Taipei

                                 Ceiling in one of the two wooden viewing towers on Tudi Gong’s mountaintop.

Before the 1600s, Taiwan was home to many Austronesian societies. There were of course the maritimers like the Chams in Vietnam. But too, there were those who settled in the plains and the mountains. Each had its distinct culture and honor system. We know that generally for these cultures authority came from the land itself, the elders of the clan, their ancestors and ritual balance. Too, we know that the integrity of a clan’s reputation was important. This conviction strengthened over the years with the introduction of Confucianism and then further emphasized when the Japanese brought their culture. Don’t bring shame upon the family. 

In the 1620s, Taiwan was discovered by the outside world as a convenient trading frontier. The Netherlands arrived to rule the south. Spain briefly held parts of the north. Missionaries, maps and cash crops arrived. Europeans relied on indigenous alliances.

In 1662 the Manchus from the northeast, beyond the Great Wall conquered the failing Ming dynasty which had ruled China since 1368. A Ming loyalist general bolted to Taiwan and expelled the Dutch. Taiwan became a military refuge for the Mings until the Qing went to Taiwan and conquered their last holdout in 1683. They annexed Taiwan and governed it loosely for two hundred years as a prefecture of Fujian; the interior indigenous lands remained unruly and effectively outside their control.

Even though their political control was far from absolute, the integration of Chinese brought the Taoism and Confucianism concepts that shaped a belief system necessary to accommodate growing urban civilizations. The Austronesian maritime culture had animistic cosmologies, ancestor veneration and local spirit systems, but not any of the bureaucratic structure that developed in the Han Dynasty ruling mainland China from 206 BCE to 220 CE.

Back in China, before its culture moved in to Taiwan, the Han Dynasty had consolidated imperial bureaucracy, formalizing Confucian governance through civil administrative systems and expanding Taoist religious structures. By the late Han period, China had tens of millions of people, tax systems, written law, civil bureaucracy, recurrent epidemics, floods and famine, corruption, weakening imperial authority and social unrest. The people needed moral explanation, ritual protection, healing and community cohesion. Quiet contemplation of the Tao did not address these pressing mass needs and so…religious Taoism evolved. In the second century CE, a movement called the Celestial Masters emerged. Let’s back up a second so we don’t get lost. The Tao or Dao or The Way is ineffable, so great that it cannot be described. It encourages natural flow over rigid order, simplicity over ambition, softness over aggression, non-forcing (wu wei) over control. The transition to bureaucracy sounds a bit cultish, but this is how it came about. As the Han dynasty was collapsing, Zhang Daoling claimed to have received a revelation from Lao Tzu (basically the founder of philosophical Taoism) to establish a religious community in Sichaun and appointing him as the Celestial Master. And so he set up a parallel religious government offering a moral code, a spiritual explanation of illness (moral imbalance), organized rituals, social welfare programs - The Way of the Celestial Masters was also known as the Five Pecks of Rice Movement as that was the cost of membership  and rice contributions were stores and redistributed - and a clear cosmic hierarchy. These concepts were integrated into mainstream thought. Mirroring the social structure that kept things running smoothly, heaven gained departments, ritual petitions developed, registers of just about everything you can think of became central, formalizing moral accounting. In short, Taoism integrated many aspects of Confucian morality. Confucianism normalized the ideas that order sustains harmony, hierarchy is natural, officials are accountable and governance reflects moral structure. The Celestial Masters applied these concepts to the spiritual world because well, why wouldn't they? And so heaven, that is Structure, cosmic authority, the organizing principle of reality… became a place of moral reporting, celestial registers, spirit officials, generals and inspectors and even a celestial court, in a structured hierarchy reporting to the Jade Emperor.

In 1894, Japan and Qing China went to war over influence in Korea. Qing lost and collapsed, and under their treaty Qing China ceded Taiwan to Japan. Taiwan remained part of the Japanese empire from 1895 to 1945. The Taiwanese weren’t crazy about this, but they are a relatively quiet people and their resistance never posed a real threat to Japan’s sovereignty. During WWII, in 1943, Allied Leaders (US, UK, Republic of China (ROC) issued the Cairo Declaration, a statement, not a treaty or legal instrument, stating that territories taken by Japan, including Taiwan would be restored to the ROC. In 1945, Japan agreed to accept the terms of the Potsdam declaration, a reaffirmation of the Cairo terms. The ROC began administering Taiwan in 1945. This was not a formal legal transfer of sovereignty but rather it was treated as a military occupation on behalf of the Allies.

