This Month:

• Alishan

Ready? Let’s dive in:

Alishan

As a man of phlegmatic nature and temperate parts, I find Taiwan’s hot and humid weather a trial. Life in Taipei, especially during the summer months, resembles the experience of a tall yam folded into a braising pan. The world outside my air-conditioned apartment feels like a swimming pool locker room—only hotter.

Months like this, amid the sweat and suffering, drive my thoughts back to Taiwan’s mountain sanctuary: Alishan.

Absent a close study of topographical maps, a person might not realize that Taiwan is a mountain range surrounded by a narrow ring of alluvial plains. We have the sea, a thin margin of flat land, and then the land slopes upward, forming the mountainous spine that makes up 70% of the country. It is here, away from the crowded plains and simmering heat, that we enter the domain of forests and Oolong tea fields.

The most famous and heavily-touristed of these high mountain regions is the Alishan National Scenic Area, a 415 square kilometer park whose elevation oscillates between 1,400 and 2,600 meters. A stone barrier to the Pacific winds, it is a land of weaving mountain mists and chronic fogs, a dark green balm for heat-seared souls. As I prepare this month’s edition of the newsletter, Taipei is expected to reach a high temperature of 33C/91F; Alishan, by contrast, may reach 20C/69F. Oh, to be back soaking up that temperate bliss.

In decades past, one ascended the mountain on the Alishan Forest Railway, a narrow gauge (2.5 feet between the rails) track laid by the Japanese during the early years of the occupation. The railway, built to transport logs down the mountainside, now moves tourists on a four hour trip from Chiayi. It’s a ponderous journey—71 km over mountain switchbacks—swaying and creaking at the pace of a good distance runner.

A modern road, completed in the 1980s, opened Alishan to bus and automobile transport. It cuts the travel time to two hours.

We broke up our journey even more with an overnight stay in Fenqihu, a small village at the midpoint of the forest railway. Fenqihu blossomed during the construction of the railway: Japanese work crews would ride down to the station and buy bento boxes for their lunches. The village still serves this this function. Trains stop here for thirty minute breaks so that passengers can purchase lunches, snacks, or simply wind through the high street shops in search of tourist tat.

There’s an interesting variety of food on offer. In the 7-11, a rack of potato chips caught my eye. The chips (crisps) were packed in Tainan, a city that is only a couple of meters above sea level. Fenqihu is 1,403 meters/4,603 feet higher. The reduced air pressure at this higher altitude allowed the air trapped inside the plastic bags to expand, making them look like a line of overinflated pillows.

For the culinary record, the most interesting chip flavor I spotted in Fenqihu was “duck head.” Not “duck,” but rather, “duck head.”

The homegrown dishes were also fascinating. As afternoon mist blew across the village-ringing mountains, I tried a local specialty: the Fenqihu tofu hamburger. A vegetarian hamburger with tofu in place of ground beef is hardly novel, but in Fenqihu they subvert expectations by using tofu as the bun.

Take a hearty block of tofu, a cuboid that is two inches by two inches and at least an inch thick. Simmer the blocks in a pot of brown liquid. The slow cooking hardens the outer skin and tans the surface.

When a customer arrives, the cook, standing by the road, plucks out a tofu slab and slices a pocket through the shortest axis. Using a pair of tongs she tucks in a variety of ingredients—pickled vegetables, peanut powder, cilantro, fried shallots, pork floss, and a dash of hot sauce—but be careful, that last ingredient goes a long way.

My tofu hamburger, fresh out of the pot, was sizzling hot. I had to wrap a couple of napkins around its plastic sleeve to insulate my fingers.

Once cooled to a reasonable temperature, it proved an amazing treat. Chewy on the outside, a silken interior enlivened with a tasty filling. Good and good for you.

In addition to odd vegetarian delights, Fenqihu also possesses a railway museum, and, up the hill from the village, the ruins of a Japanese Shinto shrine. During the occupation, the Japanese tried to impose their religion upon the Taiwanese. It didn’t take; after the Japanese left in 1945, the temple fell into disrepair. Today one finds overgrown foundations and the remnants of a Torii gate. These ruins, cautions a nearby signboard, must serve “as a reminder to future generations.” A salutary warning, even if the sign fails to specify the lesson our successors should extract from this jumble of chiseled stones.

The next morning it was on to Alishan. As noted above, logging was the motivation that brought the Japanese to this remote place. Giant Taiwan and Formosan Cypress trees flourished in these woods and the loggers cut down the trees and exported the timber back to Japan. By 1970 the resource was exhausted—the native trees cut down and shipped to the sea. With the end of the logging industry, the region reimagined itself as a tourist destination. Today Alishan attracts millions of annual visitors, offering tea, cool mountain air, and hikes through replanted forests.

Massive stumps of cypress trees—edges rounded by decades of rain and green moss—line the trails that wind through the park. The oldest known tree in the park was the Shenmu Sacred tree, a red cypress that had lived more than 3,000 years. Sadly, a 1997 storm toppled the forest’s patriarch. It evaded the chainsaws, but succumbed to its great age. Let future generations ponder that lesson.

Although the land is once again clothed in forest, the giant denizens are gone. This is a plantation of second growth trees, imports from the home islands that have displaced the native cypress trees. Wandering through the forest, contemplating the slowly decaying stumps, I could not help but feel a little mournful for the vanished giants.

Evidently, the Japanese felt the same way. In 1935 the government erected a stone structure, the “Pagoda of the Tree Spirit.” This monument, placed in the heart of the forest near Alishan’s Ciyun Temple, honors the spirits of the seventy-seven loggers killed during the clearing operations as well as “the 100,000 trees that had been felled.”

The great mountain fastness lost its mightiest trees and survives today as a slim shadow of its former glory. Nevertheless, hiking through quiet groves of hinoki, soaked in Japanese mysticism and slow shifting mist, I realized that if I were ever to make Taiwan my permanent home, a mountain village near Alishan would be on my short list.

Outro

September begins with a flying visit to Japan. NHK (Japan’s equivalent of the BBC) has asked me to fly over to talk about Comet Madness. They are filming a five-part series about what might happen if a comet or large asteroid struck the earth (how would we spot it? what might we do to defend the planet?), and episode four takes up the question of how the earth’s people might react when they learned of this approaching threat. They have asked me to appear as a talking head to provide a historical perspective, discussing the hysteria produced by the 1910 return of Halley’s Comet.

Hence my visit. It will be a short trip, but I’ve never appeared in a TV documentary before. It should be interesting. Look for a full report in the next edition of the Peripatetic Historian.

Be safe, be sensible, and I will see you again next month.

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This Month:

• Walking with Thoreau

• Eating with Spunkmeyer

Ready? Let’s dive in:

Walking with Thoreau

Midway through my annual summer sojourn on the Oregon Coast, I had occasion to pull a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Collected Works off the AirBnB bookshelf. I was keen to dig into his essay entitled “Walking,” thinking that it might offer some useful advice for a peripatetic historian. Walking is, after all, baked into my nom de plume and a major facet of my identity.

Thoreau had a couple of useful ideas: contra the US Department of Human and Health Services, which advocates a mere 2.5 hours of brisk exercise (like walking) each week, Thoreau recommended a four-hour hike every day. He also endorsed “wilderness walking”—departing the roads and villages to strike off across the unexplored countryside. It is important, he suggested, to bathe one’s brain in nature, to experience the healing glory of creation.

All good ideas.

Our paths diverged about a third of the way through the essay when he suggested that the most productive walks headed west. This idea degenerated into a call for the taming of the rest of the continent and the fulfillment of America’s manifest destiny.

