Xuanzang Shrine at Sun Moon Lake: Pilgrimage, Scripture and Buddhist Memory

Xuanzang Shrine at Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan: Pilgrimage and Memory Sun Moon Lake, seen from the water, with Xuanzang Temple set into the forested hillside above. On the southern shore of Sun Moon Lake, a white-walled hillside temple holds what devotees believe is a fragment of the skull of history’s most travelled monk. Xuanzang Shrine […]

Taoyuan Lantern Festival: Lights and Lunar New Year in Taiwan

Taoyuan Lantern Festival: Lights and Lunar New Year in Taiwan The Taoyuan Lantern Festival spreads varied lantern displays across an open civic plaza, anchored by a central main lantern. The Taoyuan Lantern Festival closes Lunar New Year the way it opened: with light. On the tenth night of our Taiwan tour, after two weeks of […]

Sun Moon Lake Tea: How Assam Roots Became Taiwan’s Ruby Black Tea

Sun Moon Lake Tea: How Assam Roots Became Taiwan’s Ruby Black Tea Tea terraces above Sun Moon Lake, where Assam-derived bushes have grown since the 1920s. Sun Moon Lake tea did not begin in Taiwan at all. Its bushes trace back to Assam, in northeast India, planted on Taiwanese hillsides under Japanese colonial administration nearly […]

Qingshui Cliff: Marble Cliffs on Taiwan’s Pacific Coast

Qingshui Cliff: Marble Cliffs on Taiwan’s Pacific Coast Qingshui Cliff’s escarpment drops toward the Pacific along Taiwan’s east coast. For twenty-odd kilometres between Su’ao and Hualien, Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range simply refuses to negotiate with the sea. The marble face of Qingshui Cliff drops almost straight down to the Pacific, and the coastal highway threading […]

Fort Provintia and Tainan: Dutch Trade, Zheng Rule and Maritime Taiwan

Fort Provintia and Tainan: Dutch Trade, Zheng Rule and Maritime Taiwan The Koxinga Shrine in Tainan, built in Fujian style to honour the general whose siege ended Dutch rule at Fort Provintia. Tainan is Taiwan’s oldest city, and Fort Provintia is where its written history properly begins. Built in 1653 as a Dutch East India […]

Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum: Humanistic Buddhism in Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum: Humanistic Buddhism in Kaohsiung, Taiwan The Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum campus, set into the hills outside Kaohsiung. South of Taiwan’s ancient river towns and the misted headlands of the east coast lies a valley that Fo Guang Shan built from bedrock and a single conviction. In 1967, a young […]

Lanyang Museum: Yilan’s Landscape Architecture on Taiwan’s Coast

Lanyang Museum: Yilan’s Landscape Architecture on Taiwan’s Coast The Lanyang Museum sits where Yilan’s mountains, plains and sea meet — the same three landscapes its galleries are built around. Where Yilan’s rice plains meet the Pacific, a black granite roof rises out of the wetlands at a twenty-degree tilt and seems to grow straight from […]

Baxian Caves: Archaeology and Sacred Geography on Taiwan’s Coast

Baxian Caves: Archaeology and Sacred Geography on Taiwan’s Coast The cave-pocked cliff of Baxian Caves catches the last light above the Pacific, on Taiwan’s remote east coast. Along Taiwan’s remote east coast, a run of cave mouths opens out of a limestone cliff above the Pacific — dark, weathered hollows that once sat below the […]

Sanxiantai: Sea Arches and Coastal Geology on Taiwan’s East Coast

Sanxiantai’s eight-arch footbridge links the Taitung coast to the offshore island, with the open Pacific beyond. The road south from Hualien runs close to the Pacific for most of the morning, and then the coastline opens into something stranger: a low headland, a scattering of huge rocks offshore, and an eight-arched footbridge curving out across […]

Yilan National Center for Traditional Arts: Taiwan’s Living Crafts

Yilan National Center for Traditional Arts: Taiwan’s Living Crafts The theatre-and-temple district at the National Center for Traditional Arts, on the Dongshan River in Yilan. Halfway between the sky lanterns of Pingxi and the marble coastline near Hualien, the itinerary slows down for an afternoon. The Yilan National Center for Traditional Arts sits on a […]

Jiufen and Jinguashi: Gold Mining Towns on Taiwan’s Northeast Coast

Jiufen and Jinguashi: Gold Mining Towns on Taiwan’s Northeast Coast Jiufen’s lantern-lit lanes climb the hillside above Taiwan’s northeast coast — once one of the most productive gold-mining towns in the Japanese empire. Before dawn breaks over Jiufen, the hillside village is quiet: shuttered teahouses, mist caught in the stepped lanes, red lanterns still lit […]

Taiwan Lantern Festival: Ritual Light and an 11-Day Journey

Taiwan Lantern Festival: Ritual Light and an 11-Day Journey Sky lanterns rise above Pingxi’s old railway street at blue hour, the tradition Taiwan’s modern Lantern Festival grew from. On the first full moon after Chinese New Year, thousands of paper lanterns rise together over the mountain township of Pingxi, each one carrying a wish written […]

Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival: Wishes, Railway Towns and Lunar New Year

Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival: Wishes, Railway Towns and Lunar New Year Once a year, on the fifteenth night of the Lunar New Year, the narrow valley around Pingxi fills with light that has nothing to do with electricity. Paper lanterns, each carrying a wish written by hand, rise together over the mountains in waves of […]

The National Palace Museum, Taipei: Reading an Imperial Collection

The National Palace Museum, Taipei: Reading an Imperial Collection The National Palace Museum’s Northern Branch in Shilin, seen on approach in early morning light. In the last months of 1948, as Nationalist and Communist armies fought for control of China, 2,972 crates of the Forbidden City’s finest treasures were loaded onto ships bound for the […]

Raohe Night Market: Ciyou Temple and Street Food in Taipei, Taiwan

Raohe Night Market: Ciyou Temple and Street Food in Taipei, Taiwan By the third evening of a small group journey through Taiwan, most travellers have already stood before the golden roofline of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and walked the porcelain-lined galleries of the National Palace Museum. Then the itinerary turns, quite deliberately, toward something noisier: […]

Questions about Taiwan for Senior travellers

Questions About Taiwan Odyssey Traveller specialises in crafting unforgettable experiences for mature-aged travellers, providing adventure and educational programs to small groups since 1983. Odyssey has built up a reasonable knowledge bank to answer questions about Taiwan that travellers are likely to ask, as they make their plans to tour independently, or with us as part […]