Taiwan - chaos and calm

Beijing
 
A night between flights spent in a chilled Beijing, a driver and a car caressing us through the streets and sights of an ominous city. Cameras, a lot of cameras; barriers, controlling where to cross; checks, controlling where to pass; wandering confined locations of youthful delight intensely populated with smartly dressed revellers. Electric cars abound beneath a sky of orange pollution. Olympic architectural flames kept alive and vibrant. Tiananmen Square where life is missing.

Taipei

Walking temperature in the city, late October beyond the oppressive heat of recent months, before it cools too far.  “Carry an umbrella” warns Elias as the drops distil from the humidity, sufficient to dampen but not to wash.
 
We have started our explorations in the outer reaches, with Elias and Pei of studio Duomuo, in the multi layered workshops of the Treasure Hill Artists Village clamped to the side of the incline overlooking the river. Upriver In Datong we find Visible City, named after Italo Calvino’s multi layered urban treatise so beloved of the young owner who crafts his tea like he crafts his silverware, with love and dedication. There’s more than a hint of the Japanese who once ruled here and who can now be found running the best bars, quietly offering delicate sustenance, traditional service and an ambience of calm.

And Ambience is our lodgings, charmingly run by young, joyful souls endlessly eager to amuse and assist, an oasis of zen-like calm, marble cool and steel white, reflecting the underside of the flyovers that fly above and around, flying over wide highways that chop the city sectors of Zhongshan and Songshan, city sectors that are as similar as their names are spoken, separated only by the studiously observed wait for the green walker lights. Between and beneath, the metro journeys are swift and clean and cheap and polite. Easy to navigate and pleasing to use.

And yet despite the cultural attractions of the outer reaches and the technologically impressive infrastructure, at its heart Taipei is not an attractive city to the untrained western eye. Small buildings are compiled from what’s at hand, an underlay of a former prouder time immersed in the commercial crazy signage billboards of more recent years. Mid-sized buildings with ill-kempt surfaces are wrapped in air conditioning and grillage, streaked by dampened dust, hitting the street without compassion. Tall buildings sport the glass facades and faux-green foregrounds of a once international architecture. Even bigger buildings are in the making, major D-walls being sunk in tight corners at all corners, adding to the cacophony. Little sense of neighbourhoods, little awareness of the homes that might lie beyond the many balconies screened from prying eyes.

And yet beneath the dusty skin the rich diversity and vibrancy are omnipresent, the chaos near absolute and near overpowering. Undecorated shells under uncared for buildings are filled with whatever is necessary for commerce, mostly cardboard boxes, a desk, a screen, a chair, an owner, a few shelves at most, a flash of golden red, selling goodness-knows-what under fluorescent light, everywhere fluorescent light.  Occasionally a scooter repair shop, maybe a hairdresser, maybe an aromatic herb seller, brightly lit vegetables and every variety of juice, always a bubbling cauldron of street food with random tables and chairs to entice the daring, all spilling out of identical shells spanning end to distant end of streets that are near identical in their variety. In their midst an occasional bank offers a few marble-faced meters of calm. The occasional pocket park full of the city’s few lush trees sheltering colourful play areas dressed in dark damp foliage. The occasional mall with its plastic fluffy child toys, child-like announcements, child-age clothing on evident adolescents, Taiwanese kawaii and all its consequences being a way of life, the conveyor and portrayer of celebration. The cultural highlights are islands in the morass, the colourful splash of a temple courtyard, the occasional muscular monument, the scattering of museums and concert halls set in the city’s rare, barely occupied plazas, each drawing in the local and the tourist alike, ticking off their lists. And scooters, everywhere the near-miss of scooters.

But there’s no rubbish, none of the odours that elsewhere accompany urban mayhem, the streets clean and night-time safe, the people delightful, helpful, charming, gesticulating and then, moving on, quietly contemplative, seemingly immersed in their thoughts, the smile replaced by a studied calm, the joy in their eyes briefly calmed.

Lucky and Shiang-I

Lucky and Shiang-I rescue us, immerse us in kindness and joy, invite us to speak to, eat with and catch shrimp for encouraging, polite, adventurous students from the school of architecture. They feed us in splendour; luxuriate our street worn feet; provide solace and warmth in the heart of this exhausting city.

Taichung

Fast train, slow and easy stations. Fresher air, warmer air, verging on the tropical down the track one short hour south. The high-speed train station far out of town, keeping the low-cost taxis busy.

Oku hotel, a colonial club dressed in far eastern bling, the demure golden plush of another time, a few marbled steps above the ramshackle night market street awash with industrious Taiwanese, amongst whom we meet Belgians by chance amongst the smoky street edge tables, sharing beer and stories of and tips for travel in Taiwan.