In 1949 the People’s Republic of China (PRC) won a civil war with the ROC and took over the governance of mainland China. The ROC leadership, military and institutions retreated to Taipei. 

In 1951, after Japan lost in WWII, they renounced Taiwan in a document called the San Francisco Peace Treaty, but they didn’t say to who.  The Cold War had begun and the Allies could not agree whether Taiwan belonged to the ROC in Taipei or the PRC in Beijing. Taiwan sits in what U.S. planners call the First Island Chain, a natural barrier along East Asian coast. If Taiwan was controlled by a communist government aligned with Moscow, which the PRC was, it would shift naval power in the Pacific. The U.S did not recognzie the PRC and the Soviet bloc did not recognize the ROC, so the San Francisco Peace Treaty simply said Japan renounces Taiwan. The US signed the treaty, but the Soviets did not. In fact, they walked out of the deliberations. 

The ROC proceeded to set up a full-throttle authoritarian rule, known colloquially as the White Terror. In 1987, the ROC voluntarily lifted martial law and let Taiwan transition to democracy. In 1996, Taiwan held its first presidential election and it has remained a democracy since then under the ROC. 

It is the PRC who is making a claim to it today.

I arrived in Taipei late Sunday evening. The lunar new year would begin on Tuesday, so people were putting the last touches on spiffingup their homes or had already taken off to visit family in other parts. It’s their longest holiday of the year, with specific rituals and agendas extending over nine days. Preparation begins a good week before with a thorough cleaning of the house to sweep away bad luck from the old year, settling all scores and accounts, getting a haircut, whatever it takes to enter the new year clean. A lot of people buy new clothes, but that strikes me as a modern Mad Avenue affectation. Washing them should be good enough, don’t you think? The Taiwanese too have a kitchen god who reports annually on their domestic activities and he had already headed off with his report at the same time as the Kitchen God in Taipei. He lives by the hearth and travels up to the Jade Emperor not by carp as in Vietnam but via smoke and vapor. The sweeping needs to be thorough as there will be a lot of family activity and the house won’t get swept again for a while as nobody wants to sweep away the good luck the new year brings. Decorations, like those red banners with gold or black calligraphy spelling out Fortune and other mainstream wishes are hung everywhere. They were neat and curated in the more modern sections of town.  But not so in Chinatown and the shopping district along Huanda street. Market stalls selling cheap shiny shit like golden treasury boats, key rings with temples and tassels, and gold coins were garish and spectacular, and these shops were interspersed with street vendors offering a tantalizing menu array: chicken butts, pig’s blood cake and cookies with squid tentacles sticking out. 

When I bought this, I though those were bits of dried cherries sticking out. I imagine my disappointment that evening when I dug in my bag for it. I’ve probably mentioned that my god is a prankster.

While on this subject of a tempered consumer experience in the transportation hubs and cosmopolitan areas, I noticed both at the airport and in front of Taipei 101, the advertisements on successive screens lining each side of the hallway or street as it were, were in a soothing pattern. Each one was exactly the same along its respective side, images with soft contours in pretty colors. It was brilliant! No sensory onslaught to derail the nervous system. It makes US public spaces look like a cheesy yard sale in comparison.  

I was told that many people leave town as a nine-day holiday affords a good bit of freedom to do as you please. Indeed that first night and the following day, the streets were almost unbelievably quiet, bordering here and there on surreal. It was an efficient trip from the Taipei airport to East Taipei Star Hostel. A ride on the airport express line that is part of the MRT system. I make that distinction because in a land that uses English sparingly, it’s helpful to know that there is also an AirPort Express which is a train and requires purchasing a separate ticket. Whereas, if you’re going to be exploring Taipei, you are better off first getting Taiwanese currency. There are a few ATMs run by major banks and this is simple and painless. Then go into a 711 at the airport and ask to buy an EasyPass metro card. You can pay for the card (not much) by credit card, but all “top-ups” of money loaded on to the card for fares require cold hard cash. Riders are inexpensive and good across the MRT system, so you can ride buses too just by tapping the card against their reader when getting on and off. The metro system is great because you can’t forget; you can’t enter or exit areas without paying. (I met a fellow who had been arrested I think in Italy - it was one of those crowded gritty metros where it’s easy to miss a pole with a reader - who’d been arrested and thrown in jail for missing a scan on his way out.) Then follow the MRT signs and find your metro. At the entrance, usually just above and in front of an escalator,  you’re just going to have to throw your fate to the wind and hope you can get on the right train when you get down there as there is no clue in English where the train goes or in which direction. But if you’ve chosen the right color line, you’ve got this one. Downstairs, directly in front of there the trains stop, are signs highlighting the remaining stops on each line. There are neatly painted slanted lines allowing queues to form, usually two across on each side of where the doors will open. The center area is kept free for those exiting and then you alight. It’s quiet and clean. The cars too are kept clean and polished. You can charge your phone just by setting it down on a shelf near certain seats. 

