China’s ‘hog hotels’

China is taking hog biosecurity to new levels — 13 stories in fact. That’s the height of a building in southern China where more than 10,000 pigs are kept in a condominium-style complex, complete with restricted access, security cameras, in-house veterinary services and carefully prepared meals. The seemingly luxurious conditions represent a state-of-the-art approach to biosecurity in which pigs — the main source of meat in China — are shielded from viruses, including the devastating African swine fever that wiped out half the nation’s hogs in the two years before the coronavirus pandemic emerged. Nicknamed “hog hotels,” these gigantic vertical farms are being built by companies, including Muyuan Foods and New Hope Group, emulating the strict controls major suppliers in other countries have used to prevent outbreaks of the devastating disease. China is copying best-practices from Europe and the US to close its biosecurity gap, said Rupert Claxton, the UK-based meat director at consultant Gira, who has been providing advice to farmers and businesses for two decades. “In 20 years, it’s done what the Americans took probably 100 years to do,” he said. Lethal African swine fever, which sickens pigs much like Ebola kills humans, caused a dramatic outbreak in China in 2018. Within a year, roughly half the nation’s herd of more than 400 million pigs had been wiped out — more than the entire annual output of the US and Brazil combined — leading to rocketing prices and unprecedented imports. TOP PRIORITY Food security became a top priority, and as inflation surged to the highest in eight years, the government had to turn to emergency sources of frozen meat to cool prices. New agriculture policies were instituted to accelerate a shift to large-scale, industrial operations over backyard farms that have traditionally fattened pigs on raw kitchen scraps and swill — the main sources of African

Notes from central Taiwan: Southern Taiwan AmCham keeps it local

Last week I was welcomed by Kaohsiung, a city of lower prices, warmer climate, friendly people and slower pace of life. These traits were brought into sharper focus thanks to a dinner chat with the kind people of the American Chamber of Commerce of Southern Taiwan. Readers may recall that Chinese firm Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group Co (上海復星醫藥集團) demanded that the Taiwanese government hand over the health data of anyone vaccinated with its vaccines. A chamber member told me that a Chinese executive in Johnson & Johnson inserted the same demand in its contract. Of course the Taiwanese government had to refuse. Yes, there was an effort, coordinated from Beijing, in part using Chinese executives in western firms, to stop Taiwan from acquiring vaccines. This episode illuminates who those executives answer to. It should be obvious that Beijing not only can coordinate their actions, but that any information about the firm such an executive has access to, Beijing already has. FUTURE PLANS Brian Aiello, President of Southern Taiwan AmCham, spoke to me at length about AmCham’s programs and plans, as well as the problems Kaohsiung faces. The Taipei Chamber, he observes, is more focused on the national level. The southern chamber, by contrast, is resolutely local. Kaohsiung, he said, has a lower level of internationalization than Taipei or Taichung. “In Taiwan,” he said, “there are many traditions that still hold strong. This is sometimes inhibiting.” Businesses in southern Taiwan often create products and then focus narrowly on one market, when there might be a number of other applications for them. Another problem Kaohsiung faces is that it is viewed as a poor destination for young talent. He said that AmCham is attempting to attack this problem via internship programs. One concern is that, compared to other major cities, Kaohsiung has a lower