He lost me there. I snapped the book shut, laced up my hiking shoes, and set off on one of my favorite coastal routes, an ascent to the top of Cape Meares. On a morning split between tendrils of sea fog slipping through the gnarled limbs of Sitka Spruce and sunlight that lanced the morning mist at apposite moments, I hiked from sea level (at the foot of Bayocean spit) up an abandoned road, decommissioned after landslides made the route too expensive to repair. 4.5 km separates the beach from the small lighthouse that marks the end of the cape. It is a pleasant 9 km round trip, with about 250 meters of altitude gain along the way.

I climbed through an old Pacific forest, filled with birdsong. The raucous calls of crows, ravens, and blue jays blended with the higher, refined voices of sparrows and professional songbirds. The surf maintained a background roar, rolling in from Taiwan to shatter against the cape’s basalt foundation. Yellow daisies and purple foxgloves provided splashes of color to cheer the eye; orange salmon berries, dusty red caps, and black salal berries delivered a bit of organic energy to hearten my steps near the cape’s summit.

Although Thoreau lost me when his essay turned to a meditation on national destiny, I can firmly endorse the central plank of his campaign: the world would be a happier place if its people spent a portion of each day walking. Perhaps not four hours, but imagine the good that would come from an hour afoot. Walking is nature’s restorative, a tonic for both body and soul. If you haven’t imbibed a dose recently, give it a try.

Eating with Spunkmeyer

An unexpected, late-July schedule change compelled MJ and I to spend two days in a Newport, Oregon, beach hotel. It was a mixed blessing. Our fine view over the Pacific Ocean was balanced by the ‘grab & go’ breakfast served in the hotel lobby.

On our first morning I tromped downstairs and ‘grabbed’ a few plastic-packaged products: some apple slices, yogurt, a fruit cup, and the beguiling “Otis Spunkmeyer Naturally Flavored Wild Blueberry” muffin. Sounds healthy, I thought. “Made with real wild blueberries,” declared a prominently placed logo.

What could possibly go wrong?

The apple slices tasted like apples; the fruit cup seemed fine, apart from the unnaturally red maraschino cherries floating on the top of the mix. The “gluten free, vitamin D enriched, live probiotic cultured” yogurt tasted like candy when it came off the spoon. I checked the ingredient list. No wonder: sugar was the second item on the list, right after ‘grade A milk.’

Scratch yogurt off my healthy breakfast. No worries, however: my back-to-nature, wild blueberry muffin would steer my digestion back on track.

Slightly wary after the yogurt-sugar shock, I made the mistake of checking the muffin’s components. To my astonishment, sugar was the number one ingredient. There was more sugar than “enriched bleached flour” (ingredient number two) in the muffin. 34 grams of sugar in a pastry that only weighed 113 grams. A full 30% of the product was sugar.

The muffin also boasted 3.5 grams of saturated fat (18% of the recommended daily allowance) and 460 milligrams of salt (20% of the daily allowance). And don’t even get me started on the “propylene glycols,” “monocalcium phosphates,” “thiamine monotrates,” and the other refugees from the mad chemist’s lab that went into the production of this ‘natural’ treat.

The latest statistics from the US Center for Disease Control suggest that 40.3% of American adults are obese. If Otis Spunkmeyer’s ‘wild’ and ‘naturally flavored’ muffins represent the country’s dining choices, it’s not difficult to understand why.

Outro

If the story of the Otis Spunkmeyer muffins didn’t set a chill in your heart; if, to the contrary, you thought “that sounds pretty tasty”—further research reveals that you can order Spunkmeyer muffins on Amazon. They come in a box of 24 for $43.99, or, to put it another way, about five cents per gram of sugar.

Readers who possess an accountant’s meticulous nature will note that I have violated my promise to keep this summer edition of the newsletter under 500 words. Since an apology would only increase the magnitude of my transgression, I won’t offer one.

Be safe, be sensible, and I will see you again next month.

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This Month:

• Summer Holiday

• No Country for Old Worms

• Whither the Historian?

Ready? Let’s dive in:

Summer Holiday

By the time this month’s edition of the Peripatetic Historian lands in your inbox, I should be back in the United States. Like swallows to San Capistrano, we turn our beaks east at this time of the year, winging home on our annual summer pilgrimage.

Reviewing recent installments of the newsletters, I have detected a tendency toward increasing prolixity: the screed grows longer every month. More is better, until it’s not.

Therefore, since it is summer—a season for rest and relaxation—I have decided to trim back and curtail my tendency to run on at length. ‘Short and pithy’ will be the Summer 2026 official motto. I’m going to set a 500-word limit and stick to it. Every word that fails to clear the 500-word bar faces the scrap heap.

No Country for Old Worms

A heavy rain falls outside the window as I prepare this month’s edition of the newsletter for the press. These are the months (May & June) of the seasonal Plum Rains. This year, two tropical storms, floating off the east coast of the country, are amplifying the monsoon’s effect. According to Taiwan’s Central Weather Authority, 5.5 inches (14.1 cm) of rain misted down on Taipei over the past 24 hours. If it wouldn’t shock the neighbors, I could go stand out back in the alley and take a quick shower.

During these periods of intense precipitation, the open spaces that pass for lawns in the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Gardens degenerate into bogs. The sparse grass surrenders and the earth turns to mud.

As you might imagine, this condition is a trial for earthworms. These little fellows absorb oxygen directly through their skin—they have no lungs. When the soil becomes water-saturated, they cannot get enough of the gas and are forced to crawl to safety—usually up onto the hard tile floor of the portico that runs around the park. Here, stretched out on cold porcelain, they are either crushed beneath the feet of careless pedestrians or are snapped up by the local birds.

It’s not easy being a worm.

Whither the Historian?

After five weeks in the US, we will be returning to Taiwan for a final year. Big trips are chalked into the coming calendar, including some island-hopping in search of WWII battlefields, Italy, and maybe another Japanese expedition. Some fun stuff—you won’t want to miss the upcoming coverage.

Looking beyond this year, the crystal ball appears to be flashing the international symbols of France (a croissant and beret). Should the oracle prove accurate, this wandering historian will return to his primary obsession: European History. Then won’t the newsletter length run wild?

These long-term plans are still in flux. Stay tuned to this channel for breaking news.

Outro

Some interesting opportunities are starting to pop on the writing front. I hope to have more to tell you next month.

Goodness—already at 500 words?

Be safe, be sensible.

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This Month:

• Battling Electronic Distractions

Ready? Let’s dive in:

Battling Electronic Distractions

(And now, for something completely different).

Donald Knuth is a Stanford University professor emeritus in Mathematics and Computer Science. Among an astonishing list of professional accomplishments—including the multi-volume Art of Fine Computer Programming and the creation of TeX, a computer typesetting system—Knuth offers a heroic, countercultural example of how to unplug from the distractions of our technological age.

In 1990, three years before retiring from Stanford, Knuth announced his shocking decision to stop using email. “Email is a wonderful thing,” he wrote on his website, “for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”

Knuth, at age 88, continues to work on his magnum opus. As he writes: “My full-time writing schedule means that I have to be pretty much a hermit. The only way to gain enough efficiency to complete The Art of Computer Programming is to operate in batch mode, concentrating intensively and uninterruptedly on one subject at a time.” His approach has paid off: five of the projected seven volumes are now in print.

Knuth, in his isolation, has maintained some contact with the outside world. Anyone who wants to reach out can mail a letter to the postal box he retains at the Stanford Computer Science department. A secretary screens incoming communiques; any missive deemed worth his attention is forwarded to Knuth. Every six months, he glances through the pile and (possibly—no promises) responds to letters that interest him.

Donald Knuth is my hero. He has escaped a world swamped with electronic distraction. He has rejected Silicon Valley’s core premise: humans need to be plugged into an electronic network every conscious moment (and should probably have an app logging data when they’re asleep). Knuth chose silence and concentration, rejecting the electric dogs that continuously bark for our attention.

He is my hero, but I am not prepared to dispense with email yet. The inbox is a necessary evil for a struggling author, the primary communication channel to readers, agents, editors, and publishers. Until I land a seven-book publishing deal, I cannot afford to delete my addresses.