Outside the window, neon lights zipped by. The stroll across the airport to meet the purple line (there are actually two MRT metros that leave the airport, one makes a few more stops) was long and quiet. My transfer to the blue line was just as silent, clean and efficient. By the time I was in my hostel, enjoying the heated toilet seat and several bidet options, I was all out grateful to have arrived into the future I’d imagined as a kid.

The next day I discovered broad, leafy empty streets and pedestrian traffic signals that must be obeyed even when there is no traffic in sight. You never know who might come whipping around a bend or out of nowhere. And crossing via crosswalks only, thank you. Strictly enforced. 

It was a lovely day to be out and about because almost every business was closed. Perfect weather. No shoppers. A dream.

I was heading toward the wharf or Old Town, I don’t recall, but I got sidetracked and ended up at Taipei 101, which worked out well as it yielded the opportunity of a reconnaissance tour: where did I want to stand to watch the lion dance the next morning, New Year’s Day? I’d wanted to see a live lion dance for the longest time. I have a shopping cart somewhere on my laptop with a lion costume in it that a Chinese family who has passed down the art for four hundred years, will sew for me when I press the button. This was part of a dream I had maybe sometime around 2011 or 2012 to start a business that provided entertainment at festivals, and lord knows a lion or dragon meandering through the crowd is always fun. Then I saw one at a festival and that ignited all kinds of other ideas for traveling art installations. In short, the lion dance had existed in an affectionate pocket of my mind for quite awhile, so I was pretty thrilled that it was suddenly going to be right in front of me.

I was a little taken aback given the modern feel of Taipei that first quiet day walking down the wide boulevard to come upon a young man in front of a shop focused on separating reams of joss paper from a thick multi-layered packet and watching it burn it in a metal bucket on the sidewalk. The stores in the neighborhood looked rather high end, though honestly it was hard to praise out what they sold or did as most had aluminum roll down doors in front of the businesses. He may have been a quiet outlier, but it didn’t seem like he’d break the law either.

I was surprised to even see one of those buckets here. For starters, the air is clean. It almost sparkles. I’m sure I’ve mentioned these metal buckets, fired up for burning anything, any thing, day and night all along the streets and alleys of India and Vietnam. Sometimes I wore an air mask to bed because the architecture is such that a top layer of ornamental cinder blocks is designed to allow for the free flow of air. Think mold prevention. Turns out there is an exception here for ritual burning. 

So far, Taipei was feeling like I was visiting the Jetsons. Except for the buckets. But then I don’t recall any episodes of the Jetsons illustrating a need to balance social cohesion. I was young and may have missed the nuances. That’s the great fun of watching cartoons as an adult.

In the immigration line at Da Nang airport, we were advised before departing that e-cigarettes would be illegal in Taiwan. Maybe this place was very strictly regulated? Digging into it, it was actually a brilliant bit of pre-emptive action on the part of the government. They’d heard the health concerns from the rest of the world that had been grappling with the problems of targeting to youths, witnessed the uncertainty and simply took the position that if it’s addictive and inhaled, it shouldn't be normalized. In 2023, they amended the Tobacco Hazards Prevention Act, banning the manufacture, import, sale and advertising, and use of e-cigs, treating them as illegal consumer products. I’d been going down the path of ai quality and health concerns to non-users, forgetting that other countries balance civil liberties differently.

So anyway when I saw this guy performing his ritual offering and petitioning for good luck for his business in the coming year, it seemed an anomaly with the high-tech toilet and the diatomaceous shower mat, my first encounter with this marvelous product. Why in god’s name would anyone use any other mat?  Have I been in a cave? And this was on top of my amazing hostel pod and the super sweet Japanese temple breakfasts, only one floor down from my room. Maybe Taipei was just a really clean fun place with organic food and pretty dresses, elegant white faux fur-trimmed jackets, and lattes.