By Michael Turton

Angst over expats forces political debate

Singapore’s success as a financial hub has long been tied to its openness to global talent. But as the city-state battles to recover from its worst recession, a backlash in some quarters against overseas workers has again forced its way up the political agenda. Opposition politicians are stepping up scrutiny of jobs taken up by expats, as this perennial debate about Singapore’s reliance on foreign labor sharpens. Some 70 percent of residents called for strict limits on the number of foreigners coming into the country, according to a survey by the Institute of Policy Studies released earlier this year, even as ministers have recently tried to drive home the importance of attracting talent. More debate in parliament is expected in the coming months. “We have about four to five local universities that produce so many graduates every year. Things aren’t like 60 years ago,” said Kian Peng, a freelance photographer. “Is the government sure that we still need so many foreign PMEs?” he said, using a common abbreviation for white-collar workers including professionals, managers and executives. For many foreign companies, Singapore’s low taxes and modern infrastructure make it one of the most attractive places in Asia to do business — particularly as Hong Kong gets caught in the crossfire of US-China tensions. But Singapore’s growing angst about foreign workers, an issue that’s particularly heated in the local press and social media, is putting the government under pressure to explain its approach and could complicate hiring decisions, right as the country is trying to stoke post-pandemic growth. In response to the backlash, two top ministers issued statements in parliament this month, defending the government’s balancing act of promoting local jobs while ensuring international talent can help the economy thrive. “We must not inadvertently shake the bedrock that has enabled Singapore to succeed,” Health Minister Ong Ye

From grey to green: world cities uprooting the urban jungle

From lettuce farmed on New York’s skyline to thick corridors of trees occupying once desolate Colombian roadsides, green initiatives are running wild in cities around the world. At a time when coronavirus lockdowns have amplified the need for nature in urban areas, AFP has gathered images and footage of projects optimizing precious city space. Replanting initiatives have sprouted up since the start of the 21st century as urban development goals have shifted and alarm about global warming has grown. And they’ve had an impact. In nine cities throughout the globe, thanks to planting schemes on walls and roofs, the temperature during the warmest month in so-called street canyons — flanked by high-rise buildings on either side — can be reduced by 3.6 to 11.3 degrees Celsius at the hottest time of day, according to a report by the French Agency for Ecological Transition. Green spaces have also been shown to improve health and wellbeing, including by reducing stress, anxiety and depression, improving attention and focus, better physical health and managing post-traumatic stress disorder, said Stephanie Merchant of Bath University’s department for health. “However, it’s about where they are created in relation to the needs of the local communities,” she added. So, are all urban replanting projects worthwhile? For a scheme to be seen as “virtuous,” it must fulfill as many functions as possible, economist and urban planner Jean Haentjens, who co-authored the book Eco-urbanisme (“Eco-Urbanism”), said. In addition to lowering the temperature, he said it should also preserve biodiversity, improve wellbeing, raise awareness, be appealing to residents and suitable for its social context. SINGAPORE’S OTHERWORLDY GARDEN The imposing “forest” of giant manmade trees constructed from reinforced concrete and steel, luxuriantly covered in real flora and fauna, is a Singapore landmark. Towering 25 to 50 meters over the city-state’s new business district, the 18 solar-powered supertrees light up the night sky, their

Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker on their Trump bestseller

History is written by the victors but Donald Trump being Donald Trump, he was never going to go quietly. So when the Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker requested an interview about the final year of his presidency, Trump invited them to the palatial Florida estate he used to call his “winter White House.” The conversation took place not in his private office at Mar-a-Lago but in its gaudy lobby as waiters assembled a buffet dinner including jumbo Gulf shrimp, oysters over ice and bananas foster. A model of Air Force One, painted in Trump’s unrealized redesign, perched on a coffee table. Club members — a Fox News host and Donald Trump Jr’s girlfriend among them — stopped to chat on their way to dinner. “Trump seemed to love the idea that he was being interviewed as theater,” Rucker recalls by phone. “He could show off to his club members that these fancy reporters from Washington had flown down just to hear what he had to say. And he enjoyed the interview. He talked to us for two and a half hours and then he invited us at the end to stick around for dinner and sent us to a table in the corner of the patio.” The upshot of this encounter in March, and private interviews with more than 140 sources, is I Alone Can Fix It, a follow-up to Pulitzer prize-winning Leonnig and Rucker’s bestseller A Very Stable Genius (both titles are direct Trump quotations loaded with irony). It is among a wave of books about Trump’s disastrous final year hitting shelves just six months after he left office. I Alone Can Fix It portrays a man who put himself before his country. It is packed with hair-raising revelations about the 45th president’s mishandling of everything from the coronavirus pandemic

