A few months ago, Witch Cloud (巫雲), a cultural fixture frequented by artists, writers, vagabonds and wannabe rebels in the Shida (師大) neighborhood, quietly moved to a brighter and more comfortable location in the Taida (台大) area. The Yunnan cuisine, the collection of vinyl records and the long-haired, bearded proprietor nicknamed Lao Wu (老五) - who grew up in Myanmar but has called Taipei home for the past 30 years - remain the same.
An old apartment with a small front yard, the new location seems to be a hangout for the idiosyncratic owner's friends. Inside, a wall of pop, rock, jazz and classical LPs, plus 20,000 records out back await their turn under the needle. Curios and antiques decorate the dining space, and the rustic wooden tables and chairs add a homey feel.
Born and raised in a family that came from Yunnan Province, China, Lao Wu is adept at cooking up the region's strong flavors. The menu offers some 20 dishes with exotic names like tea salad (涼拌苦茶) and Yunnan papaya chicken (雲南木瓜雞).
PHOTO: HO YI, TAIPEI TIMES
For first-time patrons, Lao Wu's younger brother and wait staff are likely to suggest letting the chef decide what goes onto the table depending on the number of diners and the degree of spiciness they favor.
On a recent visit, my dining partner and I had the pickles fried with pork (醃菜炒肉), Yunnan pig skin salad (雲南大薄片) and curried chicken (咖哩雞). Not particularly good with spicy food, I felt an explosion of intense flavors with each mouthful, but quickly adapted and was soon wanting more. The curry chicken was notable for its melt-in-the-mouth texture.
Witch Cloud remains open as long as Lao Wu and his friends are enjoying a good meal, conversation and drink. Beers and spirits flow freely into the early hours, and Lao Wu is always willing to bring more dishes out from the kitchen, even well after midnight.
Music aficionados should not be shy as it's easy to make friends with the regulars via the turntable in the DJ booth.
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS