When Becky Liu (劉樾) visited the Plum Pavillion (梅亭) in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投), it reminded her of her great-grandfather, who, like the pavilion’s former resident, former Control Yuan president Yu You-jen (于右任), was an expert calligrapher.
“Through this connection, I can tell [tourists] about calligraphy in our culture and what it represents,” she says.
This is one of the personal experiences that local tour guides will relate during Sunday’s Beitou, Hundred Years a day walking tour, organized by Like It Formosa (來去福爾摩沙), formed by a group of twenty-something locals dedicated to a variety of walking tours all conducted in English.
Photo courtesy of Like It Formosa
“We want our guides to not read from a book but to incorporate their personal experiences and serve as storytellers and performers,” says founding member Julia Kao (高于晴). “We want to present to foreigners the perspective of local young people.”
She adds that visitors have joined the same tour multiple times just to hear different tour guides share their experiences.
Formed early last year, Like It Formosa started out last September and October with two pay-as-you-want weekly walking tours of Taipei — a historic one every Thursday that takes people through the old Taipei neighborhoods on the western end, and a modern one every Sunday that shuffles through the bustling East and Xinyi districts from Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall to 44 South Village (四四南).
They launched their first paid tour in November — an LGBT Taipei one that took visitors to locations such as an LGBT bookstore and Rainbow Sauna (彩虹會館), a 24-hour gay establishment. Sunday’s Beitou tour is their first time taking people to northern Taipei, and they have more tours planned for later this year.
These young Taiwanese aren’t just looking to show foreigners what Taiwan is about. They say it’s also a self-exploration of what it means to be Taiwanese, which is a question local students especially struggle with when asked to present their culture while studying overseas.
“When I went on the tours myself, I felt pretty impacted,” Kao says. “To locals, it’s a chance to get to know Taiwan all over again.”
“When we pass by the Presidential Palace, we can discuss the protests and democracy in Taiwan,” Liu adds. “In Ximen, we can talk about Japanese influence on the city. Through exchanges with tourists, we can in turn ponder deeper questions about where we live.”
Water management is one of the most powerful forces shaping modern Taiwan’s landscapes and politics. Many of Taiwan’s township and county boundaries are defined by watersheds. The current course of the mighty Jhuoshuei River (濁水溪) was largely established by Japanese embankment building during the 1918-1923 period. Taoyuan is dotted with ponds constructed by settlers from China during the Qing period. Countless local civic actions have been driven by opposition to water projects. Last week something like 2,600mm of rain fell on southern Taiwan in seven days, peaking at over 2,800mm in Duona (多納) in Kaohsiung’s Maolin District (茂林), according to
It’s Aug. 8, Father’s Day in Taiwan. I asked a Chinese chatbot a simple question: “How is Father’s Day celebrated in Taiwan and China?” The answer was as ideological as it was unexpected. The AI said Taiwan is “a region” (地區) and “a province of China” (中國的省份). It then adopted the collective pronoun “we” to praise the holiday in the voice of the “Chinese government,” saying Father’s Day aligns with “core socialist values” of the “Chinese nation.” The chatbot was DeepSeek, the fastest growing app ever to reach 100 million users (in seven days!) and one of the world’s most advanced and
The latest edition of the Japan-Taiwan Fruit Festival took place in Kaohsiung on July 26 and 27. During the weekend, the dockside in front of the iconic Music Center was full of food stalls, and a stage welcomed performers. After the French-themed festival earlier in the summer, this is another example of Kaohsiung’s efforts to make the city more international. The event was originally initiated by the Japan-Taiwan Exchange Association in 2022. The goal was “to commemorate [the association’s] 50th anniversary and further strengthen the longstanding friendship between Japan and Taiwan,” says Kaohsiung Director-General of International Affairs Chang Yen-ching (張硯卿). “The first two editions
It was Christmas Eve 2024 and 19-year-old Chloe Cheung was lying in bed at home in Leeds when she found out the Chinese authorities had put a bounty on her head. As she scrolled through Instagram looking at festive songs, a stream of messages from old school friends started coming into her phone. Look at the news, they told her. Media outlets across east Asia were reporting that Cheung, who had just finished her A-levels, had been declared a threat to national security by officials in Hong Kong. There was an offer of HK$1m (NT$3.81 million) to anyone who could assist
RSS