On the other hand, I have spent the first half of this year thinking about how I might carve out more intense and uninterrupted time for the work I want to do. Electronic distractions, as Knuth recognized more than thirty years ago, are antithetical to deep thought. Rare is the individual who is able to focus in the presence of a phone’s notification buzz or ring tone.

Half-measures do not serve: I have disabled notifications on my phone to cure it of its misguided belief that I welcome its interruptions. Unfortunately, I have failed to cure my little monkey brain of wanting to check my email multiple times each day. The phone can’t interrupt me, but it doesn’t need to. I interrupt myself, wondering what jewels may be accumulating in my inbox.

The problem appears insoluble. Short of Knuth’s complete burnt bridges approach, how is one to create a distraction-free space?

Encroaching Weeds of Distraction

It is difficult to create a distraction free zone; it is even harder to maintain it.

For decades I have risen at 4:00 a.m. and devoted morning’s early hours to my writing. This has always been a sacred, precious time for me. I am at the pinnacle of productivity before the sun rises. Working at this hour is a deeply-rooted practice, and—I know many reader may find this unfathomable—the most pleasant hours of every day. Unfortunately, as 2025 drew to a close, I realized that the creeping tendrils of distraction have infiltrated my precious mornings. My eagerness to jump out of bed and work had ceded ground to the desire to jump out of bed and check emails, news sites, and YouTube videos.

My walled writing garden was no longer inviolate. The three hour period before the household begins to stir was besieged. Moreover, the battle initiated in the writer’s oasis was being fought everywhere else as well: electronic distraction consumed the hours, an invading army that gained ground with every passing year.

Reading, an activity that once anchored my life, was consigned to shorter periods. Moreover, the study of books lost its savor. The easily distracted me, trained on the constant variety and restless motion of the internet, lost patience with long books. Which was more pleasurable: a lengthy tome that demanded my brain’s concentration or a mindless scroll of YouTube videos? With increasing regularity, I chose the latter.

It was clear that I needed to reboot my life and follow Donald Knuth back to that pre-internet Eden. But how?

Behavioral change is so difficult that it borders on the edge of impossibility. I could just go cold turkey—turn off all my electronics and eliminate distraction’s access to my brain. Unfortunately the frontal attack rarely prevails. As I cast about for a different path—and I do appreciate the irony embedded in this portion of my tale—I stumbled across a YouTube video about the Japanese practice of Kaizen.

Kaizen rejects the frozen poultry approach to behavioral change; it offers an incremental strategy. In a sentence, it is the practice of becoming 1% better each day. Rather than a head-on confrontation with a habit (”I will never smoke another cigarette again”) Kaizen creeps up on behavioral change with tiny, less-threatening steps (”I will smoke one less cigarette this week than I did last week”). Like water wearing a channel in stone, change occurs so slowly that the brain fails to notice it—until the new practice takes root and begins to produce fruit.

Batches and Black Boxes

So, on an applied level, how did this work? Donald Knuth offered one clue with his claim that he worked at peak efficiency when he “operate(d) in batch mode, concentrating intensively and uninterruptedly on one subject at a time.” At the beginning of my quest, electronic distractions spread like ivy across my entire day. At any given moment I might open my web browser or email program and be off to distraction land.

Perhaps the secret was too ‘batch’ these electronic distractions.

My first step was to create a daily schedule that divided my week into 112 blocks (7 days multiplied by the 16 hours I am awake). In the initial state, each of these blocks, representing one hour of my day, stood empty. When a box is empty, I give myself permission to succumb to electronic distractions. I can surf the web, read emails, watch YouTube—whatever my Dopamine-seeking brain fancies. The 112 empty boxes represented my brain’s schedule at the start of the experiment: freedom to indulge in electronic distraction at any point during the day.

The first week of the experiment, I blacked-out the Monday, 4:00 a.m. box. A black box symbolizes no electronic distractions: phone on airplane mode, web browser closed. It was the tiniest thing: Monday morning, one hour, from 4:00 to 5:00. When the clock hit 5:00, up came the emails and my ‘normal’ life resumed. But for that first hour of every Monday, I was Donald Knuth: focused and uninterrupted.

It felt like the smallest of sacrifices, a short blip of computer discipline that passed with barely a ripple. Then came week two. I filled in a second block on my chart, the 4:00 to 5:00 slot for Tuesday mornings. Now there were two undistracted hours on my weekly schedule.

This is the genius of Kaizen: it is insidious in the best of ways. It tricks the brain by saying “I’m not giving up my electronic distractions—I’m simply clearing a very small block of undistracted time each week.” Distraction is deferred, not eliminated. Even I can wait an hour to check my email after I climb out of bed. The brain makes a small, as opposed to a heroic, sacrifice. No teeth-gritting bursts of willpower—just the quiet chuckle of a rising tide, the slow growth of an undistracted life.

As this month’s newsletter goes to press, I am 37 weeks into the experiment. To put it another way, there are 37 black boxes on my schedule—nearly a full 40 hour work week of undistracted time. I began this practice as a compulsive email checker; the pressure to open an inbox peaks at the start of my day—surely valuable, important messages have arrived in the night. In the past I found it virtually impossible to dive into that email box with my morning coffee.

But look at my Kaizen schedule today: my Mondays begin with a solid column of blacked-out boxes, a seven hour, undistracted period that stretches to 11:00 a.m. The first seven hours of each week pass before I check my email, surf the web, or see what cool videos have floated up on YouTube.

It is an amazing feeling. Not only am I blocking out distraction-free time that can be devoted to more valuable projects and interests, but I’m discovering that as my brain detoxes, the electronic distractions lose traction. My mind is slowly realizing that the emperor has no clothes: ninety-seven percent of the slop that washes up on the internet’s beach was never worth my attention. The challenge, as my blocks of distraction-free time grow, will be to find new activities (or recover old interests) that deserve the time I have rescued from the electronic abductors.

So that’s what I’ve been up to this spring. As Taiwan’s days grow hotter and more humid, I’m tucked beneath an air conditioner, filling in my Japanese boxes and reclaiming my mind.

Outro

It is now clear what I can accomplish with more distraction-free time: longer newsletters. Sorry for the length of this month’s offering. I know I’m a bit off brand as they say in the marketing world, but if you’re here for the history and photos, I’ll be returning to my normally scheduled topics next month.

Until then, be safe, be sensible.

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This Month:

• Peripatetic Field Report: Hidden Christians

• The Hidden Guanyin

Ready? Let’s dive in:

The Peripatetic Field Report: Hidden Christians

When discussions turn to the topic of Japanese religions—and, faithful reader, if you’re anything like me this experience is as common as a trip to the mall—most conversationalists will want to focus on Japan’s big two: Zen Buddhism and Shintoism. That makes sense; recent polls suggest that roughly 48% of the Japanese identify as Buddhist and another 48% lean toward Shintoism.

The percentage identifying as Christians stands a little north of the 1% mark. That number is probably higher in Kyushu, where we spent our recent Japanese sojourn. Numerous churches dot the cities, a testament to the fact that this was ground zero for the faith, the part of the country that received the first Jesuit missionaries.

Francis Xavier, the apostle to Asia, was first to arrive. In 1549, he established Japan’s first Christian mission. His two year stay produced remarkable results: by the time he departed the Jesuits had carved a toehold in Japan’s western provinces. Their effort gained momentum when Daimyo Omura Sumitada—one of Japan’s feudal lords—embraced the faith. Sumitada granted the Jesuits land for churches and seminaries in Nagasaki.

Persecution

Despite this promising start, Christianity was a hard sell in polytheistic Japan. The missionaries encountered opposition from indigenous religious leaders, and, eventually, the Japanese rulers began to associate the faith with Portugal’s colonial ambitions. The foreign religion could be used as a wedge to split the people from the Japanese daimyos. Christianity was considered a dangerous weapon, a tool to enslave the country.

In 1587, Toyotami Hideyoshi, Japan’s most powerful daimyo, issued an edict that outlawed Christianity and expelled the missionaries from his country. Some priests fled, others went underground in an attempt to keep the flame burning in secret.

Zealous government officials offered villagers astounding sums to betray the Christians living among them. A widely circulated schedule of rewards offered 500 silver pieces—about $350,000 in modern currency—to anyone who betrayed a priest; a monk was worth 300 coins, and a simple believer netted 100.

Villagers had a powerful incentive to betray the Christians in their midst. Once apprehended, the accused were offered an opportunity to recant their faith. This was demonstrated through words and deed: suspects proved their loyalty by cursing the name of Christ and stepping on a plaque that contained his image.

Those who refused to recant their faith were tortured to provoke a change of heart. One particularly horrific story claims that some Christians were lowered headfirst into the geothermal springs at nearby Unzen. It’s difficult to believe that a person would survive that experience long enough to recant their Christianity, but it surely must have exerted a powerful influence on the other prisoners who were compelled to watch the torture.

The Twenty-Six Martyrs

The Christian martyrs are still honored in Nagasaki. The most famous memorial commemorates an execution that occurred on Feb 5, 1597. Local authorities, having identified a number of Christian offenders, decided to make a public spectacle of the accused. They erected 26 crucifixes on the slope of Nishizaka Hill, overlooking Nagasaki harbor.

They then brought out the prisoners—20 Japanese and 6 European priests—and crucified them en masse.

Today a bronze memorial honors the martyrs. It stands in the spot where the twenty-six suffered and died.

Although the Nagasaki martyrs remain the most celebrated of their class, many more people were executed for their faith over the next three centuries.

The Faith Tolerated

Relief did not arrive until the second half of the nineteenth century. Persecution came to an end as the country embraced the Meiji Restoration. Japan’s rulers desperately wanted to catch up with the technologically advanced West. Christian leaders in Europe and America pressured their governments to deny assistance until the Japanese granted religious toleration to the beleaguered Christians. In 1889, the government ratified the Meiji Constitution, granting freedom of worship throughout the country.

Despite legal sanction, the religion never recovered. Three hundred years of persecution failed to root it out, but it never achieved the success it enjoyed in other Asian countries (the Philippines, for example). Although Christianity faced major cultural and religious barriers to entry, Daimyo Hideyoshi’s edict is probably the most important reason the faith never caught on in Japan.

The Hidden Guanyin

Guanyin, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, has appeared a couple of times in these pages over the past few months. We’ve encountered the stalagmite Guanyin (Feb. ‘26) and Guanyin on a turtle (Apr. ‘26).

But the well still bubbles with fresh wonders.

During Japan’s 300 years of Christian persecution, the faithful were forced to conceal their religious beliefs. Plausible deniability was the rule if government inquisitors arrived in your village or informers began to poke around in your affairs.

In those exigent times, it was useful to possess ambiguous religious artifacts; few were as difficult to pin down as the gently smiling Guanyin.

This statue, displayed in the Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture, illustrates that useful ambiguity. What do you see? Is it Mary holding the baby Jesus or Guanyin cradling an unnamed infant?

Among her many merciful qualities, the goddess is reputed to help couples with fertility issues—the “Child-Giving Guanyin.” In this manifestation, she is represented with the desired child cradled in her arms.

So, is it Mary or Guanyin? If an inquisitor was ransacking your hut for Christian artifacts, it would be decidedly useful to possess such an adaptable statue.

Outro

The end of this month’s issue merits a few literary fireworks: as May arrives we celebrate the sixtieth issue of the Peripatetic Historian—five years in production. I don’t know what the next year five years will bring, but I’m hoping that I’ll still be digging up items that you want to read about.

As always, thanks for coming along on the ride. See you next month as we get year six underway.

Until then, be safe, be sensible.

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This Month:

• Peripatetic Field Report: Hiroshima

• The Writer’s Corner

• An Opportunity Lost

Ready? Let’s dive in:

The Peripatetic Field Report: Hiroshima, Ground Zero

In the annals of history, the name ‘Hiroshima’ is linked to horror. Here, on August 6, 1945, an American B-29 dropped a single bomb on the sleeping city, inaugurating the nuclear age and the use of weapons that may eventually end our species’ tenure on earth.

This was my frame of mind when, during the recent trip to Japan, I traveled to the city. I expected the worst from my visit. I anticipated a flood of horror and remorse. And yet, as a fast ferry carried us up the Motoyasu River, I could not stop thinking, “what a beautiful city.”

Hiroshima defied my preconceptions. I expected charred, twisted ruins, apocalyptic smoke still rising into the sky, radioactive hotspots kept behind signposted barriers. Instead I found a place that reminded me of Paris on a spring morning.

Little remains of the destruction unleashed by the violent blast. The Japanese have done wonders rehabilitating the haunted ground, effacing the nightmare that followed the bombing. The only obvious reminder is the Atomic Bomb Dome. Formerly known as the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, the stone and steel structure was built on a European model to promote the manufacturing potential of the city. Two marble columns, still standing on an upper floor, hint at a former elegance.

The bomb, aimed at the nearby Aioi Bridge, exploded 150 meters from the hall. It killed everyone inside and shredded the building. The iron frame that once supported a copper dome stands exposed to the elements, twisted and skinned like a winter tree after leaf fall. At the structure’s base piles of shattered brick and stone clutter the ground where they fell.

Were it not for the remains of this building, visitors would be hard pressed to find any physical evidence of the disaster. Hiroshima is a bustling, vibrant, Japanese city. That is by design: Residents would like to wash away the stigma that still clings to the word Hiroshima.

I expected to be troubled by the horrendous thing my country had done here—and I was. But what really surprised and disturbed me was the normalcy of the aftermath. The Peace Park museum does a wonderful job conveying the human suffering that followed the bombing, but if you didn’t walk through those exhibits, you would be hard pressed to know what had happened here.

Had General MacArthur placed me in charge of postwar reconstruction, I would have walled off a kilometer by kilometer square at ground zero and left it undisturbed. I would want visitors to walk through ruined streets and blackened rubble, to see firsthand the destruction these weapons caused.

Humanity requires a sterner reminder that this must never happen again. I couldn’t help feeling that the perfection of the current city undermined that conclusion.

An Opportunity Lost

Having served many years as an academic historian, I feel uncomfortable with that seductive mental exercise known as “alternative history.” I prefer to contemplate the world as it is (or was) rather than as it might have been.

Nevertheless, after spending time in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then watching in horror as my country launched an unprovoked, illegal, morally-indefensible attack on Iran, I could not resist pondering what might have happened if early twentieth century diplomats had been a little more diligent in their attempt to regulate future conflicts.

On October 18, 1907, the delegates attending the Second International Peace Conference at the Hague, advanced Article XIV, an agreement to ban the wartime “discharge of projectiles and explosives from balloons or by other new methods of a similar nature.” It was, in short, a ban on weapons dropped from aerial platforms.

Unfortunately, only three countries—China, the United Kingdom, and the United States—ratified the treaty. Delegates to the second conference did not press for universal agreement. It was thought that the anticipated Third Hague Conference would provide the opportunity to work out the details and create a lasting ban of aircraft-launched weapons.

More than a hundred years later, we’re still waiting for that third conference. Real history chose a different path. Even as the Hague delegates were meeting, Roy Knabenshue was demonstrating the practicality of aerial delivery by dropping a flour bag on the Los Angeles City Hall (see my recent book, L. A. Birdmen for the details).

During the Great War (WWI), the military integrated aircraft into their operations. German Zeppelins bombed population centers, Allied pilots dropped munitions on Teutonic fields. As technology improved, the prospect of banning these weapons receded.

