Many of the first-time customers at Matsu Noodles Shop try to order "Matsu noodles," which they suppose is a type of noodles indigenous to the Matsu archipelago, one of Taiwan's outlying islands. There are in fact no Matsu-style noodles here and the name of the eatery was thought up ad hoc by its proprietress who happened to come from Matsu.
Located in a quieter section of Liaoning Street Night Market, the two-floor eatery is always crowded with all kinds of customers. Since opening over 10 years ago, the proprietress' family has pushed its business hours further and further into the night, finally opening 24 hours. Two years ago, it even expanded to include a neighboring two-floor space, which offers lunch boxes and rice dishes as well as noodles.
Matsu's noodles -- with pork sauce, sesame sauce, wonton, or sha-cha sauce -- do not sound much different from the menus of noodles stands everywhere, but their homemade recipes create a particular flavor that you won't find elsewhere. The sauces have a strong taste without being too greasy or heavy. The pork sauce mixes pork with pickled cucumbers. Both are so finely minced and mixed that the sauce has a rich flavor and blends well with the noodles. The sesame is finely ground in the sesame sauce. It is strongly fragrant and much less sweet than the usual kind. The sha-cha sauce is not greasy but highly appetizing. With a little bit of chili-pepper sauce, it taste even better.
PHOTO: VICO LEE, TAIPEI TIMES
Matsu's homemade wontons are relatively large and firm. A special way of wrapping the filling prevents the pork inside from losing its flavor when the wontons are served in soup. Noodles with oil is somewhat similar to the better-known Fuchou dry noodles, with its light taste and use of vegetable oil. This is a good choice if you want to taste the original flavor of Matsu's Fuchou-style noodles. All the noodles mentioned here come in large, medium and small sizes (NT$40, NT$35 and NT$25).
With mixed soup (NT$50), you can have a sampling of all the items Matsu is best at: two Fuchou fish balls with a filling of tasty pre-fried fish, some wontons and a smooth-tasting boiled egg. The eatery also has several homemade side dishes. Pork leg (NT$50), tender and light-tasting, is the most popular.
In the next few months tough decisions will need to be made by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and their pan-blue allies in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It will reveal just how real their alliance is with actual power at stake. Party founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) faced these tough questions, which we explored in part one of this series, “Ko Wen-je, the KMT’s prickly ally,” (Aug. 16, page 12). Ko was open to cooperation, but on his terms. He openly fretted about being “swallowed up” by the KMT, and was keenly aware of the experience of the People’s First Party
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
Standing on top of a small mountain, Kim Seung-ho gazes out over an expanse of paddy fields glowing in their autumn gold, the ripening grains swaying gently in the wind. In the distance, North Korea stretches beyond the horizon. “It’s so peaceful,” says the director of the DMZ Ecology Research Institute. “Over there, it used to be an artillery range, but since they stopped firing, the nature has become so beautiful.” The land before him is the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, a strip of land that runs across the Korean peninsula, dividing North and South Korea roughly along the 38th parallel north. This