerful visual language. xiao-qing-yang-grammy-designer received five Grammy nominations, helping the world recognize Taiwan culture through album covers. Fang Xu-zhong's design spans brand identity and curation. jimmy-liao's picture books cross the boundaries between children's and adult literature, translated into multiple languages.
In new media art, che-yu-wu creates digital life forms through algorithms, with works exhibited at Venice Biennale and Art Basel Miami, bringing over 20,000 students into the world of interactive art programming.
lin-hwai-min | jimmy-liao | Aaron Nieh | Fang Xu-zhong | che-yu-wu | Ju Tzong-ching | Xu Fang-yi | xiao-qing-yang-grammy-designer | Chen Jun-liang | stan-lai-theater-innovation-master | Lee Kuo-hsiu | Ming Hwa Yuan
Politics & Democracy
Cheng Nan-jung self-immolated for 100% freedom of speech, making April 7 "Freedom of Speech Day." shih-ming-te led the Kaohsiung Incident and was imprisoned for twenty-five years; the trial became an amplifier for the democracy movement. lin-yi-hsiung-democracy-advocate-tragedy-survivor suffered family tragedy after the Kaohsiung Incident, later using hunger strikes to promote nuclear referendum, demonstrating the power of non-violent resistance.
李登輝 completed Taiwan's "Quiet Revolution" over twelve years: abolishing martial law provisions, opening direct presidential elections, pushing for comprehensive congressional reform. Promoting democratic transition from within the authoritarian system is extremely rare in global political history. tsai-ing-wen is the first elected female national leader in the Chinese-speaking world, facing multiple challenges of pandemic, cross-strait relations, and international situation during her tenure. chen-shui-bian-controversial-president and ma-ying-jeou-cross-strait-reconciliation-leader achieved two peaceful power transitions, establishing Taiwan's democratic system stability.
These people used different sacrifices to push democratic experiments, making this small island the only democratic beacon in the Chinese-speaking world.
tsai-ing-wen | 李登輝 | shih-ming-te | Cheng Nan-jung | chen-shui-bian-controversial-president | ma-ying-jeou-cross-strait-reconciliation-leader | lai-ching-te | annette-lu | chen-chien-jen | lin-yi-hsiung-democracy-advocate-tragedy-survivor | 高俊明
Technology & Business
Taiwan's miracle wasn't built on natural resources, but on a group of people finding irreplaceable positions in global division of labor.
tsmc-morris-chang invented the "dedicated foundry" model — not designing chips, only manufacturing — redefining global semiconductor division of labor. Today TSMC manufactures 90% of the world's advanced chips; Apple, NVIDIA, and AMD's cutting-edge products all depend on TSMC. terry-gou's Hon Hai Precision grew from a mold factory to the world's largest electronics manufacturing service provider, with annual revenue exceeding 6 trillion Taiwan dollars. 施振榮 proposed the "smiling curve" theory, influencing the transformation thinking of Taiwan's entire manufacturing industry.
yung-ching-wang-formosa-plastics-founder built a petrochemical empire from a rice shop, embodying Taiwan's economic miracle. jensen-huang, born in Tainan, immigrated to America and founded NVIDIA, now the core driver of the global AI computing revolution. He repeatedly emphasizes the strategic cooperation between TSMC and NVIDIA, securing Taiwan's irreplaceable position in the AI industry chain.
ethan-tu founded PTT, influencing Taiwan's internet culture, later working at Microsoft AI Research before returning to Taiwan to establish Taiwan AI Labs. These people prove that small islands can find key positions in the global innovation landscape.
tsmc-morris-chang | terry-gou | jensen-huang | 施振榮 | lin-bai-li | Barry Lam | steve-chang | mark-liu | cc-wei | yung-ching-wang-formosa-plastics-founder | Shi Wen-long | Ye Guo-yi | jamie-lin-ai-industry-pioneer | ethan-tu
Sports
At the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, Taiwan's delegation achieved historic best results. kuo-hsing-chun-olympic-weightlifting-champion won weightlifting gold with three Olympic records, journeying from rural Taitung to the world's peak. lin-yang-duo-taiwan-badminton-champions (Wang Chi-lin and Lee Yang) badminton men's doubles final shot's "holy grail" pose became a collective national memory. li-chih-kai won pommel horse silver with his signature Thomas flair — transforming from the little boy in documentary "Jump! Boys" to Olympic medalist over twenty years, this arc itself is a film.
tai-tzu-ying maintained badminton world ranking number one for 214 weeks. chien-ming-wang-mlb-sinker-ace's sinker left New York Yankees hitters helpless; the "Wang fever" had all Taiwan waking up at midnight to watch MLB broadcasts. su-wei-hsieh-wimbledon-champion won multiple Grand Slam titles in tennis doubles. C.K. Yang's 1960 Rome Olympics decathlon silver won early international sports visibility for Taiwan.