Today, the idea of a universal ban on air-dropped weapons is a risible notion. Modern militaries are deeply infatuated with the plummeting bomb. The world could have been a kinder and gentler place, but that was the road forsaken.

Outro

Summer is at hand in Taiwan. Temperatures are climbing back into the 80s. I will try to keep cool by remembering the lovely temperatures I experienced in Japan. One installment to go. Look for the grand finale next month.

Until then, be safe, be sensible.

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This Month:

• Peripatetic Field Report: Everywhere a Kukai

• From Guanyin to Kan’on

Ready? Let’s dive in:

The Peripatetic Field Report: Everywhere a Kukai

I was haunted, during my recent trip to Japan, by a dead man.

Or, as Billy Crystal once declared: ‘Mostly dead.’ It’s possible that he is simply meditating.

But more about this in a moment.

The person in question is one of Japan’s most famous monks: Kukai (later given the name Kobo Daishi). Analogically, Kukai is to Japan what Saint Benedict is to Europe. He roamed, he rambled, he planted monasteries like Johnny Appleseed spread orchards. If you’re examining Japanese religion, it is hard to avoid Kukai. Every city we visited claimed a Buddhist temple founded or influenced by the omnipresent monk, a man as ubiquitous as Hello Kitty.

A Bit of Biography

Born in the 7th century, Kukai followed a conventional path through his formative years, studying the Confucian classics and dreaming of entering imperial service. In his early twenties he grew disenchanted and turned to Buddhism. The desire to understand a mysterious sutra led him to China where he became the disciple of a famous monk. His master passed on the essentials of what became known as Shingon Buddhism, an esoteric practice that emphasizes mantras, mandelas, and secret rituals to ease one toward enlightenment.

Returning to Japan, Kukai served several emperors, spread his novel interpretation of Buddhism, established temples and monasteries, and ultimately founded Japan’s largest Buddhist complex, Koyasan.

An Encounter with the Big Buddha

Kukai’s work endures to this day. Tochoji Temple, pride of the city of Fukuoka, claims him as a founder. According to legend, Kukai established the temple in 806, right after his return from China.

Despite this illustrious antecedent, Kukai takes a back seat to the Big Buddha—a cypress statue that stands 10.8 meters tall and weighs thirty tons. It is a big Buddha.

I hoped to illustrate this point with a photo, but the monks do not allow the use of cameras around his bigness. A guard stands off to the side of the statue to enforce their decree.

No selfies with the Big Buddha.

A passage runs beneath the Big Buddha’s right knee. For those who dare enter, the route offers a foretaste of the horrors awaiting the wicked in the underworld: A garish series of painted panels line the tunnel, depicting the torments of hell.

The opening scene presents two boats. Buddha sits in the stern of the vessel on the left; he and his passengers cross the water in confident, untroubled serenity. The boat on the right, however, is rowed by two red demons; it transports a cargo of frightened sinners bound for the hot place.

Subsequent panels offer variations on the theme of eternal torment. Demons toss the wicked on pitchforks, dip them in bubbling vats like human tempura, and generally make the afterlife unpleasant for their victims. The last picture coincides with the final light in the passage. To exit one must advance into a pitch black space, running fingers over the curving walls, groping through the darkness toward.

The experience symbolizes our spiritual blindness in this world; the antidote is to place one’s faith in Buddha and aim for a seat in his boat.

And Speaking of Hell...

Kukai was not the first monastic founder to operate in Japan. A century earlier a monk named Gyoki established a monastery in an unlikely spot—at the foot of Kyushu’s Mount Unzen. It is a volcanic land, a place of earthquakes and geothermal upheaval. Plumes of scalding gas rush from fumaroles, sickly hot mud bubbles in churning cauldrons, and the ever-present stench of sulfur hangs like mustard gas over a battlefield. Gyoki saw the educative value of this uncomfortable landscape: It would serve as a constant reminder of the hot place waiting for monks who took their calling lightly.

This idea proved popular. When Kukai visited, a century later, numerous temples and monasteries stood among the seething hot springs. Kukai opened a Shingon monastery and carried the idea of a monastic complex away with him.

Koyasan - The Master Meditates

After a long peripatetic career, Kukai settled in a high mountain valley, south of Osaka. Convinced that monks could only make spiritual progress when removed from the temptations of the secular world, he established Koyasan, Japan’s premier monastic colony. Set at the foot of eight mountains, which are said to resemble lotus petals, Kukai established an enduring stronghold for Shingon Buddhism.

1,200 years later, 117 temples remain in the mountain valley. It is a beautiful spot, but I don’t recommend a January visit.

We stayed in the pilgrim’s lodging of Ekoin Temple, a traditional structure built of wood and paper. Apart from the guest rooms, the temple is unheated. As winter snow drifted through the air, capping the cedar limbs and waxy rhododendron leaves, we huddled in our room against a small gas heater that was barely able to push back the arctic air.

At night the building spoke—cracking, popping, straining as frigid mountain winds leaned against the exposed timbers.

Okunoin cemetery, Kukai’s final resting place, stood just down the road from our lodging. Opened in 816, the cemetery contains more than 200,000 graves in its two kilometer valley. Weather-eroded markers and stone lanterns line the paths that wind through groves of ancient cedar. On a freezing morning, with airy snowflakes falling through the gaps between the trees, it possesses a contemplative quality that is difficult to find in the rest of the crowded country.

Wonders await the curious explorer. Press your ear against the stone of a certain Buddhist nun, it is said, and you can hear the voices of the damned rising from Hell (no thank you). A few steps down the path, I discovered a well cut into the earth. A nearby sign proclaimed that if you look down into the darkness and fail to see your reflection in the water, then it is time to put your affairs in order—you will be dead within three years (I saw myself, so I should be good until 2029).

The centerpiece of the cemetery, however, is Kukai’s mausoleum.

And here is where things get a little odd.

According to his followers, Kukai hasn’t actually died. In 835 he simply slipped into a meditative state from which he will not stir until the advent of Matreiya Buddha, a messianic figure who is not scheduled to return until millions of years from now. To keep Kukai going while he meditates, local monks bring breakfast and lunch to his mausoleum, a duty they’ve carried out for more than 1,200 years.

How he eats while meditating is a mystery that lays beyond my limited imagination.

Nevertheless, if you should meet Kukai on the road, don’t be too surprised. He’s everywhere in Japan.

From Guanyin to Kan’on

Elephantine readers (and by this I mean those ‘with excellent memory skills,’ not ‘massive’ or ‘clumsy’) will recall last month’s Guanyin Stalagmite, a calcite formation at the base of Kaohsiung’s Monkey Mountain that resembles the Buddhist deity.

Imagine my great delight when, while paying a visit to Nagasaki’s Fukusai-Ji Buddhist Temple, I stumbled across another example of the goddess.

I should note that Guanyin is a much-beloved figure in Buddhism; her statue is commonly found in temples. What interests me are her odder manifestations.

Fukusai-Ji is an unusual building; it looks more like a church rectory than a traditional Japanese temple. That’s the curse of modern architecture. The atomic bomb destroyed the original temple, a building that had stood on the spot since 1628.

The temple was rebuilt in 1979, and rather than adopt a conventional design, the main building was constructed in the shape of a tortoise. An 18 meter statue of Guanyin (known as Kan’on in Japan) stands atop the tortoise’s back.

Why is Guanyin riding a turtle? I really have no explanation. The temple houses the bones of Chinese residents who died in the 1945 explosion. Its basement displays war relics and, paradoxically, a Foucault pendulum. A nearby placard claims that this is the third largest example of the device in existence (it’s not).

I have not found the thread that links a tortoise-riding Guanyin, the atomic bomb, and a nineteenth century physics experiment.

It is an encouragement for all of us to embrace the inexplicable mysteries that surround us.

