T irelessly cutting the air with a large Chen Shui-bian flag in the pre-dawn hours of Saturday morning, Wang Cheng-kuang stood alone on the darkened corner of Jenai and Anho roads in downtown Taipei.
He wore a headband and his thick, wire-framed glasses had slid down his sweating face and come to rest at the tip of his nose.
"Gimmie five!" he yelled out at the trickle of passing motorists on the otherwise silent street.
Wang, unwilling to wait, was getting an early start on Election Day 2000 in Taiwan, but in a few more hours, the whole of Taiwan joined him to make their voices heard.
And turn out in force they did, with more than 80 percent of the nation's voters casting ballots and pushing DPP opposition candidate Chen Shui-bian to victory.
"We've waited 400 years for this, and we finally have our first true president!" screamed a lone woman to anyone who would listen at the joyous post-election celebration outside of Chen's Taipei headquarters.
"We are Taiwanese! We have our first president!" she screamed again before wandering off into the gathering pandemonium of air horns, flags and fireworks.
Over nearby loudspeakers, an anonymous voice blared, "The people of Taiwan have spoken, and we have realized our dream!"
EARLIER THAT DAY
But the outcome of the election was far from certain throughout the day as people flocked to the polls to support their favorite candidates in record numbers. By mid-morning the Sungshan Train Station in eastern Taipei was struggling to keep up with the wave of passengers trying to get home, where they were registered to vote.
"We knew it would be busy," said a ticket seller surnamed Zheng. "But I think it's been crazier than we expected."
The story was much the same throughout the day at Sungshan Airport in Taipei where ticket counters were practically overrun with passengers trying, at the last minute, to catch planes back home.
Huang Tai-ling, a young man waiting for his plane said, "I don't mind having to go home one bit. I'm just happy to have a chance to vote for A-bian because I love him so much."
Later a large platoon of soldiers began congregating quietly in the airport terminal.
"We're going to Kinmen," said a young soldier who was sitting with a few members of his unit. The soldiers milled about quietly, some making phone calls, some eating fast food and some just sitting, heads buried in their arms, nervous. But not all of the soldiers were apprehensive about their posting on Kinmen so close to the election deadline.
"Am I nervous?" said a soldier named Hsiao Hei in response to a reporter's question, a cigarette dangling from his lips.
"Lemme put it to you this way," he said, a smile breaking across his face. "I just voted for Chen Shui-bian."
At the Sungshan High School's polling station, Yeh Chin-hsiung sat in a classroom under the watchful gaze of a Sun Yat-sen portrait, taking in the scene around him in his capacity as an election observer.
"It's been like this all day," he said. "There has been a constant stream of people since the polls opened at eight this morning, but, basically, things have gone without a hitch."
With that, an elderly couple, a man in a wheelchair pushed by his wife, passed by. It only took them a few short minutes to fill out ballots and drop them in the white box in front of Yeh.
"Did you do it?" the man asked his wife, reaching for her hand on their way out of the polling room.
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