Behind every medal is the physical practice of "what a small island can achieve." These athletes used speed, strength, and skill to answer questions about limits.
kuo-hsing-chun-olympic-weightlifting-champion | tai-tzu-ying | chien-ming-wang-mlb-sinker-ace | lin-yang-duo-taiwan-badminton-champions | yang-yung-wei-judo-olympic-silver | li-chih-kai | su-wei-hsieh-wimbledon-champion | chen-wei-yin-mlb-pitcher | hong-chih-kuo-taiwanese-left-handed-pitcher | C.K. Yang | chi-cheng-flying-antelope | kevin-lin-ultramarathon-desert-pioneer | lu-yen-hsun-tennis-champion | chuang-chih-yuan-table-tennis-legend | hsu-shu-ching-olympic-weightlifting-champion | yang-dai-kang-taiwanese-baseball-star-in-japan | cheng-chao-tsun-javelin-asian-king | yani-tseng | jeremy-lin
Science & Academia
Yuan T. Lee won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the first Nobel laureate born in Taiwan. His crossed molecular beam technique in chemical reaction dynamics provided key tools for understanding reaction microscopic mechanisms. Wong Chi-huey invented "one-pot oligosaccharide synthesis" technology, considered the Taiwan scientist most likely to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Ta-You Wu is known as the "Father of Chinese Physics," training Nobel laureates Yang Chen-ning and Lee Tsung-dao, establishing Taiwan's physics research foundation. Paul C.W. Chu is a pioneer in high-temperature superconductor research. Tu Tsung-ming was Taiwan's first medical doctor, earning his doctorate from Kyoto Imperial University during Japanese rule, founding Kaohsiung Medical College. Xu Zhuo-yun writes about Chinese and world civilization from a historian's perspective, continuing to care about Taiwan and Chinese world destiny in his later years.
These scholars prove that investment in basic research will eventually bear fruit; academic reputation is a society's most precious soft power.
Yuan T. Lee | Wong Chi-huey | Ta-You Wu | Paul C.W. Chu | Tu Tsung-ming | Xu Zhuo-yun | Huang Guo-zhen
Education & Society
audrey-tang is the world's first transgender minister, symbolizing Taiwan's digital governance. Digital democracy platforms like vTaiwan and JOIN allow citizens to directly participate in policy discussions; pandemic tools like mask maps and contact registration demonstrated the possibilities of technology-governance integration.
Yen Chang-shou invests in remote area education, promoting educational experiments in Taitung, arguing that Taiwan education should cultivate complete personalities capable of thinking and creativity, not test-taking machines. Yeh Bing-cheng developed the PaGamO gamified learning platform, winning global teaching innovation awards. lu-guan-wei-junyiacademy-founder founded Junyi Academy, this "Taiwan Khan Academy" aims to give every child learning resources suited to their pace.
chen-shu-chu-vegetable-vendor-philanthropist donated over ten million Taiwan dollars from fifty years of vegetable selling income, selected by TIME magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2010. When reporters asked why she donated so much money, she simply said: "Money is useful only when given to those who need it."
audrey-tang | Yen Chang-shou | Yeh Bing-cheng | chen-shu-chu-vegetable-vendor-philanthropist | lu-guan-wei-junyiacademy-founder | Huang Guo-zhen
Digital & Media
ethan-tu founded PTT — Taiwan's largest online forum, still an important venue for public opinion. He later worked at Microsoft AI Research, returning to Taiwan to establish Taiwan AI Labs, promoting open-source AI technology. PTT and g0v communities represent Taiwan's civic technology culture, unique digital democracy assets of this island.
Ray became a representative author of Taiwan workplace novels with "The Bright Times of Post-Rookie." Rex How leads Cite Media Group, an important force in Taiwan's publishing industry. These creators and media figures record society and influence the public through new media formats, creating new areas of Taiwan's digital culture.
ethan-tu | Ray | Rex How | yang-you-ren-shoes-for-hope-taiwan-youth-hero | Chu Ge-liang
Cuisine & Craftsmanship
andre-chiang-taiwanese-culinary-innovator trained in French Michelin three-star restaurants, then opened Restaurant André in Singapore, selected among Asia's 50 Best Restaurants. In 2018 he returned his Michelin stars and came back to Taiwan to open RAW restaurant, redefining "Taiwan flavors" with local ingredients. His choice — abandoning international prestige to return to Taiwan — is itself a cultural statement: the best ingredients and deepest inspiration are on this island.
Jimmy Wu won the 2010 World Bread Championship with lychee rose bread, amazing the international baking world. From rural Pingtung to world champion, his story is a typical case of Taiwan craftsmanship spirit. After returning to Taiwan, he opened bakeries while continuing to participate in baking education, advancing Taiwan's baking industry technical standards.
andre-chiang-taiwanese-culinary-innovator | Jimmy Wu
These stories of people are not a list of "Taiwan's pride."
Among them, some bled and were imprisoned, some lived in poverty, some chose to abandon everything at their peak, some never stopped writing even in their lowest valleys. Their commonality is not "bringing glory to Taiwan" — that phrase is too light — but that they each, in different ways, answered the same question: On this small island surrounded by great powers, what can one person achieve?
The answers are written in their works, in court judgments, on medals, in donation receipts, and in those studios where lights still burn deep into the night.
Browse Options:
- Click categories above to view people by field
- Use search function to find specific individuals
- View complete list of people articles
Image source: Wikimedia Commons | CC BY 2.0 | Photographer: Gage Skidmore
