The Wufenpu Garment Wholesale Area, as the popular clothing market opposite Taipei's Songshan train station is called, is a place that solves many of Taiwan's fashion mysteries in one fell swoop.
It's here in this semi-open-air market -- semi, because the goods spill out of the stores and onto the sidewalks and into the alleys -- where over 100 outlets supply a significant portion of the wardrobes favored by Taiwanese of all ages and fashion persuasions. And they do a brisk trade, with some stores selling by weight instead of item count, though single purchases of items are usually welcome.
Stores tend to specialize in specific fashion niches, such as trendy teeny-bopper gear, extra-large sizes, pet fashions, qipaos and pseudo-ethnic wear. Whatever their different specialties, they share a price range at the lowest end of the scale for clothes in Taipei.
PHOTO: MAX WOODWORTH, TAIPEI TIMES
"It's a race here to the bottom, price-wise," said one storeowner surnamed Chen (
Which is perhaps why Wufenpu has become a term that, when evoked in description of someone's fashion-sense, is intended to carry the sting of an accusation of poor taste and quality.
Popular actress Hsiao Shu-shen (
But despite the sneering aimed at the supposedly chintzy goods flooding out of Wufenpu, many people wandering the smart areas of Taipei are actually decked out in Wufenpu clothes and are making a fairly convincing show of having paid top dollar for their faux retro Mickey Mouse T-shirt or their sexy velour halter top. (Then again, some may have actually paid top dollar in East District boutiques for the clothes, but they would be suckers.)
It turns out that a lot of East District yuppies and hipsters, as well as teenagers mimicking pop star Jolin Tsai's (
But don't be fooled. The T-shirt with a Mary icon print and the words "Mary is my home girl" can be found at the market for about NT$200.
So before dropping a wad of cash for a DJ Guevara T-shirt or for an allegedly Nepalese skirt in front of the Dunhua South Road Eslite bookstore, savvy shoppers will make the trek to Wufenpu to pick them up for about NT$200 each.
Wufenpu is at its busiest on Mondays, as vendors from all parts of Taiwan come to stock up on goods that are later sold at night markets and stores. Using rapidly flashed hand signals, vendors haggle over prices for enormous bundles of clothes, which are then transported out of the narrow alleys behind scooters specially rigged with carts to the train station or to waiting courier trucks. From there, the clothes fan out around the city and the rest of Taiwan.
How the clothes reach Wufenpu, however, is a matter of considerable debate. The typical claim from vendors at the market for the provenance of their clothes is that they come from Hong Kong, Thailand and Japan. One vendor, however, confided that most of the products, in fact, were made in Taiwan.
Either way, the sheer volume of knock-off goods provides ample reason to question how forthright the stores are about their products. But judging from the number of customers, no one seems to dwell on the point.
The market fulfills a huge range of fashion demands for all ages and that's good enough for most. And with its low prices, the market guarantees that the winds of fashion can change quickly without leaving everyone in the dust.
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
Apr. 13 to Apr. 19 From 17th-century royalty and Presbyterian missionaries to White Terror victims, cultural figures and industrialists, Nanshan Public Cemetery (南山公墓) sprawls across 95 hectares, guarding four centuries of Taiwan’s history. Current estimates show more than 60,000 graves, the earliest dating to 1642. Besides individual tombs, there are also hundreds of family plots, one of which is said to contain around 1,000 remains. As the cemetery occupies valuable land in the heart of Tainan, the government in 2018 began asking families to relocate the graves to make way for development. That
RSS