But those notions of a consistent modernity erasing a long past occurred before I discovered gritty, smelly old Chinatown in all of its pre-festive fury. 

Where I ended up that afternoon. And where I bought the deceptive cherry cookie along with a plate full of colorful and kooky treats. I bought a bag of heavily sugared plump dried fruit that was kind of citrusy and very tasty, though I got dizzy after three. I don’t remember where else I got candy. Did I mention that it’s good luck to eat candy at the advent of the new year? There’s a prevalent notion of internalizing sweetness. The receptionist at the hostel offered some that had some chocolate in them though I found the flaky edible aluminum paper a bit disconcerting. Along with all of those colors and who knows what other ingredients, by the end of the day my body felt little more than a badly shaped mountain of candy. Chinatown was more than lively. 

It was after all the day before the New Year would reset the cosmos! Vendors peddling miniatures of deities with crazy eyes, flourishing mustaches and a panoply of creatively styled long beards, welcomed dragons and lions and tourists alike to the circus. We were gearing up for The Year of the Horse!

I bought some wealth offerings for the gods, a little gold boat for Cashein I could leave somewhere he’d find it. I would have liked to see him swoop down on a tiger, though a chariot would be okay too. But I had a 1:45 am flight the day he was due back in the realm. 

A quick cultural note on petitioning for wealth in case you’re wondering. It’s diffferent than the western mindset where it’s popular to visualize like hell to manifest millions and millions of dollars, if not billions or trillions; the focus here on keeping prosperity flowing. Undoubtedly, upward mobility in careers is respected and business success is taken seriously. It’s just that the cost/benefit analysis seems more of a personal choice than one imposed by an expectant society.

I began noticing small home shrines and saw ancestor altars through open doors. Beyond the flashy banners were quieter signs of ancient beliefs. Even my modern hostel quietly set up an altar on Day Two. At the entry space outside the glass door. By the way, altars are not just left out. They are pretty carefully attended and quickly cleaned away after they have served their purpose.

I ended up late my second night in front of the Taipei Xia City God Temple down on Dihua Street, a street I thought might be festive as it was New Year’s Eve. The City Temple was closed, though there was activity in the shadows. I wandered on. Most shops were shuttered, but at the corner of a plaza, a vendor sold sparklers and to-me-disappointing explosives that were nonetheless affording some mirth to a couple people setting them off on the plaza. And Romeo and Juliet got married, with just a handful there to witness.

I think it’s actually better that they look blurry. Like they are in their own dream.

New Year’s Day opened with the Lion Dance in the plaza in front of the Taipei 101 skyscraper.

The Lion Dance was a blessing of this public space and the surrounding businesses. The drumming represents the lion’s heartbeat and the sound of the metal symbols cuts through the air, cleansing the space. The lions accept bounty (lettuce) and then spit it out to spread it. Afterward whirling deities in tall headdresses and elaborate embroidered robes release wealth by distributing coins from the celestial treasury a golden boat. I was handed a gold coin. It is considered a seed of prosperity.

Smiling, I headed toward the City Temple to see if anything was happening down that way. Despite reading here and there that temple visiting was structured to visiting specific deities on certain days of the nine-day holiday, for example Day Four for Cashein, the truth was it was a general free-for-all to get in front of any and all of the gods you wanted to, beginning on New Year’s Day. I joined the throngs of people at the City Temple, accepting and lighting three sticks of incense to press to my forehead and bow down with in front of a deity, introducing myself by name, date of birth and address, praying, and then bowing thrice again to seal the deal. I followed what most of the people in front of me were doing and didn’t bother presenting special offerings of fresh flowers or fruit or joss paper as that would have required carting them along with the burning incense in a tight crowd and trying to find a donation box, then fumbling around for money. There were quite a few deities with specific duties people felt the need to petition. From what I could sort out, success in exams, fertility, love, and wealth were all popular entreaties. The City God temple was packed with people either shoving through the crowd or stopped dead in front of their object of entreaty. People seemed to have their own unique way of relating with particular gods and there were a lot of intense and personal conversations between worshippers and the gods staring at them from behind glass or sitting on a throne. The City Temple contained too many administrative gods for me to count. It was dizzying. There is an entire gold wall filled with hundreds of transparent bubble cells with tiny bureaucrats inside them and niches and cases upon cases showcasing a lot of deities and bureaucrats I can’t begin to name. 