A final Guanyin/Kan’on fun fact: when a Japanese optics company, Seikikōgaku kenkyūsho, needed a name for its first product, a cheap clone of a Leica 35mm camera, it chose the name Kwanon—in honor of the goddess. In 1947 the company modernized the spelling of its name, yielding today’s Canon Camera.

Outro

As the length of this month’s installment suggests, I harvested far too much material from the Japan expedition to cram into one month’s edition of the Peripatetic Historian. If you’ve enjoyed this month’s coverage, then look for the April issue and part two of the series.

Until then, be safe, be sensible.

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This Month:

• Peripatetic Field Report: Monkey Mayhem

• Tallying the Taipei Positives

Ready? Let’s dive in:

Monkey Mayhem

The internet has no shortage of advice on how to handle encounters with Formosan Rock Macaques. Don’t offer them food. Look away if they glance in your direct; eye contact could provoke a defense of the animal’s territorial claim. Should a macaque jump on your head, don’t flail your arms about as if you were trying to dislodge a wasp—walk slowly and calmly down the trail until it grows bored and leaps away of its own volition.

Make no erratic moves if you treasure the long relationship you’ve enjoyed with your ears.

In short, watch yourself. You don’t want to be the next earless tourist bleeding across the six o’clock news broadcast.

So, cognizant of these potential perils, why would someone voluntarily risk an encounter with Taiwan’s second most dangerous primate? It was, you can be certain, a question I was contemplating as we started up the jungled slopes of Shoushan—Kaohsiung’s fabled Monkey Mountain.

Kaohsiung is Taiwan’s second largest city, placed on the island’s southwestern coast. The city abuts the ocean, except for where it wraps around Monkey Mountain, whose western slope falls into the Strait of Taiwan. Although there are taller mountains inland, Shoushan does offer a 347 meter (1,138 feet) climb to reach its summit. As with many of the country’s developed trails, this meant several flights of stairs switch-backing up a rock face.

Up we went, the Kaohsiung cityscape dropping away behind us. Soon I heard bird song yielding to the chatter of primates skulking in the overhead canopy. An elderly gentleman eased slowly down the steps, knocking black, acorn-sized monkey feces off the path with a hiking pole. No doubt remained: we were in macaque territory.

The path flattened; the stairs yielded to a ribbon of rough, unfinished concrete, poured down the center of the trail. It was at this juncture that I spotted my first macaque. In my enthusiasm, I made the mistake of a direct gaze. Its sullen visage twisted into a snarl, a fierce display of small, sharp white teeth.

I raised my camera. “When you evolve a bit more,” I told the animal, “Get in touch and I’ll lend you some photos for your Instagram feed.”

I don’t know if I was persuasive.

We hiked deeper into monkey territory. The animals leapt through overhead branches. A mother nursed her child. A juvenile macaque voided its bladder, just missing a young Taiwanese boy standing on the trail.

No internet source mentioned that peril.

Running the gauntlet, threading hazards both real and imagined, we reached the summit and Pansong Pavilion. This is a popular rest stop, favored by both humans and macaques.

In a feat that provokes my unchecked admiration, Kaohsiung volunteers carry barrels of water to Shoushan’s summit in order to offer cold water and hot tea to arriving hikers. Nothing like a morning workout to stay in shape.

Apart from the odd snarl, the monkeys had been relatively indifferent to our passage. At the pavilion, they closed in and circulated freely among the spent hikers. Military strategists might label this tactic: “cultivating a false sense of security in the adversary.”

My charming wife Mary set her backpack on the floor behind the bench she occupied. A little blighter slipped surreptitiously over the platform railing, unzipped her backpack, and snatched a red plastic bag of pretzels.

It happened faster than it takes to type the sentence. Our first inkling of the theft was a flash of fur and bright plastic as the criminal monkey leapt gibbering upward into the overhanging tree branches. There, about 15 feet above our heads, he calmly tore open his prize. Pretzels rained, like manna from the heavens. The rest of the band scurried around our feet, snatching purloined pretzels that escaped his greedy mouth.

The ingenuity and execution of the crime were shocking. The pretzel bag was sealed—in theory the monkey shouldn’t have known it was in Mary’s backpack.

But it did and it took what it wanted, with impunity. Feeling thankful that we’d only sacrificed a snack to the monkey lords, we continued our loop of the mountain. 7.5 kilometers from our starting point, we finished a stair-filled descent and emerged again in the Kaohsiung suburbs.

Having survived Monkey Mountain our hearts longed to visit Yongquan Temple.

What is so rewarding about this Buddhist institution? What is the attraction that draws pilgrims from around the globe?

Well, as it turns out, Yongquan Temple contains a stalagmite that resembles Guanyin, a female Buddhist deity. Unfortunately the temple is hiding their light beneath the proverbial bushel basket. They really should put more effort into advertising this astonishing treasure. Signage is lacking; the locals we asked had never heard of this mysterious stone.

Ultimately, persistence paid its premium. After questioning a couple of Buddhist nuns, we found the second floor chamber where the sacred stalagmite stands, secured behind a protective glass pane.

The geologic oddity does resemble a slender woman—Christians might see the Virgin Mary in the calcareous protuberance. Depending on who you ask, Guanyin is either a goddess (the one who perceives the sounds of the world) or a Bodhisattva (someone who has achieved enlightenment); the manifestation is either a male, female, or androgynous being. Her nature is, in short, complicated.

Nevertheless, if I was asked to nominate a stalagmite to represent Guanyin, this is the one I would choose. It was, for our hike around Monkey Mountain, the perfect capstone.

Tallying the Positives

Former Denver Post sportswriter John Henderson (proprietor of the Dog-Eared Passport, a blog devoted to his expatriate life in Rome) writes an annual anniversary list of the things he still finds wonderful about his adopted city. His 2026 installment, the fruit of twelve years spent in the Eternal City, prompted me to offer a few notes on things I appreciate about life in Taipei, Taiwan.

Cost of Living: Our utility bills arrive every two months. We receive whopping bills like $15 for electricity and $11 for water—six times each year. Every time I think about what these services cost in the US or Europe, I am thankful.

Meals are similarly inexpensive. The last sandwich I ate in a US restaurant sucked $18 out of my wallet. I can’t imagine prices are much lower in the UK. A meal for two people, with drinks, at our local dumpling restaurant costs a little over $10. If I purchase my entrees in the local market, $6 purchases enough food for two meals.

Convenience: Taiwan has more than 12,000 temples of convenience spread across the island. We are rarely more than a block or two away from a xiaoqi (7-11) or a FamilyMart. These small stores offer a wide range of services—so much more than selling groceries. Head to the xiaoqi to have a coffee, eat a meal, pay your utility bills, recharge your metro card, or receive a package from Amazon. If you can’t do something at the xiaoqi, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.

Public Transport: Brilliant and affordable. Zip around Taipei on the metro or the vast network of shared bicycles. Hop on the High Speed Rail to blast down the island at 300 km/hour. Climb aboard a bus and rattle away into the countryside. There simply is no need for a car or scooter; anywhere I could possibly want to travel, from the north coast to Kaohsiung’s Monkey Mountain, can be reached on public transport for ridiculously affordable fares.

Security: The Taipei Metropolitan area contains 2.5 million people. It is a big city, a frightening and dangerous place—or not. I see unaccompanied school girls, seven and eight years old, skipping home alone in the evenings after dark. People leave bags and backpacks unattended on benches in Chiang Kai Shek Park while they participate in their morning Tai Chi practice. No one would ever steal them. Last month a visiting band piled their instruments at the base of the Peace Arch. The musicians wandered away, unconcerned about the equipment left unprotected. No one touched their instruments; why would they? I am certain there must be criminals working the angles somewhere in the country, but I have yet to detect their presence.

Not having to worry about practical matters—how much things cost, what might happen if I wander down a “dangerous” street—frees up a lot of time to appreciate the wonderful culture that surrounds me. I hope some of that is leaking through in the newsletters that have documented my time here. Yes, there are still annoyances: the mosquitoes have thinned out, but not vanished; Taiwan would be much nicer if summer only lasted six months. But once you get past these minor niggles, it becomes abundantly clear that this is truly a wonderful place to live.

P.S. For those of you interested in life in Rome, you will find John’s blog at: https://johnhendersontravel.com

Outro

As advertised in last month’s edition, although I am putting the final touches on this edition at my Taipei desk, by the time you read this, I will be exploring southwestern Japan. Look for a full report next month.

Until then, be safe, be sensible.

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This Month:

• Oh the Weather Outside is Frightful…

• Peripatetic Field Report: Tales from the Grand Hotel

• Mosquito Mayhem

Ready? Let’s dive in:

Did Taiwan Freeze Over?

You will recall that last month’s Peripatetic Historian ended with a cliffhanger. As we went to press, Taiwan’s Central Weather Authority had just issued a frigid weather warning and residents faced the horror of a plunging column of mercury. Temperatures were forecast to drop into the 50s (teens for those of you reading along in Celsius).

The situation was grim. I immediately implemented contingency plan "Old Jack Frost,” verifying that my closet still contained my small collection of long-sleeved shirts and shaking out the folds in my light blanket. One doesn’t mess around when these warnings arrive from the CWA. I had no doubt that a winter blast, fresh from the Siberian steppes, was about to scour our fair city.

Or not.

The prediction proved a false alarm. Our daytime high on Christmas Eve was 84 (29C). Today, with the new year only two days away, the temperature is 78. Our endless summer clings with the tenacity of a waterlogged rat balancing on an old ship’s timber.

Life in the semi-tropics.

Dragons and Presidential Escape Chutes: Life at the Grand Hotel

The Grand Hotel, Taiwan’s first guesthouse to attain a five star rating, attests to a love of dragons and the paranoia of the country’s first president.

It is a building designed to impress and overwhelm visiting dignitaries. Resembling a squat pagoda, the hotel stands fourteen floors high and shelters more than 500 rooms beneath its gold tile roof. Guests in the outer rooms enjoy private patios, from which they can gaze across the Keelung River and admire views of downtown Taipei and Songshan airport.

And then there are the dragons. Wherever you look, wherever a flat surface presents itself, you find a hand-carved dragon. According to Feng Shui masters, the hotel squats on a local dragon. I have no way to verify that claim, but even if it is untrue there are more than enough dragons in the hotel to compensate.

According to local tradition, an Australian visitor set himself the challenge of counting every dragon in the hotel. After three days—the length he had specified in his original room reservation—his task remained unfinished. He was forced to add another three days of residency. After six days of neck strain and finger cramps, he had counted more than 220,000 dragon images in the building.

Is this story true? As a professional skeptic I am dubious. A back-of-the-jotter calculation reveals that, assuming he tallied dragons for twelve hours a day, he would have been required to average 3,055 dragons per hour.

That’s a frenetic pace. It would be hard to keep it up, especially since he had to find each dragon before counting it. The story strikes me as an urban myth, but I will confirm that the hotel has a significant number of dragons lurking about.

In centuries past the dragon was closely identified with imperial power. The many instances of the creature in the Grand Hotel directs our minds toward the building’s sponsor, President Chiang Kai-shek.

As does a second relic of his reign: a classified escape slide integrated into the hotel fabric that allowed the president to flee the building in case of an attack.

The Western Secret Passage burrows beneath the hotel foundations, careening downhill to a concealed exit at the base of Jiantian Park. The tunnel is two meters wide, and for the first 20 meters of its descent, is divided between a steep flight of stairs and a polished concrete escape slide.

In an emergency, the presidential bodyguard would hustle Chiang Kai-shek to the tunnel entrance. One of the soldiers would then lay down on the smooth trough. The president was placed on top of the soldier, as snug as a child atop a sled. Released, the pair would zoom down the escape slide like an Olympic bobsled team. A second team of soldiers waited at the bottom of the chute to catch their president.

The leader was then hustled the remaining 65 meters to a non-descript steel door, built into a concrete wall. Having outfoxed potential assassins, Chiang Kai-shek would be led to the river and a waiting escape boat.

Although there were some tense moments during Chiang’s rule, emergency contingency plan “Sliding Tunnel Rat” was never implemented. For decades after his death the tunnel remained a closely guarded secret. Finally, in 2019, the government confirmed its existence and opened it for tours.

It certainly makes one wonder how many other rat runs and badger burrows run beneath the placid surface of this city. One never quite knows what other surprises remain concealed behind innocuous doors.

Mosquito Bait

The prolongation of mosquito season is another drawback of a summer that refuses to release its sticky fingers. We have a special breed here in Taipei—the 2:00 am Night Marauder—which, as its name suggests, specializes in concealing itself in secret spots until midnight is just a memory. At that point, when the human prey are adrift in their dreams, the hellspawn emerge from their hidden lairs to suckle like miniature vampire bats.

Although I retain faith in the overall arc of evolutionary theory, the mosquito whining in my ear, waking me with the sound of a high speed drill burrowing through a tough molar, makes me wonder if Satan hasn’t thrown a demonic wrench into the evolutionary pathways.

If, as Mr. Darwin argued, evolution favors genetic mutations that confer an advantage over non-mutated examples, then how does the theory account for the mosquito? It seems patently obvious that an insect heralded by an irritating whine labors under a significant genetic disadvantage. Surely, over the millions of years that these critters have annoyed the earth, there must have been some mutations that produced silent flight. How is it possible that shrill, unevolved mosquitoes still exist?

Commonsense suggests that, handicapped by their noisy approach, the baleful creatures would have been replaced by silent predators, the sort that might suck your blood without waking you up. And yet, here in Taipei’s eternal summer, they thrive. They are the Hydra of the insect world: smash one and two more spring forth.

We’ve tried everything: mosquito gassers that spread toxic fumes in the air; a bug zapper designed to lure them to an electric death; weeping and gnashing of teeth—but still they come. In theory, once the weather grows cold, they will stop breeding and give us a respite.

Oh for chilly days that will bring relief on so many fronts.

A Few Fun Mosquito Facts

Only female mosquitoes bite humans. Male mosquitoes lack the needle sharp proboscis required to lance the flesh. The mosquito that attacks you is a female.

Blood is not a regular part of the insect’s diet. Both genders normally feed on plant nectar. However, when the time comes to continue the species, the female turns carnivorous. She needs blood’s protein to produce eggs. At this point in the cycle she hunts a supply of warm-blooded mammals.

Or cold. Mosquitoes also torment frogs and lizards. Of course, since these critters enjoy snapping up a mosquito treat, this is undoubtedly a perilous option.

And finally, the easiest time to kill a mosquito is after she has tanked up on your blood. Sated on the red stuff, she grows turgid and slow to take flight. Watch your background, however, as the swat-ee will leave a nasty scarlet smear.

Outro

Eager to escape the heat, we are returning to Japan for our three week winter (ha!) break. I am expecting cooler temperatures and fascinating new vistas. Look for that report next month.

Until then, be safe, be sensible.

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This Month:

• Peripatetic Field Report: H. R. Giger’s Treehouse

• Arctic Cold Sweeps Taiwan

Ready? Let’s dive in:

H. R. Giger’s Treehouse

Anping is a historic district of Tainan, a southwestern Taiwan city. Here the indigenous and Chinese residents of the island made first contact with Europeans—the Dutch who arrived in 1624. The Dutch gained a temporary toehold and built a fort to secure their trading outpost (Fort Zeelandia) but ultimately were expelled in 1661.

Although failed colonization attempts are fascinating, it was natural history that captured my imagination during a November visit to Anping. The ruins of the old Dutch fort could not compete with the rundown building that stood a couple of blocks north.

