Asia > Taiwan > Taipei > Taipei City > Articles > Taipei - wish you weren’t here

Out of the Pandora’s workbox of handy travel cliches, writers are fond of grabbing a familiar line. “This or That City,” they will tell us, “offers a surprising array of...” and then they will go on to mention restaurants or museums or mink pelt shops or tiddlywinks games centres and never ‘a surprising array’ of whore houses.

It occurred to me on my first visit there that those writers would be seriously stumped by Taipei.

That city ‘offers’ nothing at all to visitors. It is far too busy making things. Anyway, there aren’t many visitors. Worse still, there is a surprising array of whore houses. At least there used to be, until the new mayor of the city closed scores of previously licensed brothels. Other great cities didn’t license prostitution, so why should Taipei, he demanded, overlooking the quiet truth that many other cities would give half a year’s taxes to have a neat brothel licensing system in place.

This also leads to there being even fewer visitors. Japanese males were deeply convenienced by the licensed brothels and do not come to Taipei to turn over stones.

Taipei does not care. From its early days as the capital of the Kuomintang Republic of China, it has become used to being the Gorgon of Asian cities. One look at it and one is turned into a grey block of four-storey concrete. This is no longer quite fair, but it takes a day or so before one realizes it. Coming in through the northwest, across the Tanshui river, from Chiang Kai Shek International, I passed vibrant scrap-metal yards and busy vehicle workshops blasted by battery acid. The freeway mesh suggested East Los Angeles with oriental characteristics. On a small hillock above it sat the Grand Hotel, the town’s five star ethnic hostelry. Floors of dragon’s head trim topped by a pagoda roof suggesting that an Aberdeen floating restaurant had become spectacularly grounded.

Down the push and shove traffic of Sungchiang Road and behind, through the Chungshan district, I felt myself in a place that seemed an interesting cross breed between Guangzhou [old name: Canton] and Tokyo. Street level shop strips are colonnaded across wide pavements, a civilized consideration in a land of hard suns and frequent rains. There are attempts at boulevardism. Muck-grimed willow trees stand stoically along the kerbs. Following Tokyo and Seoul, building fascias are of small bathroom tiles in whites, oranges, yellows and greens.

The uncovered sections of the double pavements serve as fait accompli parking for the town’s million motor scooters, foolish little contraptions looking as if they belong in an episode of ‘The Jetsons,’ and driven with the casual fatalism that usually goes with two wheels. Taiwanese hope that a crisper public transport system will make them redundant. Certainly taxis won’t do the job. There are already plenty of those cramped saloons at Hong Kong prices, the drivers of which understand no English and create lanes of their own in a hurry.

One of Taipei’s few urban conceits is that it fancies it has a traffic problem. In fact the streets are wide with a bump and rumble that tells of fast and furious resurfacings. The freeways are expanding usefully. The 272 bus from The Sun Yat Sen Memorial to Chunghua Road took me across the heart of the city centre in 30 minutes on a Saturday afternoon. One problem is the arrogant double-parking of delivery truck drivers which is leading to an interesting new phenomenon, described by ‘The China News’ on 29 March as ‘Kerb Rage’.

In many ways, Taipei is an unselfconscious, provincial Chinese city which makes things and money. Behind the wide boulevards, along the smaller streets and down the snug and chatty alleys, mixed with the houses and the small hotels are the small factories; low storey concrete affairs with verdigris windows. Metal pipes make right angles over their outer walls. Tin steam shafts climb the sides to small chimney-stacks with dinky tin caps.

Taipei is a young keen city with a smudge on its face and dust on its shoes. It is heyday Manchester or Pittsburgh with newer, smaller Chinese bones. The older section to the south and the west of Chungshiao Road, past the gruesomely dated ‘modern’ railway station and down to the Majestic Theatre traffic circle, is a pungent, ramshackle racket. The shoddy slew of small businesses has been hastily bricked onto the old without much of an attempt to tidy the mess or hide the join. There are colonnaded streets of flaky paint and eclectic shopping: T-shirts, jewellery, shoes, herbs, cakes and spices. Crowds, penned in by regiments of parked scooters, spill over intersections.

There are sudden bursts of street market. Half way down a block of shops on Chengtu Road hides the remarkable and uncelebrated Tien Ho Temple, a cathedral of Gothic black wood where old men and old tarts pray busily for the return of old loves long gone over the seas. Over the street but quite beyond me is ‘The Windsor Tea Rooms’. They even have fake Jacobean window frames.

Tour guides will describe the city as being split into North and South by the Chungshiao Road. This axis does not match current truths. The divide is between East and West. The old city sits to the West, close to its origins and the river. There lie the Confucian and Lunshun temples and the markets, and also the government quarter with admonishing brick buildings from the Japanese colonial era and the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial, a truly massive Baked Alaska with a pagoda hat.

The centre of the city has moved eastward to the tinted glass high-rises and frantically occidental eateries of the Sungshan financial district; to the department stores and boutiques of the Dinghao area; to the hip coffee shops, bars and bookshops around the university in Ta-an.

The new north/south axis is Tinhua Road, a wide boulevard, with a central divider of clipped grass. It is the territory of expensive boutiques and motor car showrooms. On it, by a massive but oddly unchristened traffic circle, is a large academic and literary bookshop merrily mixing English and Chinese titles and seemingly packed with every person over 16 in Taipei who can read.

