Introduction

© Martin Moos. Lonely Planet Images

Whether or not you like Taipei depends on how you feel about big, booming, expensive cities. About 6 million people live in and around Taiwan's capital, lured by the excitement of a bustling city on the move. And for the most part, they're not disappointed. Real estate is virtually unobtainable--Taipei residents have long dispensed with the dream of home-ownership--and the government is encouraging businesses to set up elsewhere in Taiwan. Despite this, the notion still prevails that to make it big in Taiwan, you have to set up in the heart of the capital--even if the air is perpetually toxic. Taiwan's capital is packed full of people, cars and smog--a real hotbed of renao, or liveliness. It's not a relaxing stopover, but the food is excellent, the people are friendly and there are some top-notch sights.

At first glance, Taipei is an intimidating confusion of sprawls. With a good map and compass (no kidding) the logic at the heart of the city's layout will slowly begin to dawn. Even so, unless you read Chinese characters, the system of romanizing Chinese characters used in Taiwan (called the Wade-Giles system) will leave even those with impeccable senses of direction floundering. There is a push to replace this perverse, unintelligible system with the reasonably successful 'Pinyin' system used in China. But this plan has met with staunch opposition: if it works on mainland China, the thinking goes, it must be bad.