Breakfast on the fifth day was at a “Western” breakfast burger place called Laya Burger. Not quite believing it, I ordered the promotional KitKat burger which turned out to be a nice spicy chicken burger with crushed molten kitkat on it. I’m not sure what I expected. Next up was a personal indulgence, a railway museum built in the lovely Japanese-occupation-era Railway Ministry building, which combined good production values, strong English translations and lots of little models with the highly specialised love of train obsessives everywhere (although it didn’t have any actual trains). It also clearly had a bit more space than it knew what to do with, leading to a couple of quite random exhibits, but was a charming warmup to the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall.
The hall is set in an immense square which is itself a sneering demonstration of state-personality-cult excess on par with the Anitkabir. Through the “Gate of Great Centrality and Perfect Uprightness”, beyond the paired National Theatre and National Concert Hall (two colossal sweeps of orange roof, traditional Chinese architectural forms allied to 1980s production values) is the gigantic monument itself, in white marble and royal-blue tiles (Kuomintang colours, of course, but also a clear nod to Sun Yat-Sen’s mausoleum on the mainland).* Under its roof, up 89 steps (he died aged 89) is a gigantic seated knockoff-Abe-Lincoln bronze of CKS himself, wearing a friendly, benevolent smile which immediately reminded me of pro-democracy protestors being strung together with steel wire through their wrists and shot into Keeling harbour. I came to this island with a pretty low opinion of CKS, based partly on him being a vicious, murderous shit but mostly on also being a spectacularly corrupt and inept dictator whose failures of leadership lost mainland China to the CCP, and was interested to see if the exhibition here was going to change my mind.
50% of the exhibition felt like your classic old-fashioned personality cult museum – historic uniforms, shiny cars, ivory miniatures, medals of the Grand Order of Whatever from irrelevant countries, a horrible smiling waxwork of CKS in a replica office in front of a delusional map of all China, black and whites of him hugging children, Soong Mei-Ling with all the glamour stolen US money could buy. But it also, quite pointedly, had a few letters and receipts from people warning about personality cults and illegal unconstitutional actions. The other 50% was a more modern piece about the struggle for democracy and Taiwan’s “waddle to freedom” ([sic] – it mostly wasn’t translated but did have QR codes to English webpages).
Delightfully, shortly after its completion the huge square immediately became a rallying point for massive pro-democracy protests and has been a favoured place for demonstrations ever since. Most of the exhibit is about these protests and the actual elections that Taiwan only very recently started to have; it isn’t specifically aimed at CKS (although it is inside his monument) but rather the entire KMT machine behind the White Terror – but that in itself is interestingly partisan, when the KMT are still a real live political party with their white sun symbol in the nation’s flag. Much of it felt like just hammering the point that freedom of speech and thought are essential elements of modern Taiwan and human dignity, an implicit but very clear reproach to their cousins across the strait. Everything around this place is the subject of ongoing political battles between Taiwan’s two political coalitions, the progressive Greens and the conservative Blues;* the name of the memorial was even changed away from “Chiang Kai-Shek” to “National Taiwan Democracy” and back again, and only last year the Greens took armed guards away from the memorial.
For a tonally much lighter afternoon, we had thought about the viewing platform atop the gigantic Taipei 101 skyscraper, but the precise ticket we wanted (having decided too late to book it in advance online) had already sold out, so we booked it for the following day and instead got a bus south to Maokong Gondola. This is a fantastically long cableway (with two intermediate stations!!!) going up into the tea estates south of Taipei, and comes with an optional glass-bottomed “crystal cabin” to look down at said estates (which wasn’t, it turned out, very interesting.) The weather had finally cleared after several days of hammering rain, and we got actual sunlight coming down on the zoo, the jungle below, the chimney of a nearby waste incinerator painted with a huge cartoon giraffe. On a passing hilltop, a multi-tier mobile mast stood like a latter-day pagoda. The city mostly fell away, but the top few tiers of Taipei 101 were almost always visible.
70% of Maokong’s gimmick is tea, and after an inadvisably large lunch of tea fried rice, smoked tea chicken, oyster mushrooms in tea sauce, buns and (shockingly) tea, we still managed room for tea-flavoured ice creams (with a green tea cat biscuit; the other 30% of its gimmick is cats***) and a walk downhill to enjoy some tea plantations at close range. We got back onto the cable car and descended, stopping for a turn around the Lingxiao Palace (part of the huge Zhinan temple complex); dusk was turning the hazy Taipei skyline orange, and the place was quiet apart from a handful of sightseers taking lots of Instagram selfies, its grounds full of prowling or snoozing cats, including one posing perfectly with a statue. We shared the last segment of cableway (and some of the metro trip home) with a friendly Japanese lady on holiday, and promised to help her out if she ever came to London.
Taiwan 2025
Jiufen and Houtong / Taipei Museums / Taroko Gorge / National Palace, Lungshan Temple / A Brief Interlude on the History of Taiwan / CKS Memorial and Maokong / Dihua Street, Taipei 101 / Anping District and Forts of Tainan / Tainan History / Fenqihu / Alishan
* Sun Yat-Sen is held in equal esteem either side of the Taiwan Strait as the symbolic father of modern China. On both sides this seems to be less about what he actually did, more because Mao and Chiang bigged him up to enhance their own legitimacy as his successors. I frankly know little about SYS other than Jung Chang’s portrayal of a ruthless, reckless thug who constantly sold his rivals out to everyone (including the Japanese!) with no interests besides self-aggrandisement. I don’t really trust this (extremely partial) portrayal,**** but partly due to the aura of vague you-should-know-this-already nationalist Veneration around him, did not encounter any facts contradicting it in Taiwan.
** The Green coalition, led by the Democratic People’s Party, are philosophically stridently pro-independence (although not actually doing anything about it). The Blues, led by the KMT, publicly repeat the spectacularly delusional claim that they are the legitimate government of both Taiwan and mainland China (but again aren’t really doing much about it). There are, for fairly obvious reasons, no Reds.
*** “Mao” means cat; it’s likely that this actually referred to civet cats, but the locals don’t care and have cat related art everywhere, much like Houtong.
**** I did enjoy this book but it has some gigantic blind spots, including the same “meh, everyone did it” attitude to corruption which destroyed the KMT and an astonishingly rose-tinted view of a violent period of chaotic state failure and banditry, possible only because what came before was medieval autocracy and what came after was the apocalypse.