It seems kind of crazy that people would like the idea of heaven operating like a bureaucracy, but their frame of reference was a successfully functioning model of reality at street level during the Han Dynasty, so why wouldn’t heaven operate just as efficiently? Heaven is not the ultimate. It’s just an expression. The underlying Tao is the ultimate. Fate is not random. Misfortune is not chaos. It is mistimed alignment. For example, new beginnings should take place in Spring. Intellectual and career success ripens like fruit. After the Han dynasty collapsed, Buddhism became attractive as it gave a suffering a cause, explained injustice through karma and rebirth and made liberation from it all possible. And so it was absorbed on Chinese terms. Reality remained orderly and reviewed to keep harmony, but Buddhism added depth and escape, so if you believe in it to the extent that you can transcend your suffering, well that is your choice. 

The temples here are not segregated by belief systems. All deities are welcome and sit side by side. The temples instead are more subject-based. The City Temple covers civic matters. It is compact and administrative. 

The Longshan Temple is expansive, devotional and a blend of Taoist folk belief, Confucianism, Buddhism and animism. People go for general or specific blessings, their choice. Confucianism was in evidence on full throttle on New Year’s Day. Lining the wall of a long narrow hallway outside the temple were tables with pink charts hanging above them and pens and forms so that people whose birthdate did not exactly align with the Year of the Horse for a fortuitous year could petition for appeasement and a nudge in the right direction. 

Then there was The Actual Festival Day feel of Old Town, where spiritual engagement was mixing full tilt with the excitement of a new start. People poured out of the gorgeous Longshan Temple in dismay and bewilderment, unconsciously joining a river of people heading into the narrow streets lined with picturesque two and three story brick buildings that had been there hundreds of years.

Don’t peer too closely into that pot.

The Tamsui Port was blessed with a tea merchant boom in the 1860s which  brought a lot of money rolling in on the waves from through 1895 when Japan took over and things changed. With efficient urban planning, they modernized the port town to a colonial capital. When people talk of the Golden Age here, they are actually referring to both eras, spanning the continuum from 1895-1945.

Serving different purposes as time rolled on. 

Eighty-five percent of Taiwanese follow many of these temple beliefs, or so read a poll. Easy to believe considering the sheer number of the people I rubbed shoulders with in the temples, the human mass. 

But it became clear that a rigorous moral order did not dampen the holidays by any means. It certainly did not rule out believing that the heavens were filled with wonderful possibilities. Correct moral behavior last year duly reported to the authorities, along with a possibly negotiable twist of fate could open the heavens to loose and shake showers of good luck. These were auspicious days.

The Hongludi Nashan Fude, the magnificent mountaintop temple overlooking Taipei is dedicated to the Earth God Tudi Gong, who in Chinese folk religion is associated with land, wealth and prosperity. This is a popular temple for petitions for wealth. You can feel it there.

But for now, back to the City Temple to give you an idea of the scaffolding. Consider the duties of only these twelve of ostensibly twenty-four departments which report to the Jade Emperor.

1. Wenchang Dijon. Now and then a god just steals your heart. This guy, behind glass of course, stole mine. There’s just something about his smile that reminds me of my brother. He influences scholarly success, oversees exam outcomes and to top it off, governs the destiny of writers. I feel good about him being at the helm.

2. Caishan is all about business prosperity and financial distributions.

3. Zap Jun oversees household conduct.

4. Chong Huang is the city-level magistrate. He tracks merit and misconduct locally.

5. Tudi Gong is a neighborhood guardian who oversees land energy and local welfare.

6. Yama runs the Justice and Afterlife Courts, judging souls in the underworlds and evaluating karmic balance. Sounds like ripe material for a sitcom. If it isn’t you.

7. Who do you think works in the Weather Bureau? If you’ve been enduring the winter of 2026 in the central- and north-east US, you won’t be surprised to hear that it’s the Dragon Kings of the Four Seas.

8. Oooh and then there are those who work in the Life Span Registry. They are not simply record keepers. They determine birth timing and longevity. 

9. There’s a Merit Accounting Office which tracks vows, moral conduct and ritual participation. Ritual participation? Seriously? We’ve seen the cautionary tales in Hinduism of awarding boons simply for formal devotion. Consider the tale of Bhasmasura, a power-seeking being who was granted the ability to instantly turn anyone to ashes simply by touching their heads. When Shiva realized he’d gone overboard granting this power, he had to trick Bhasmasura into touching his own head. I’ve had some nasty large women shove to get in front of me in temples. I vote that ritual participation deserves deep scrutiny before it’s rewarded. But since this is just a department in a bureaucracy the level of scrutiny probably changes tone with the administrator in charge that day. 