We are staying on the outer edge of the Taichung Central District, offering the same rich mix and poor quarters of Taipei without the stress. We learn that as the wealth trickles down, the Centre is slowly emptying, losing its intensity, a few youthful efforts at regeneration, but the developers circle.  Behind us and by contrast the outer swathes are peppered with jewel like buildings, museums, galleries, high rise living, landscaped avenues, lively cafes, street performers, busy malls and bustling markets. The new Taichung action rings the old town, watching and waiting as it decays.

Low-cost taxis ferry us around the north and west of the city, searching out the architecture, presenting us with different approaches to public buildings, with varying degrees of aptitude in response to the experience, and three very different approaches to the plan.  

Toyo Ito goes wobbly and loses his balance at the theatre; a boxed kawaii toy that doesn’t always play well when unwrapped by the critical eye.

IM Pei keeps it deceptively simple at Luce, bending the planes to derive emotion, practical and ecclesiastical in a singular swoop of the pen. 

Saana confidently adds panache in lieu of cost to the Librarium. Glinting moiré extracts joy from simple silver fabric. Signs of a generous client accommodating the whimsy.

Daniel and Esther

Daniel and Esther are a delight; she, glamorous, quick to wit and overflowing with amusement; he, the conscientious architect of buildings playful and robust in turn as in turn they cater for studious students and the staunchly religious. Endlessly kind they show us and gift us the pleasures to be found in and around Taichung. Hot-pots in a richly timbered setting, luxuriously driven to the mountains, roads ignoring the topography, highways perched high above the terrain that slips too easily along the fault line, occasionally punching tunnels through sedimentary shale until we are close to the tea and the lake. Daniel and Esther, delightfully connected and overly generous with their time and their elegantly cultured outlook. Will they ever retire from work? Maybe, but certainly never from life.

Our last Taichung days are spent at a slower pace, exploring the cafes and the parks, reading the politics of which we have only a cursory western grasp. It comes as little surprise that the status quo is the preferred stance; there’s a confidence in the strength of the people and their economy, hopes for an independent future stronger than those for reunification. Despite all the war-plane wing-waving overhead, the status quo seems fine for the time being. Relax and simply get on with life.

Tainan

We head further south, fast train into the slow-moving path of Typhoon Fung-Wong. To be met with an earthquake warning from the president. Nature adds spice to the journey.

Our ‘typical Tainan’ house and rooms in the close built streets of the old quarter are reminiscent of the Perfect Days cleaner’s, classically simple, spotlessly clean, and largely devoid of comfort. We seek to anticipate the imperfect days ahead of us, typhoon enforced monastic pastimes in lieu of the architectural culture we had Google-flagged.

It is in anticipation that we scurry through the street sights, checking for typhoon updates as we upend another coffee, as we pause between markets and navigate the alleyways that waffle the city centre, searching for paper and materials to keep us occupied in the apocalypse. A very charming city, very clean and amusing in the chrome and mosaic detail of the city heart.  With rare highlights it’s little-ado-about-nothing but gentle living, interspersed with splendid eating. “Some people feel the rain; others just get wet” Marley quotes as we sit back and read Chinese broadsheets on the upstairs deck of a tiny tin clad coffee house in the tiny tin clad back streets of Tainan, saxophone accompanying the raindrops as we add the pleasure of hearing the downpour to Bob’s feelings.

We consider the impending apocalypse to be best spent in more comfortable lodgings and leave our gurgling damp Perfect Days apartment after two ill-slept nights for something swankier across town. We appreciate the choice with which we are blessed, but there’s something enjoyable about being out of the close-roofed morass of the old town and onto the wide grid simplicity of the modern quarters. We can stretch without poking something, breathe in the breezes that wider streets allow, walk through the night without tripping over another historic pavement.

Overhead the war jets jet noisily by, until the typhoon lands and nature briefly defeats them. The rains and winds are evident, but the epicentre has swung south and they’re tame. With the earthquake warning still unrealised, the weather becomes just an unusually balmy November day in the UK. We rest and watch it pass nevertheless, knowing of the warm calm days to come and when they do we are back in cheap taxis, stop-starting around the city to the sights we had google-flagged to visit. Not the sights beloved of the tourist buses but the interesting, mostly-but-not-all modern buildings squeezed between the background detritus, overrun by banyan trees and dotted fore square around campus quads. We resort to the alleys for the comfort of unchained coffee shops, but the joy is in the architectural exploration and the unbridled opinions.

And then one further elegant Tainan meal and it’s time to leave, to fast train north to meet and relate our exploits to recent new and old friends in the rich chinoiserie of the Taipei Grand Hotel for one luxurious night, before Beijing beckons again briefly on the journey home.

November 2025