Taiwan
2026-10-08 — 2026-10-08
Wherein the Air of Sydney Is Inhabited, Pavements Are Traversed by Bicycles, Hokkien Is Spoken by Seventy Percent of the Populace, and High-Performance Semiconductors Are Forged Alongside Egg Rolls and Saxophones.
Taiwan sounds interesting.
UPDATE: I went there. Confirmed: it was super interesting.
Pithy summaries:
- What if Singapore, but fun?
- What if vibrant like a Southeast Asian metropolis, but with the air quality of Sydney instead of constant lung sludge?
1 Taiwan anchors Hokkien
Hokkien people are 70% of Taiwan’s population, so Towan is the closest thing to a Hokkien state. Hokkien is the home language of 70+% of the populace, apparently, and it is the Taiwanese department of education that maintains a phonetic transcription (bopomofo) and extended Chinese script to write it. Taiwan Taigi Recommended Characters - Wikipedia
2 Austronesian ground zero
Have you heard of the Austronesian languages? This language family is classified into 10 subfamilies, and 9 of those subfamilies are known only in Taiwan.
This is the linguistic trace of the incredible Austronesian expansion that originated from Taiwan, starting more than 4000 years ago and spreading across the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, introducing to the region, among other things, sailing, and “rice, bananas, coconuts, breadfruit, yams, taro, paper mulberry, chickens, pigs, and dogs.”
YEah, and all that started in Taiwan, ~2000 BCE.
3 Taiwan is pretty gay
Taiwan Pride is one of the great gay prides of the world, and maybe the best in Asia (pace Thailand’s epic White Nights). It doesn’t attain the slick polish of e.g. Sydney’s pride (man, they don’t even block off the whole street for the Parade route, but let the marchers contend with hectic motor vehicle traffic)
4 Being in East Asia is a good time
The imprints of Taiwan’s recent history in East Asia are everywhere. Infrastructure and wayfinding are often in Japanese, and to an extent Korean. Imprints of Taiwan’s time as a Japanese protectorate are everywhere
5 Political vibes/history
A long but slightly famous story, and which I will not re-tell here but you should look it up. How did Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang take over this island? And then accidentally lose their authoritarian rule to democracy? Long story bro but check it out.
6 Industries
- Underpinning the bulk of western high-performance semiconductor industry
- saxophones
- Bikes
- delicious egg rolls
7 Bikes
Bike infrastructure is reasonably good. Sometimes the road lacks bike lanes, but then we can totally pootle along slowly on the pavement and that feels pretty safe, at least if you are patient, because those pedestrians are not shy about asserting right-of-way.