You can pluck as many mushrooms as you like in Puli nowadays. Traditional mushroom-growing farms there are turning themselves into recreational theme parks, with the emphasis on do-it-yourself, from picking them by hand to cooking them in microwave ovens.
To double your fun, Rich Year Farm offers classes to group visitors on how to prepare "outer-space bags" -- small packs of earth and nutrients that you can take home and use to grow your own mushrooms.
Nearly every farm has its own specialty dishes featuring different kinds of mushrooms. One that wins over all visitors at Rich Year Farm is prepared with oyster mushrooms, which release a butter-like flavor when they are baked in an oven or lightly sauteed.
Mushroom sashimi is one of the most unusual, yet popular, dishes at the Lu-Yao Mushroom Garden (
The nearby Herb Villa (香草叢林農莊) is a marvelous-looking restaurant with a relaxing atmosphere. It has a magnificent view overlooking Nankang Stream (南港溪), a valley and a herb garden on the hill. Restaurant owner Lin Kuo-tai (林國泰), who is in his 20s, majored in home gardening and built the garden restaurant all by himself. He is proud of his mushroom dishes and his hors d'oeuvre -- baked Chinese mushrooms with a rosemary-and-cheese topping -- is exceptional.
Before you race down to Nantou to sample for yourselves the best mushrooms Taiwan has to offer, do make an appointment. Most farms provide a lunch service only.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby