At the start of Lucy, the Luc Besson-directed sci-fi thriller starring Scarlett Johansson, she is pushed into delivering a drugs package to a five-star hotel in Taipei. Her boyfriend is gunned down outside, and she is forcibly escorted to a suite, where she's operated on, and thereafter develops superhuman powers. I'm staying in that hotel, the chic and elegant Regent Taipei, and although nothing nearly this dramatic happens while I'm here, I do wonder why Hollywood has taken so long to discover such a cinematic city.
Then again, you could say the same about tourists. While it’s very popular with Chinese visitors, Taiwan is still, somehow, almost undiscovered compared to Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok and Tokyo. It’s still surprisingly cut off in terms of international flights, with Dubai the only direct link with the Middle East. I’d always thought of Taiwan as Asia-lite, but the capital’s bland image evaporates as soon as I arrive at Taoyuan International Airport’s Terminal 1, a startling, newly renovated building which looks like a temple from the outside; inside, it feels like you’re under a monochrome curtain of steel and light. Yet not content with this bold statement, the World Design Capital for 2016 is already working on a third terminal, with the globe’s best architecture firms jostling for a slice of the action.
Taipei has a population of 2.3 million people, 10 per cent of the country’s total, but it’s connected to two satellite cities, New Taipei and Keelung, which bring its population up to seven million and make it one of the most densely populated parts of the planet. On the way into the city, we sweep through green forests and valleys punctuated by brutalist tower blocks so incongruous and ugly that they’re beautiful. Or perhaps “brutiful”.
The best view of Taipei is not from the top of the Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building before the Burj Khalifa, but of it, from a distance. The pool deck of the old-school 1980s Shangri-La gives you multiple perspectives on the structure, its spiky appearance designed to resemble the notches on a bamboo stalk. It springs up from a dramatic ensemble of shanty-town-like sprawl and forested mountains.
That crowded shanty town is perfectly clean and ordered when seen at ground level. The Creative Expo 2015 is taking place at the buzzing Huashan 1914 cultural centre – an impressive array of small-scale arts workshops, cafes – yet a better version of this is the Songshan Cultural District, a converted tobacco factory showcasing various architectural styles, from art deco to industrial warehousing. Here, I take in the Taiwan Design Center, Taipei Design Museum and Red Dot Design Museum, before moving on to the new Eslite building, with a funky design hotel and multilayered shopping mall, full of sophisticated products, real-life artisans’ workshops (again, incongruous in such a sparklingly clean structure), and with a view over the new Taipei Dome stadium, built by Taiwanese developer Farglory, which is currently building parts of Abu Dhabi’s Al Maryah Island.
My HSBC debit card is blocked, so suddenly I find myself walking farther than expected. For its sheer visual impact the mausoleum-like Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall is worth the hour it takes to get around the site. Completed in 1980, it’s a giant concrete and marble structure worthy of communist Vietnam or China – and the museum is dedicated to that supposed enemy of communism and father of the nation (CKS for short). There are vintage cars and other artefacts including family photographs – here, his son looks oddly like Chairman Mao.
At Dadaocheng Wharf on the riverside to the west of the city centre, there’s a completely different feel – that of an almost forgotten wasteland. I’m disappointed to see that no old buildings remain here, but just parallel to this is Dihua Street, which dates from the 1850s, and reminds me of George Town in Penang, with its old-style shophouses selling everything from shark fins (it’s terrible to see huge dried stacks of them, in shop after shop) to powdered plant roots for hair loss, plus its temples (the Xia Hai City God Temple, commonly known as the Matchmaking Temple, and well worth half an hour). Opposite and down the road are local restaurants and some great hipsterish cafes with names such as Fleisch and Frog, serving excellent coffee and value-for-money handcrafted design gifts. Just to the east, Ximending is like Tokyo’s Shibuya, and near where I started, the Taipei 101 area is a more sterile melange of big shopping malls and branded blocks. There are various branches of the now-international Din Tai Fung restaurant chain across Taiwan, and the one at the foot of the Taipei 101 is probably the busiest. It’s worth a visit for the view onto the kitchen (the dumplings won a Michelin star at its Hong Kong restaurant), the staff in face masks and the noodle soups, dumplings and Asian salads at what seem like giveaway prices.