10. Fertility and Childbearing. They even determine the destiny of offspring. I’m guessing there is interdepartmental cooperation.

11. Destiny and Fate Allocation. This might be a fun department to work in. These officials assign life circumstances and watch karma unfold.

12. Those in the Department of Protection and are martial gods who remove the malevolent forces. The definition of malevolent forces evolves over time. For example, long ago illness was considered to be caused by bad spirits.

There are ten courts that review different aspects of conduct after the soul leaves the body. After the processing where the soul undergoes correction, one has her memory erased by eating soup offered by Meng Po to allow rebirth to begin without past memories and grudges.

And there are other deities not exactly assigned to a department. Yue Lao, the Old Man Under the Moon is a relationship deity and a fate-binding official who dabbles in human affinities. He binds together two who have drawn red threads from the temple and taken them home along with sweets allowed to get sweeter before ingesting. Even young serious techies bow down respectfully before him. The petition is not a plea for finding a soulmate. He ties unseen threads between those destined to meet. To be fulfilled, a destiny has to be at the right time and it sometimes needs a little push. So these folks are just praying for activation. Nor is there a real desperation to marry just now in Taipei. I don’t want you to get the wrong picture. Of course people use dating apps as well. But females are now educated at the same rate as males and sometimes finding satisfaction more in their careers than marriage and a family might yield. Taipei housing costs far outstrip the median income. Taiwan birth rates are among the lowest in the world.

Here are a couple deities who leaped out at me.

Zhong Kai, the demon queller. Look into his eyes. He’s got a sad background story. A gifted scholar who placed first in the imperial exams, but was denied the position he sought because some jackass (the emperor) said he was too ugly for it. He took his own life at the palace steps. The emperor later regretted his action and ostensibly honored him by appointing him King of Ghosts, tasked with capturing and controlling demons. 

The photo definitely reflects awfully, but it’s a good thing Zhong Kai remains behind glass here. It feels like he’s going to leap out and strangle someone.

This is Boa Zheng. He was once a mere mortal, a government official who became a folk hero during his career under the Song Dynasty for prosecuting corrupt officials, punishing powerful elites, refusing bribes and with all of his talent and skill, still taking the time to defend ordinary run-of-the-mill people. Black faces of gods denote uprightness, seriousness.

This is Lao Tsu himself. 

One of the Three Pure Ones. The big three celestials in the religion of Taoism represent (1) the cosmic “before”, (2) the ordering of the cosmos and (3) Lao Tsu who explains to humanity how it is structured.

I climbed the long mossy stairs on a quiet morning with just this man, who waited for me to catch up with him, telling me that he was 65 and afraid of dogs. Other than that exchange, we walked alone together in companionable silence.  The Hongludi Nashan Temple, a magical space overlooks Taipei. Taipei 101 rises in the center foreground in the valley. The powerful Tudi Gong watches over the city.

It was all glorious. I seldom take pictures inside temples, so either visit or google. I might if it’s just that kind of scene and I may as well. But I could have stood out here all day and taken photos. The detail was wondrous.

Outside the world of temples, the New Year was celebrated in public spaces with a lot of people strolling together and street performers about. I watched this Houdini-type guy finagle himself out of tight chains in a shopping mall plaza.

Too, I had an amazing Japanese meal in a restaurant that seemed to be a popular tradition for many with its set New Year menus. If I found the receipt with its name I intentionally retained so I could record it and probably just as intentionally tossed it so I could clean out my pack, I’ll edit this and include it.

I had a cold Tsingtao beer overlooking the river, clean with healthy wetlands and then walked along its bicycle and pedestrian path.

I photographed this guy because he stopped and asked if he could have a picture with me because I “was cool.” That made me feel good and I wanted to remember him.

The elephant in the room of course is how Taiwanese feel about what the rest of the world views as their existential threat. But one must remember the deeply ingrained Taoist/Buddhist beliefs that it is best sometimes not to articulate issues. Not to push things to a breaking point when it is unnecessary. And their history of uninvited colonization has taught them to lay low, to teach their children that some subjects are not to be discussed outside the family. I hope they can maintain their independence. It seems to be working beautifully.