Roaring across it to the north is Chungsha East Road, a heaving shopping strip of popular department stores and brand-name shopping, unfortunately at Hong Kong prices. At the cross with Yenchi Street, an inaugural Starbucks is unwrapping itself. This is the side of the city that demonstrates Taipei has earned its right of passage to join the other slick Asian capitals. It is still an ugly duckling because it has almost no architecture from times past when men of rank cared for aesthetics. Today it is on a par with its Asian contemporaries. Which of them lately has developed for looks?

In some ways, Taipei is still a frontier. For the uninformed, finding a meal that is of value, indeed that is edible, can be as precarious a roll-a-penny. Western food is particularly expensive and unreliable. Taipei being a ‘hardship posting’, the Americans bring their comfort food chain restaurants with them. They are usually an ersatz version. In the T.G.I. Friday restaurant in Dinghao, the ‘Boston’ burger with yeastless buns I was eating would not sell for US$6.50 in Boston for very long without a whole new ‘Tea Party’ incident. In an empty ‘Trader Vick’s’ in Dinghao, at 1.30pm on Sunday, a message came through from the chef asking us to hurry up with the order because he wanted to go home.

There seem to be few Chinese restaurants of distinction in Taipei. Eating out may not have caught on so thoroughly with the locals as it has in Hong Kong. Maybe they have homes to go to? I had one very happy Northern cum Schezuan [Sichuan] meal at a tastefully minimalist restaurant called ‘Human’ on Chenkuo South Road, just a couple of blocks north of Hsyini Road and the Flower Market. (For flavour, it’s under a fly-over). One may hear keen talk of the ‘Indian’ restaurant on Pateh Road. It is three floors of psychiatrically disturbed dining, designed around simulated skeletons of dinosaurs. Don’t eat. Just drink. GO drunk. Most of the patrons are. I ate looking up the skeletal behind of a pterodactyl. The mutton I was eating looked as though it had just fallen off the bird, and tasted so.

There is plenty of nightlife as long as one is happy for it to centre around bars. The newer ones are to be found in the financial district and Dinghao. Tu Cafe, the Malibu and Q Bar are persistently popular. The really cool spots are found near the Normal University in the south east which has a fair density of student pubs, more upscale bars and dance clubs. I kept hearing that jazz fanciers found themselves a good night at ‘Brown Sugar’ and the ‘Blue Note’.

The traditional, more mild mannered version of Patpong is what the US forces once called ‘The Combat Zone’: a mix of girlie and legitimate bars and eateries in a grid of small streets behind the Imperial Intercontinental Hotel around Shuang Cheng Street. They have ‘My Place,’ ‘Hollywood Baby,’ ‘Charlie Brown,’ and ‘LAPD.’ There is even a big gay bar and dance floor, ‘Genesis,’ in the mix. Still, from what I could see, peace was declared in ‘The Zone’ long ago.

As for hotels, the government allowed them to be built again in the 1970’s and now there are too many. The Imperial is cozy and convenient for businessmen. The Sherwood is a rich cluster of antiques - and probably the best. The Far Eastern Plaza is new, hip and swanky. The Regent is full of flavour, but not as glamorous as its sisters. The Hilton is reliable and functional and hideously placed opposite the train station. The Ritz is very like a boutique and in the process of becoming more so. I am advised by those who know that it might be best to mention no others.

Whereas one is more likely to go to Italy without the Italians and Java without the Javanese,

“Taiwan is nothing without the Taiwanese,” thought Martin, a teacher of English and drama who travelled with me to Hong Kong. “They are very friendly and relaxed. They are the Sicilians of China.”

I think he was referring to the unfolding of staggering corruption at government and army staff levels. That they are kind and courteous to foreigners is both true and a source of amazement to those flying in from the Pearl Delta. I was lost looking for my hotel. A middle aged scooter man fell out of the usual traffic surge at a light to ask me my problem and direct me on my way. Moments later he was booked by a policeman for not having surged when he should.

Sitting one evening in a long bar created from old Japanese colonial residence just up the road from ‘Human’ restaurant, Dr. Bret Hinsch, an American academic and teacher in a southern Taiwan university, told me that expatriate residents often argue amongst themselves as to what it is that makes the Taiwanese so unusually relaxed and informal amongst Chinese. He has his own theory.

When the Kuomintang lost main land China, they regretted the chasms of class and wealth in the old order. Taiwan became a deliberate exercise in egalitarianism. Every man was as good as his neighbour. Snobbery and conspicuous display were frowned upon.

“Earlier, The Grand Hotel used to require a jacket and tie for admission. Then, one day, the President of the Republic showed up in an open necked white shirt, and that was that.”

Taipei may not have a lot to show, but what does have is genuine.

“There is nothing fake or ‘neo’ set up for tourists here because we have so few. Everything you do see is for the daily lives of the Taiwanese,” said Hinsch. The countryside is startlingly beautiful, especially along the East Coast and since most tourists are locals, there can be nothing ‘cod’ laid on there either.

Taipei itself is not for the idling vacationer. Yet, for the business-visitor with time on his hands, or the plain curious who want to get a different handle on ‘Chineseness,’ there is a particular strain of China, just getting on with its business.

I would not get on an aeroplane solely for Taipei’s temples or street markets. I would do it to get a sense of another China. If I had an interest in Imperial Chinese art and history and had not seen the mass of treasures evacuated from The Forbidden City by the Nationalists now on display in The National Palace Museum, I would be booking an early ticket for that, and that alone. Otherwise, kindly don’t go there in any numbers and make those laid back Taiwanese feel that they must lay on lion dances and anti-Manchu resistance tableaux and, remember, it all costs as much as Hong Kong.

Articles

• More from Stuart Wolfendale