By David Smith

Even in absence, North Korea’s presence felt at Tokyo Games

North Korea isn’t at the Tokyo Olympics this summer. And therein lies a tale — one of sports and viruses, but most of all a tale of complex politics. While it’s not making headlines here, the North’s absence is noteworthy, especially among those who watch the intersection of sports and diplomacy — and the way North Korea’s propaganda machine uses international attention to advance its needs. The no-show is especially striking when contrasted with the last Games. Perhaps the hottest story of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, was the North Korean delegation, which included 22 athletes, hundreds of cheerleaders and leader Kim Jong-un’s powerful sister. The coronavirus is the biggest reason for North Korea’s decision not to come to Tokyo. Always highly sensitive to communicable disease outbreaks, the nation has shut its borders even more tightly than normal, worried that its fragile health care system and rickety economy could not withstand a major outbreak. That, in turn, could imperil the ruling Kim family’s grip on power. But there are other things at work, too, according to analysts. North Korean sports, like much about the country, are intertwined with calculations about its pursuit of a nuclear-armed long-range missile program to target the US mainland. After a brief period of engagement, Kim Jong-un now fears the introduction of another virus — the cultural one from the wealthy South — and may be biding his time until next year’s Winter Games. Those take place in China, its longtime ally with which it shares a land border. Kim may have also decided there’s nothing to be gained by nuclear diplomacy at the Tokyo games, as Washington shows no intention of accepting Pyongyang’s demand to end sanctions. PROPAGANDA Neither do sports exist in a void inside the North, where domestic audiences consume messages controlled by the government every step

By Foster Klug

In ‘The Green Knight,’ an enchanting Arthurian dream

Why, for starters, is the Green Knight green? It’s a question that’s long vexed scholars of the 14th century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The movie, like the epic poem, is full of mysteries, most of them unspoken. But the knight’s unlikely color — Why isn’t he a more typical knightly blue? — is a question voiced by the characters of David Lowery’s adaptation, The Green Knight. He’s green, answers Dev Patel’s Sir Gawain, because it’s the shade of rot. The Green Knight, as seen in Lowery’s enchanting Arthurian dream, is an imposing tree of a man, with a wispy beard of twigs and a wooden mane whose movements rustle with the sound of bended, creaking branches. (He’s played by a much-costumed Ralph Ineson.) Early in The Green Knight, he rides on Christmas Day into King Arthur’s court, cloaked in shadow, and offers a game. Strike him wherever you want, and he will repay the same stroke a year hence at his Green Chapel. Gawain, freshly inspired by King Arthur to be ambitious after spending his days drinking and carousing, takes up the challenge and boldly chops off the knight’s head. The thrall of victory quickly turns ominous when the Green Knight stands, picks up his head and — with more menace than even an unwanted houseguest promising to return for the holidays — says he’ll see the young man next Christmas. The Green Knight is the color of nature and of death, which here are the same things. Lowery’s film, shot on misty Irish plains and dank forests, is earthy, with dirt under its nails, and blanketed in wintery fog. It’s both of the land and the ether, poised in a dreamy, mythical long ago. Gawain’s quest to visit the Green Knight a year later is a haunting journey into an

