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Taipei is just a short 100 minute flight across the Taiwan Strait from Shanghai. And a good place to rest up for a bit after my China classes were finished. There’s plenty in Taipei to keep first-time visitors occupied for a few days and we crisscrossed the city in taxis to see a few of the sights. The highlight, for us at least, was the Chiang kai-shek memorial hall featuring an enormous bronze statue of the Generalissimo and an hourly changing of its guard. The building is beautiful, and the story documented inside fascinating (though no doubt a little more reverential towards Kai-shek than he truly deserved). But there’s no doubting the significant part he played in modern Chinese history and his prominent time on the world stage following his defeat by the Chinese communists, and retreat to Taiwan, in 1949. Kai-shek didn’t flee from the mainland empty-handed; he brought with him the treasures of the Forbidden City, and many of these are now displayed in the Palace Museum in northern Taipei.
From what we’d read, we expected Taipei to have a food scene on the scale of Singapore or Malaysia but we found it to be a mere shadow of those two gastronomic paradises. One notable exception was the dumpling restaurant chain Din Tai Fung, outside which people patiently queued for an hour or so to get a table. We had lunch on Sunday at their restaurant in the basement of Taipei 101, the world’s second-tallest building, and our own wait for a table was worth every minute.
Monday night we saw a Peking Opera performance at nearby Taipei Eye. There were two short plays; the second, “Bottomless Pit” was the highlight. The program explained that it involved Buddhist monk Tang San-zang and his three disciples heading west to receive scriptures from India. Unfortunately, en route they happened upon the Bottomless Pit where San-zang was pulled in by the Albino Rat (aka Lady Earth Flow) who wished to feast on the flesh of the monk, thereby attaining eternal life. In what I thought was the funniest line in the whole show (though strangely I was the only one laughing), when Tang San-zang was seized, Lady Earth Flow ordered one of her underlings to “Take him to the Pit and gut him!” But all turned out well in the end. Protector Wu-kong arrived on the scene, and encountered the Rat first whereupon they did battle. The program went on to explain, “The Rat’s Taoist Magic is strong, putting Wu-kong in a pinch and forcing him to call on the Cat Spirit for help before they can bring the Albino Rat under control.” It was a funny, slightly weird, highly entertaining show. Don’t miss it if you’re in Taipei.
Yesterday we took a smooth high-speed train south of Taipei to Taichung in central Taiwan, and from there a bus into the mountain range that runs down the centre of the island. Our destination was Sun Moon Lake, a pleasant enough body of water surrounded by tall peaks, and across which tourist boats conveyed crowds to see the various sights along the shore.
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