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| Like the rest of Taiwan, Taipei is caught in the between.
Sure, there’s the obvious – the fact that Taiwan is not quite an official country, losing that distinction to mainland China in the 1970s. It exists in the political shadows, no one allowed to recognize its existence, even as ‘Made in Taiwan’ becomes more prevalent than any other tag.
The U.S. officially protects this unofficial territory from its official self – that is, China. Taiwan is usually too timid to declare themselves independent, despite the fact that they are exactly that. China, for its part, is eager to absorb this rich island and certainly isn’t above rattling her sword now and again for that purpose.
Observers all agree: this isn’t likely to end well. The war between Mao and Chiang Kai Shek will someday be finished, and poor Taiwan is caught in the middle.
But the country’s one-foot-in-one-foot-out existence doesn’t end there. In some ways, Taipei is the strangest city in the world – because it’s the oddest conglomeration of melding cultures you’re likely to find.
Consider: it has all the neon and technical gadgetry of Japan, with all the same sleekness. Yet that is buried and layered with night markets and open air hawking which would more appropriately be found in Thailand. The two just don’t mix well – they struggle for supremacy, and yet in Taiwan, it somehow works.
Consider: Taiwan is a tiny little island, and yet nonetheless it feels huge. How? Take a drive from one tip to the other and you’ll see – not only does the flora and fauna change, but in the middle you’ll come across rocky crags and gaping gorges on a scale tiny islands just aren’t supposed to offer. In the south you’ll come across tropical sand beaches, while the north is weighted with the megalopolis of Taipei. It might not be a long drive, but it’s not a short one either.
In fact, Taiwan is about the only tiny island in the world which manages to be tiny when, in fact, it’s not. Often lumped with Singapore and Hong Kong, it dwarfs both of them put together. After all, the former two are barely large enough for one city – Taiwan is large enough to have a former capitol in the south. It only seems small so close to the menacing giant of China.
It’s very Chinese – and yet no one spoke the language as recently as 60 years ago; it had been colonized by Japan for almost half a century, and everyone spoke Japanese before Chiang Kai Shek’s arrival. Taiwan resigns itself to someday being swallowed by China – and yet that famous Chinese rudeness and aggressiveness is nowhere seen on the island, save when you mention the mainlanders.
It is home to a peaceful merchant people, long some of the most important traders in the Pacific, both when free and when conquered by the Chinese (not too long ago the Taiwanese were a different racial category). And yet it has become the focus and last stand of not only the last Chinese civil war, but one before this, in middle of the last millennium, under eerily similar circumstances.
When that previous King-turned-exile arrived in Taiwan, he kicked out some Western colonial forces and introduced his soldiers to the land; that’s when the genetically Chinese started to take over the island (and today, you have three basic groups: the aboriginal, the first Chinese wave centuries old, and the second from the 1940s when Chiang Kai Shek made the same trek).
‘A study in contrasts’ is one of the most trite and overused phrases in the travel writing industry, but if there is any place on the globe that still deserves the treatment, it’s Taiwan. |
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