China’s crackdown on its biggest companies

With market-trembling new rules and investigations, Beijing’s crackdown on its most prominent companies has seeped into nearly every aspect of modern life, wiping billions of dollars from Chinese and Hong Kong-listed stocks and bamboozling investment sages. From after-school tutoring to music streaming apps, and shopping to bike-sharing, stellar firms have been hit as Beijing tightens the leash on corporations, citing national security and antitrust concerns. Whether motivated by the control reflexes of the Communist Party or to avoid market contortions hurting the pockets and safety of the Chinese public, few expect this to be the end of the crackdown. Here are some of the sectors caught in regulators’ jaws so far. FOOD DELIVERY Top food delivery app Meituan’s shares have fallen about 15 percent from Friday last week after regulators suddenly announced new worker protection rules this week. Employers in China’s booming food delivery sector, a lunchtime lifeline for millions of office workers, must now enforce minimum salary levels and “relax delivery time limits.” Meituan and rival Alibaba-owned Ele.me have come under fire in recent months after local media exposed the dangerous routes taken by drivers on tight delivery deadlines. Hong Kong-listed Meituan’s stocks had already taken a beating in April when regulators launched an antitrust probe of its lifestyle super-app, which also allows users to book entertainment, health and leisure services. EDUCATION Beijing also trotted out new rules on Saturday requiring tutoring companies to become non-profits and forbidding weekend classes, sending the valuations of private education stocks plunging. Analysts said the move made the companies virtually uninvestable. The government said the industry, worth US$260 billion in 2018 according to consultancy and research firm L.E.K. Consulting, had been “hijacked by capital.” The founders of New Oriental and Gaotu Techedu almost instantly lost their billionaire statuses after the rules were announced. Their fortunes were built by capitalizing on China’s hyper-competitive education system where

Hong Kong’s civil society ‘withers’ under national security purge

Hundreds of elected community leaders in Hong Kong have resigned and dozens of civil society groups have disbanded as China remoulds the finance hub in its own image. Just days before Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on the city last year, student Wong Yat-chin founded a new group called Student Politicism. He had just finished his exams and wanted to keep opposition voices alive in a city supposedly still guaranteed free speech by setting up small street booths to discuss issues such as democracy and prisoner rights. Since then he has been arrested five times for hosting booths or making speeches. “The red lines are being tightened each day,” the 20-year-old said. He added some venues have quietly urged his group not to turn up after one was questioned and reminded of anti-coronavirus rules by police recently, a tactic commonly used on the Chinese mainland. “Even the most peaceful and rational voices are not allowed. And there are so many groups disbanding themselves,” he lamented. Civil society, he said, is “ebbing and withering.” ‘PATRIOTS RULE HONG KONG’ China has used a double-blow knockout on dissent in Hong Kong after the city was convulsed by huge and often violent democracy protests two years ago. The first was the national security law with more than 120 arrests so far, almost entirely for political views. The other is an ongoing campaign dubbed “Patriots Rule Hong Kong,” where all public office holders and local politicians must be vetted for their loyalty. Most of the city’s prominent democracy leaders are either in jail, facing prosecution or have fled overseas. And a wave of resignations has swept through the city as community leaders try to avoid receiving a knock on the door from police. More than 250 district councilors have now quit ahead of the new political loyalty tests. District councils were the only elections in

By Su Xinqi

How do we know what’s a great athlete anymore?

A stack of Olympic and possibly world records will be broken on the Tokyo track over the next two weeks but, such has been the incredible impact of shoe technology on performance lately, that nobody quite knows what constitutes great any more. It used to be the case the world records on the road and track were edged down by fractions of a second, often untouched for years at a time, before the next generation shaved a couple of hundredths and were rightly feted. However, since the arrival of thick-soled, carbon-plated road shoes, and now their track spike equivalent, long-standing records set by the sport’s all-time greats are being obliterated, and then obliterated again, to leave historical comparisons difficult, if not impossible. Any lingering questions about how much difference Nike’s Alphafly shoes made disappeared in one weekend in October, 2019 when Eliud Kipchoge wore them to run the first, unofficial, sub-two hour marathon and fellow Kenyan Brigid Kosgei lopped four minutes off her personal best to break Paula Radcliffe’s 16-year-old women’s marathon record by over a minute. On the roads, 17 of the 20 fastest men’s marathon times in history have been set in the last five years and, coincidentally, it is the same case for women over the distance. Nobody had gone under 58 minutes for the half marathon until last December when four men did in the same race — with winner Kibiwott Kandie clocking an amazing 57 minutes 32 seconds in his Adidas Adios Pro carbon shoes. As that technology filtered into track spikes, Uganda’s Joshua Cheptegei destroyed the early 2000s world records of all-time-great Kenenisa Bekele in the 5,000m and 10,000m. Last month Dutchwoman Sifan Hassan took a huge 10 seconds off the 10,000m world record but even that giant leap lasted all of two days as Ethiopia’s Letesenbet Gidey beat it by

