In Chinese the word for “fish” (yu) sounds the same as the word for “surplus,” so fish has always been an auspicious symbol. Fish is de rigueur at Lunar New Year, and the older generation will say it’s best not to eat it all, so that there is a “surplus” in the new year.
As far back as the Qing Dynasty, gentry visiting Taiwan would return home with sleeping mats woven from triangular club-rush. Even then they made great souvenirs and gifts. During the Japanese era, rush products comprised the third largest category of exported agricultural goods, and the rush weaving industry brought prosperity to the town of Yuanli. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the industry there gradually began to fade away.
The idea of the “metaverse” has been taking off in recent times, but many people still have questions: What is the metaverse? How do you use it? Is it a technology that can even be realized?
There are others who are trying to use sound as the medium through which people can get to know Taiwan. For example, the American Andrew Ryan has recorded the sounds of daily life in Taiwan and transformed them into an English-language radio program. The artist Wu Tsan-cheng shares soundscapes from around Taiwan on the Radio Aporee website—just click on the map of Taiwan and you can be surrounded by local sounds.
“Non-fungible tokens”—NFTs—seem to be everywhere these days. Here in Taiwan, the hype has been growing ever since Christie’s auctioned an NFT of Everydays: The First 5000 Days, a work by the American digital artist Beeple, for US$69 million.
Charles Darwin, author of On the Origin of Species, loved flowers. He wrote to the English botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker: “I never was more interested in any subject in all my life than in this of Orchids.” The morphological structure of orchid flowers is simple—three sepals, three petals, and a “column” that contains the reproductive parts—but these flowers lure insect pollinators by many clever mechanisms, such as color, mimicry, scent, deception, and traps.
Mountainous Taiwan has diverse ecosystems that provide excellent habitats for butterflies. The island has more than 400 butterfly species, of which one in eight are endemic. In the 1960s Taiwan began to export large numbers of butterflies for crafts, becoming known internationally as a “butterfly kingdom.” However, the butterfly industry later relocated to Latin America, and Taiwan’s butterfly processing centers fell into decline.
In urban backstreets, residents cultivate potted plants and flowers on terraces and under awnings. Although pets can be troublesome, people are happy to raise them, and even see them as family members, paying substantial sums of money to treat them when they get ill. And every weekend, large numbers of people go out hiking, birdwatching, fishing, and snorkeling in the great outdoors.
Despite the English expression “dirt poor,” there is nothing “poor” about soil. It is in fact rich with life. Randomly pick up a clump of earth, and it is likely to contain as many as 10 billion microorganisms. Taiwan, moreover, has extremely varied soil.
In the Age of Discovery, when Portuguese explorers saw Taiwan from their ships, they exclaimed “ilha formosa,” meaning “beautiful island.” And in the preface to his General History of Taiwan, written nearly 100 years ago, Lien Heng described Taiwan as “a beautiful island in a swirling sea.” Regardless of era or ethnicity, everyone’s first impression of Taiwan is of a beautiful island set between sea and sky, with a richly abundant flora and fauna.
