Taiwan – Old China blends with New Asia
Walking through the humming, lively night market, flames leaping from food stalls, the sizzle of meat on grills, a colleague asks. “What is your favourite place in Asia?”
We were swept up in energy and atmosphere rarely seen in Europe, one moment in the glitter of lights from the Raohe market, the next in the arc of the 18th Century Ciyou Buddhist temple with its red roof, joss sticks, gold-plated sculptures and sudden tranquility.
Images sped through my mind. What was my favourite place? The magic of Bali; the beaches of Thailand; the chaos and music of the Philippines; the ordered symmetry of Japan, and then to where we were now, a place that blended traditions of old China with the excitement and technology of new Asia.
In short here was China without having to go to China, no paraphernalia about visas, no wi-fi restrictions, no underbelly about human rights and politics. With Taiwan, you just get on a plane and arrive.
In a family holiday, there can be days of mountain walking or cycling, swimming among the most amazing coral, high speed rail journeys through stunning landscape, soaking in hot springs and the food, of course, while absorbing a fascinating slice of Asian history.
Taiwan is the pearl that the Chinese communist party has never been able to capture and control and has forged itslf into a relaxed, first world democracy.
In the National Palace Museum are stored China’s old and priceless treasures smuggled from the mainland in the late 1940s as Communist armies swept to power.
In the early 1990s I was lucky enough to have filmed inside the museum’s long atmosphere-controlled tunnels in which treasures were kept, some still in wooden crates, straw packing spilling out, hauled away in the rush of war.
Today, the museum is modernised and superbly curated where, in a morning, you can get a sense of China’s complex and tumultous history with ancient calligraphy, intricate porcelain, art and carvings.
The most popular is a piece of jade shaped into a cabbage head with two grasshoppers camouflaged into its ruffled semi-translucent leaves. The Jade Cabbage came from the Forbidden City where it was part of a 19th Century wedding dowry for Wenjing, a consort of the Guangxu Emperor.
Photo credits: Humphrey Hawksley & Pixabay
Just across from the museum is Silks Palace Restaurant which recreates dishes from exhibits such that you can eat the Jade Cabbage as one of your deserts.
Less than an hours drive away is the former gold-mining town of Juifen, real, old Taiwan, a mountain coastal town with spectacular views over the East China Sea. Its steep narrow streets are lit at night by red and yellow lanterns.
Like much of Taiwan, Juifen is injected with the architecture of Japan which ruled from 1895 until its defeat in 1945.
The Sun Moon Lake, with boat trips and a web of well-built cycling and walking trails, is a massive reservoir constructed by the Japanese in the 1930s. It is also a site of Buddhist history where a temple is named after the 7th Century monk, Xuanzang, who travelled to India, bringing back scrolls and texts to spread Buddhism around China. Fragments of his skull are kept at the temple.
The founder of modern Taiwan, Chiang Kai Shek, used Sun Moon Lake as a hideway. Supported by the United States, he came with his anti-communist government after his defeat by Mao Tse-tung.
The walls of his lake-side modest guest house are decorated with photographs of visiting celebrities and American politicians, including a letter from President John F Kennedy about the ‘hope and opportunities of freedom in Asia’, language from the 1960s that resembles today’s headlines about the rise of China.
You can get a ringside glimpse of this modern flashpoint on a short flight from Taipei to the low-lying dragon-shaped island of Kinmen which carries a touch of Berlin’s now dismantled Checkpoint Charlie.
At its closest point, Kinmen is barely a mile from the Chinese mainland. On a clear day, you can see skyscrapers in the mega-city of Xiamen and take a boat to wave at tourists on pleasure craft from the other side.
If you do have a China visa, you can catch a ferry that plies back and forth on a thirty-minute commuter run between Kinmen and the mainland.
Astonishingly, several coastal islands have remained under Taiwan’s control, although not without bloodshed. There is a memorial at the site of the Battle of Guningtou which Taiwan won in late 1949 and which is now a bird sacnntuary.
Tunnels were blasted out of granite mountains to protect Taiwanese vessels bringing supplies from American ships anchored in international waters. Now they are a museum and, because of their unique acoustics, concerts are held inside where you can listen to world class orchestras with sound and light bouncing between the granite and the water.
Kinmen has an array of guest houses. A common architectural feature is a decorated towers in the compounds once ownd by merchant families and used to keep watch against coastal raiding parties.
Everrich Golden Lake is the island’s on one five star hotel hich has an adjoining duty-free shopping mall with designer stores such as Ferragamo, Gucci, and Tiffany, a sign that whatever the politics, business continues to boom.
Nearby a craftsman known as Maestro Wu runs a knife-making furnace. When Wu Tseng-dong was a boy, China was firing artillery barrages onto Kinmen, then at the heart of Asia’s Cold War. Shell casings are now piled high at the back of his workshop and Wu turns them into custom made kitchen knives to sell back to Chinese tourists, often with the engraving “From Mao with Love.”
So, back to that question. Without doubt, Taiwan is one of my most favourite places in Asia, where things work, people are efficient but laid back, distances are short making mountains, beaches and fascinating history all within easy reach.
HH – March 2024
Humphrey flew China Airlines from Gatwick and stayed at the Sun Moon Lake Hotel, the Sherwood Hotel in Taipei and Shuatou guest house in Kinmen.