By Mitch Phillips

Booker prize reveals globe-spanning longlist of ‘engrossing stories’

Kazuo Ishiguro first won the Booker prize in 1989 for The Remains of the Day. Thirty-one years later, the British author has made the longlist for the £50,000 award with Klara and the Sun, his first novel since winning the Nobel prize in literature. Ishiguro’s story of an AF, or “artificial friend,” which is bought as a companion for a 14-year-old girl, is one of 13 novels in the running for this year’s Booker, the most prestigious books prize in the UK. The author, who has been shortlisted three times, was praised by judges for his “haunting narrative voice — a genuinely innocent, ego-less perspective on the strange behavior of humans obsessed and wounded by power, status and fear.” “It’s not just a novel about a technological future,” said judge Rowan Williams, the writer and former archbishop of Canterbury. “It is a novel about power, the nature of personality, about freedom and about love.” Ishiguro makes the cut alongside some heavyweight names, from Richard Powers, chosen for the yet-to-be-published Bewilderment, about a widowed astrobiologist trying to raise his nine-year-old son, to Rachel Cusk, longlisted for Second Place, in which a woman invites an artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives. Sally Rooney, who was nominated for the Booker for her 2018 novel Normal People, was overlooked by judges for her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, which is out in September. Judges also failed to longlist Don DeLillo’s short novel The Silence. “Most of us had one or two favored novels that really struck us, but we couldn’t persuade the others, or sometimes there was a novel where we thought this was a really really good, thoroughly satisfying novel, but does it quite break the new ground or change the horizon in the way we hope a Booker winner would?” said

By Alison Flood

Book review: ‘Borges and Me:’ a bumpy literary road trip

“That all those who knew him should write about him,” Borges wrote of the protagonist Ireneo Funes in his story Funes the Memorious, “seems to me a felicitous idea.” Certainly those who knew Borges, even in passing, thought it was a felicitous idea to write about him. Fifty years ago, it seemed that a trip to Buenos Aires wasn’t complete without a stopover at his sixth-floor Calle Maipu apartment, which he shared with his mother. Both Alberto Manguel and Paul Theroux have written about reading to the blind genius in his living room. VS Naipaul, in The Return of Eva Peron, found Borges to be “curiously colonial,” insulated from the violence and disorder in his country. When Mario Vargas Llosa visited in 1981, he noticed that Borges had kept his mother’s bedroom intact, with a lilac dress ready on the bed, even though she had died six years before. Jay Parini’s “encounter” happened far from Argentina. He claims to have met Borges in Scotland, while doing his PhD at St Andrews. Parini was close to the poet Alastair Reid, who lived nearby and wrote regularly for the New Yorker: Reid was also one of Borges’s English translators. During Borges’s visit in 1970, Reid was called away for a few days to London. Parini was asked to look after the guest, and the two of them apparently set out on an impromptu journey across the Highlands. Borges offered to bear all costs, while Parini was tasked with both driving and describing aloud everything he saw en route. “Description is revelation,” Borges told him. Borges even christened the car Rocinante and fancied their getaway as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on a Scottish literary pilgrimage. They stayed at the Crusoe hotel in Lower Largo, where Borges tasted a pint of Export — by stirring

