Wang Dong hasn’t worked for months and doesn’t plan to, whiling away his days at a lakeside town as one of a growing number of young Chinese “retiring” in the countryside.Extended breaks from work were long unheard of in China, with its fiercely competitive office culture and where officials vaunt t
Books that attempt to explain Taiwan in an accessible manner have proliferated in recent years. This can be traced to Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taipei and China’s belligerent reaction, increasing the attention paid to Taiwan in international media and efforts to explain the country’s peculiar sta
Cool showers and less coffee or alcohol: sleep quality is being harmed by hotter temperatures caused by climate change, and scientists say we need to learn how to adapt.The human brain is very sensitive to heat, with higher temperatures raising the body’s central thermostat and activating stress sys
A Chinese military blockade of Taiwan ignites panic across the self-ruled island as banks shut down, families flee, fake news spreads and Taiwanese troops brace for attack.The on-screen chaos is the basis of a new Taiwanese television series called Zero Day (零日攻擊), which creators hope will “awaken”
Holding an oversized carrot, a brawny, shirtless man promotes a supplement he claims can enlarge male genitalia — one of countless AI-generated videos on TikTok peddling unproven sexual treatments.The rise of generative AI has made it easy — and financially lucrative — to mass-produce such videos wi
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown.From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qin
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province.“Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festi
May 11 to May 18The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station.During construction on the third-generation stat
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his adminis
On the second floor of the Keelung Museum of Art a collection of black-and-white photographs seeks to highlight the city’s layers, from its natural environment to its people. The exhibition, 26 Seconds of Sun, consists of images taken by Olivier Marceny, a French-born photographer who is based in no
Though the total area of Penghu isn’t that large, exploring all of it — including its numerous outlying islands — could easily take a couple of weeks. The most remote township accessible by road from Magong City (馬公市) is Siyu (西嶼鄉), and this place alone deserves at least two days to fully appreciate
This weekend, Huashan 1914 Creative Park plays hosts to a joint art exhibition “Voices 2025 x Photo ONE’25.” The Taipei Times was invited on Wednesday to see the artists and exhibitors set up tables, art installations, hang picture frames and prepare for what organizers hope will be a popular event
It can be a painful thing, acknowledging that our heroes are both human and flawed, but Ezra Edelman spent five years doing just that. The film-maker behind 2016’s sprawling, Oscar-winning OJ: Made in America, was at work for Netflix on what, by all accounts, would have been the definitive Prince do
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking re
Visitors mill around a bright red hilltop pagoda in southwestern China, gazing down at a sprawling cigarette factory whose deadly output has put an otherwise unremarkable city on the map.China is home to a third of the world’s smokers and tobacco-related diseases are a major cause of death in the co
The excellent historical novel by Chen Yao-Cheng (陳耀昌) is a gripping tale of Taiwan in the 17th century, called Formosa at the time, told from the perspective of characters representing the three major ethnic groups (the “tribes” mentioned in the title): the indigenous community, the Dutch and the C
One hundred and thirty-three cardinals are sequestering themselves behind the Vatican’s medieval walls for the start of a conclave yesterday to elect a successor to Pope Francis. Here are some things to know about the election of the 267th pontiff of the Catholic Church, which has 1.4 billion faithf
Like many hashtags, #NoMowMay is both an inspiration and an oversimplification. In the UK — where the movement started — and in those parts of North America where it’s caught on, #NoMowMay urges nature-conscious people to let patches of grass under their control grow wild, so that bees, butterflies
Do whales make you horny? How about UFOs? Maybe you’ve always dreamed of having a tryst in a fairytale castle, or making love inside a gigantic biscuit tin? Whatever your weird fantasy may be, it can probably be catered for on a roadside somewhere in Japan, if a new book on the curious phenomenon of
RSS