On the northern edge of the city, it's worth the trek to the National Palace Museum, which has the world's largest collection of Chinese art, much of it sent here for safekeeping during the Second World War. Though aborigines are thought to have inhabited Taiwan 30,000 years ago, the ground-floor timelines show the first evidence of settlement in the form of tools and artefacts from the Neolithic Changbin culture to date from 6,000BC – before the ancient Egyptians, Old Babylonian Assyrians and Greeks. And before Dutch and Spanish settlement in the 17th century, and before the Chinese began immigrating then annexing under the Qing dynasty, though descendants of the original and ancient population still live on. The most popular exhibit here is the Jadeite Cabbage, a small, semi-translucent carved piece of jade featuring a grasshopper. Dating from late-1800s China, there's an almost permanent queue for viewing.
It’s Chinese New Year, and at the nearby Taipei Expo Park, I get my first taste of the extravaganza that is a lantern festival. Though this sounds inconsequential, the size and scale of the various festivals, which are held all over the country, is astounding. Tens of thousands of people flock to different zones, each with its own theme, from animals to robots to cartoons, traditional stories or music acts. Mostly made of plastic or paper, the lanterns betray an almost anarchic level of craftsmanship and attention to detail. Free to enter, and accompanied by massive local food markets, each major town boasts its own show. The lights are balanced by thousands of the latest mobile phones, which locals use to capture the event in images of such high quality it makes the iPhone look prehistoric. Oddly, street fashion doesn’t seem to have kept up, as I’m confronted many times with the frightening spectre of the shell suit, something not seen in most parts of the West for at least 20 years. Foreigners, too, are still something of an attraction, and I now feature in a number of random “family” shots with complete strangers.
With a small group and a guide called Tony, a retired ex-army engineer who guides “to meet different people”, I set off on the high-speed rail train to the southern port city of Kaohsiung. On the smooth journey through flat agricultural land, I talk to Tony, who seems resistant to giving a yes or no answer, but prefers to talk in circles. After much pressing, I gather that while his parents followed Chiang Kai-shek from communist China in 1975, he thinks that in the long-term, it will be better, or perhaps inevitable, to “join with China” – because of its small size and industrial innovation elsewhere, Taiwan can no longer compete like it used to.
Yet, the country is still very industrial, with well-documented pollution issues. However, new green technologies may yet save the day. Bizarrely, in central Kaohsiung, two of the most popular tourist attractions are ultra-modern metro stations. Even more bizarrely, just outside the city is E-da World, a four-year-old self-contained township boasting two hotels, one theme park, an outlet mall, a professional baseball team, two hospitals and a university. “We have everything from cradle to grave”, boasts a PR person – this includes Santorini Mountain City, a fake street food market and signs saying: “Happiness is up to you”.
After this, sunset on the more natural setting of the seafront seems like a wilderness; there are also attractive, almost Mediterranean dock areas. Our hotel is the 82-storey 85 Sky Tower hotel on what is the equivalent of Dubai Creek. Dinner is at one of many Indian restaurants, which are generally suitable for halal guests worried about the widespread and often invisible use of pork fat in food (for more information, see http://eng.taiwan.net.tw/).
Leaving Kaohsiung behind, we head out through a rural industrial aesthetic – the E-United steelmaking company on one side of the road, and paddy fields on the other – to Ten Drum Cultural Village, in part of a disused Japanese sugar refinery. After taking part in a drumming session and watching a performance, we have a delicious lunch in the retro chic cafe before driving to Sun Moon Lake. We stay at the excellent Hotel Del Lago, where the service could be a model for hotels everywhere. Indeed, most of the hotel service I experience is a delight, because it seems to be based not on subservience but responsiveness. Whenever I dial down to reception, calls are answered immediately, as if they have been waiting for the call. At the Del Lago, a person arrives at my door within 60 seconds of calling – a feat.
A lakeside walk and visit to the Norihiko Dan-designed visitor’s centre, followed by a trip across the lake in a solar-powered boat, are highlights. Despite considerable tourist numbers, the exquisite landscape has held on to an elemental appeal. The same can’t be said for the western city of Taichung, which is under an orange haze when we arrive, though this could have been partly because of the fireworks from its lantern festival – it’s the official festival city for this year. The city’s other highlights include an opera house, gourmet coffee and ice-cream shops, and bubble tea, which was invented here in the 1980s. We finish our tour in the scenic hillside village of Pingxi, half an hour from the capital. Here, along with local and Chinese families, we each set lanterns free to the sky, with a wish written on the side.
rbehan@thenational.ae