By Abhrajyoti Chakraborty

Environmental Impact Assessment: Why cities matter to wildlife

The importance of biodiversity is well understood. A diverse biosphere is better able to provide ecosystem services, those tangible and intangible benefits that humans obtain from ecosystems. These include: foods that can be grown, gathered, hunted or trapped; plant pollination; useful materials such as timber and bamboo; clean air and water; the regulation of flooding and soil erosion; and non-material benefits such as recreation and cultural enrichment. The greatest biodiversity is found in certain places untouched by agriculture or industry. Urbanization is usually harmful for native animals, which suffer as their original habitats shrink and are fragmented. For this reason, nature-lovers in Taiwan — just like their counterparts elsewhere — often fetishize wildernesses, while ignoring the cities in which more than 80 percent of the country’s population lives. Such thinking shows an incomplete understanding of cities’ ecological functions, argue the authors of a paper published in the February issue of BioScience. CONSERVATION In “The Biological Deserts Fallacy: Cities in Their Landscapes Contribute More than We Think to Regional Biodiversity,” scientists affiliated with the San Francisco Estuary Institute assert that not only do many urban areas harbor greater biodiversity than even many specialists suspect, cities also have the potential to make important contributions to global biodiversity conservation as the impact of climate change on nature grows. Researchers in Australia have identified 39 species, among them plants, a type of tortoise and a kind of snail, that now cling to existence only in urban habitats. In an article posted by the Environmental Information Center (環境資訊中心, e-info.org.tw) late last year, Lee Yu-chin (李育琴) explains how tidiness can be an enemy of biodiversity. Lee writes that citizens expect neatly trimmed trees and the removal of dead leaves from parks, not knowing that “fallen leaves nourish microorganisms in the soil [and] seemingly useless deadwood is also home to insects and some

By Steven Crook

Only Tokyo could pull off these Games? Not everyone agrees

Staging an Olympics during the worst pandemic in a century? There’s a widespread perception that it couldn’t happen in a better place than Japan. A vibrant, open democracy with deep pockets, the host nation is known for its diligent execution of detail-laden, large-scale projects, its technological advances, its consensus-building and world-class infrastructure. All this, on paper, at least, gives the strong impression that Japan is one of the few places in the world that could even consider pulling off the high-stakes tightrope walk that the Tokyo Games represent. Some in Japan aren’t buying it. “No country should hold an Olympics during a pandemic to start with. And if you absolutely must, then a more authoritarian and high-tech China or Singapore would probably be able to control COVID better,” said Koichi Nakano, a politics professor at Sophia University in Tokyo. The bureaucratic, technological, logistical and political contortions required to execute this unprecedented feat — a massively complicated, deeply scrutinized spectacle during a time of global turmoil, death and suffering — have already put an unwelcome spotlight on the country. Most of all, it has highlighted some embarrassing things: that much of Japan doesn’t want the Games, that the nation’s vaccine rollout was late and is only now expanding and that many suspect the Games are being forced on the country because the International Olympic Committee needs the billions in media revenue. The worry here isn’t that Tokyo’s organizers can’t get to the finish line without a major disaster. That seems possible, and would allow organizers to claim victory, of a kind. The fear is that once the athletes and officials leave town, the nation that unwillingly sacrificed much for the cause of global sporting unity might be left the poorer for it, and not just in the tens of billions of dollars it has spent on the Games. The

By Foster Klug

The jewel of the 1964 Olympics: The Yoyogi National Stadium

The Yoyogi National Stadium by Kenzo Tange was the elegant symbol of Tokyo’s 1964 Summer Olympics, a combination of modern technique and Japanese tradition. Tange was awarded the Pritzker prize in 1987 — architecture’s highest award — and the citation described Yoyogi as “among the most beautiful buildings of the 20th century.” It remains so. Simple. Striking. Timeless. It went up just 19 years after Japan’s defeat in World War II, a time when building materials were in short supply in the country. It offered an early glance into a modernizing Japan that included tiny transistor radios, bullet trains, and ubiquitous labels that read “Made in Japan.” Yoyogi’s sweeping roof is anchored to earth and held up by steel cables — like a suspension bridge — and connects modern, western design with forms found in Japanese temples and shrines. “It’s kind of a miracle,” said professor Souhei Imamura, who teaches architecture at the Chiba Institute of Technology. “It combines structure, form and also function. Each is unique and they are blended. Dynamism was required at the time because Japanese society wanted to change, to evolve. The dynamism was also needed for those Olympics.” Yoyogi endures like a 500-year-old European cathedral and sits next door to the sprawling park and Meiji Shrine in central Tokyo. Small by today’s standards, Yoyogi was the swimming venue in ‘64 where American teenager Don Schollander won four gold medals. He was the Mark Spitz or Michael Phelps of Tokyo 57 years ago. This time it’s the venue for team handball, and was also used for a gymnastic event last year when organizers began testing anti-COVID-19 measures they might use in order to hold the Olympics during a pandemic. Tange also designed a companion building next door — usually called the Annex — that was the basketball venue in ‘64 where the Americans won

By Stephen Wade

Notes from central Taiwan: The invasive onslaught

When I visited John Lamorie’s eco-farm in Pingtung a few weeks ago, the first thing I saw when I stepped out of his car was an iguana running along the ditch that borders his property. “It’s been hanging around there for weeks,” he said. “Can’t get rid of him.” An invasive species from an exotic land that looks like a monster (the 1998 Godzilla film hints that Godzilla is a mutated iguana), iguanas have been in the spotlight for a year now, with a spate of articles highlighting their growing presence in southern Taiwan. The government banned their import in 2015, and 15,000 were killed in Taiwan last year, over 8,000 in Pingtung alone. Like most invasive species in sensitive island environments, they are extremely destructive. They burrow, damaging irrigation infrastructure, and they compete with local species for resources. They were first reported on Taiwan island in 2004, likely as the result of an intentional release. Several local governments now offer bounties for them. ‘INTERESTING CASES OF SPECIATION’ Taiwan is a special place. Because it sits on the boundary between two major zoogeographical zones, the Indomalaya and the Palearctic, it hosts lineages from both areas. There are over 100 amphibians and lizards native to Taiwan, with roots in both regions. Since Taiwan is cut up into numerous tiny regions by high mountains and fast-moving rivers, the island presents interesting cases of speciation. For example, lizards of the genus Takydromus are distributed widely in the Palaearctic regions, and reach their greatest diversity in Taiwan. A 2015 paper found that speciation occurred between T. viridipunctatus and T. luyeanus, two species separated by a narrow stream only 15 meters wide, “one of the narrowest contact zones ever documented in terrestrial vertebrates”, the authors observed. Invasive species threaten these unique and precious creatures. The many-lined sun skink,

By Michael Turton

Taiwan in Time: A blood-soaked 16 days in Yilan

July 26 to Aug. 1 Five hours after they ventured inland, the European expedition party returned to the St Peter and St Paul with five Taiwanese prisoners — two of them seriously wounded. Three party members were struck by arrows. What’s believed to be the first European landing on the nation’s east coast 250 years ago obviously did not go well. According to the 1790 English translation of the Memoirs and Travels of Mauritius Augustus Count de [Benovsky], the 18-person group found a few people on the shore and asked for food. They were taken to a village and fed “boiled rice with roasted pork and a quantity of lemons and oranges,”and they offered a few knives in return. As the party made its way back to the ship to deliver the news, they were suddenly hit by a shower of arrows. The Europeans fired back immediately, mowing down about a half-dozen attackers. They were ambushed again as they neared the ship, this time defeating 60 warriors and capturing five of them. “Upon this information, I would have quitted the place, as I was not desirous of exposing myself to a war with the natives,” Benovsky writes. “But my associates insisted on entering the harbor. I found it impossible to calm their fury, and for that reason, at last consented.” The Slovakia-born Benovsky ended up staying in what’s believed to be today’s Suao (蘇澳) for 16 blood-soaked days, where his crew ended up helping a local “prince” win a massive battle against their pro-Chinese enemies. While Benovsky is considered somewhat of a national hero in Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, it’s generally agreed that his tales were greatly exaggerated and full of fabrications, and should be taken with a huge grain of salt. WHITEWASHING VIOLENCE Benovsky’s brief visit is often brought up

By Han Cheung