I speak of the old Tait & Co. warehouse, a stone and brick structure erected in 1867. After China’s defeat in the Second Opium War, the emperor named Anping as one of the ports that Europeans could use for their trading enterprises. Tait & Co., a Scottish firm that traded opium for Taiwan’s sugar and camphor, moved right in. The company prospered until 1895, when the Japanese took over the island and nationalized international trade. They pushed the European traders out and confiscated the buildings for Japanese enterprises.

The Japanese Salt Company took over the warehouse and stored—unsurprisingly—salt. Fifty years later, after the end of World War II, the Japanese left and the warehouse was abandoned.

The Reign of the Banyan Tree

When I first heard the name “Anping Treehouse,” I envisioned a massive structure lodged in a tree—sort of a Swiss Family Robinson edifice. Reverse the image: the treehouse is a tree that took over a (ware)house. In a scene that could be slotted into a movie about an apocalyptic, post-human world, we are confronted with a giant banyan tree that has reclaimed the land, overrunning and enfolding the Tait & Co. warehouse into its root structure.

Now, full disclosure as the financial journalists say: I have been fascinated with banyan trees since I first arrived in this verdant land. It is my favorite Taiwanese plant, a communal, parasitic organism.

Wikipedia describes the tree as “epiphytic, lithophytic, and terrestrial.” What this means is that the seeds of the banyan tree are incredibly versatile. If a bird deposits one in a limb notch of another tree, it will sprout and send vines spreading around the the trunk and limbs of its host. The banyan will use the host tree in the same way a young tomato plant climbs a stake.

Should a seed fall on stone or concrete, the plant will anchor itself and spread like ivy across the hard surface. Lacking the first two options, a seed can also take root in the earth and grow in a normal manner.

No matter how the seed starts, one of the distinctive characteristics of the banyan is its aerial roots. As limbs grow laterally, the tree drops long tangled threads toward the ground. When these touch the earth, they root and and develop into secondary trunks that support the expanding tree. Left unchecked, a banyan tree will spread in all directions, covering acres of land in a dense, woody thicket.

Or, as in the case of the Anping Treehouse, an entire building. Lacking dedicated gardeners to keep the aerial roots in check, the tree overwhelmed the walls of the building, covering it in a dense weave of roots, trunks, and limbs.

Absolutely fascinating. I was reminded of the “biomechanical” art of Swiss painter H. R. Giger, whose chilling fusion of machine and organic material heightened the tension in the movie Alien.

The banyan tree has completely overwhelmed the Tait & Co. warehouse, integrating the stone and brick into its own structure. The building has been assimilated, folded into a greater biological complex. Should humans end up destroying themselves, it is easy to imagine the banyan trees spreading across Taiwan.

Resistance is futile.

“Frigid fangs of winter beckon with cold temps”

The season of arctic cold is upon us, suggested this headline, plucked off the Nov. 15, 2025 front page of the Taipei Times. Taiwan’s Central Weather Authority warned that the island might experience temperatures as low as 16-17 C (61-63 F) before the month drew to a close. A climactic crisis to be certain.

As someone who spent 14 years enduring the winters of Spokane, Washington—where entire months passed in which the temperature did not rise above 0 C—I have a different scale of cold. Nevertheless, I am anticipating an outbreak of puffy jackets, stocking hats, gloves, and woolly scarves as the environment again tests Taiwanese pluckiness and fortitude with temperatures that might plunge as low as 10 C / 50 F before this misery abates.

Pity us as we prepare for another horrific chill in Taiwan.

Outro

And, of course, winter’s approach inaugurates the holiday season. Shopkeepers in Taipei have had their Christmas decorations up since Halloween. I anticipate much yuletide cheer to come this month. Wherever you are, enjoy the season, and I will see you back here as the new year begins.

Until then, be safe, be sensible.

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This Month:

• Peripatetic Field Report: The Bubonic Plague Issue

Ready? Let’s dive in:

Confronting the Black Death

So let us imagine that we are living in a pre-scientific age, a time before modern medicine or, in fact, even a primitive understanding of the root causes of illness. It was a golden era, a time that would delight US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Natural remedies—bloodletting, animal dung (ingested or applied topically)—stood prominent among treatment possibilities. Life expectancy was low, mortality high, and there were none of those nasty vaccines to stoke controversy.

Which left Venice (and the rest of Europe) in a a poor position when the first wave of Bubonic Plague reached the Mediterranean in 1347/8. Venice, possessor of a huge merchant fleet engaged in regular traffic with the East, was one of the first European cities to feel the blow. Over the next five years, the Black Death mowed like a scythe through the heart of the city.

As the recent Covid outbreak reminded us, pandemics are a frightening thing. This is true even when we understand the underlying science of a disease. But imagine the terror of our ancestors who lacked an intellectual framework to explain what was happening around them. Today everyone appeared hale and hearty; tomorrow family, neighbors, and friends were suddenly sick and dying.

Faced with what appeared to be a distressing and inexplicable judgment from heaven, the Venetians pioneered an innovative approach to tackling the disease.

The Secular Option

Although centuries passed before Europeans discovered the plague’s cause (the bacillus Yersina pestis, identified by Swiss microbiologist Alexandre Yersin in 1894) people noticed that the disease developed in clusters: let one person show symptoms and soon family members and neighbors were likely to become infected. Proximity appeared to matter. This observation served as the basis for the miasma—bad air—theory. Doctors believed that the plague was produced by poisonous air, gases that concentrated in pockets and killed those who lived in the area. This miasma clung to infected individuals or objects, and seeded new pockets as people moved around.

Building on this explanation, Venetian doctors began to wear masks during outbreaks:

They stuffed efficacious herbs into the overgrown proboscis, a precaution intended to filter the miasma. Although stylish and comforting, the mask offered no protection against the biting fleas that actually transmitted the bacillus.

Although the miasma theory fell short of true understanding, it did suggest a solution that did prove useful: the separation of the infected from the healthy population.

Although the first stroke ran from 1347 to 1351, a series of aftershocks rattled the city over the following century. The plague receded and then mysteriously returned. In 1423 the Venetian Senate voted to establish a “hospital” for plague victims on a nearby island. This facility, Lazzaretto Vecchio, (the ‘old’ isolation hospital) was less concerned with treatment than sequestration. Officers of the Magistrato alla Sanità snatched individuals displaying plague symptoms in the city and transported them to Lazzaretto Vecchio. Those who survived a 40 day trial (our English word “quarantine” has its roots in the Italian quaranta-forty) were allowed to return home. The majority of internees did not survive the experience—their bodies were stacked in mass graves in the island’s cemetery.

Like recent Covid measures, the government lockdown and restrictions on movement were unpopular, but logic suggests it must have saved many lives. The isolation of plague victims slowed the disease’s spread. It was only a matter of time before the practice was extended to deal with the threat of international trade.

Lazzaretto Nuovo

On an October Saturday afternoon, I hopped off the number 13 vaporetto and climbed a short gangplank to the gates of Lazzaretto Nuovo (the ‘new’ isolation hospital). It is a small island, sitting three kilometers northeast of Venice. Uninhabited today, this low-lying rectangle of earth, rising out of the tidal marsh, was the site of Venice’s second innovative response to the Black Death.

The Lazzaretto Vecchio had demonstrated its value in reducing the impact of plague in the city. Unfortunately, Venice, at the hub of international trade, remained vulnerable to the contagion carried on arriving ships.

Lazzaretto Nuovo, was intended to blunt the danger. In 1468, the city took over an island previously owned by the Benedictine monks of San Giorgio Maggiore, and built a massive cargo and lodging complex on the site. Each ship arriving in the lagoon was inspected by a Venetian doctor. If he discovered signs of the disease aboard (or if the ship came from an afflicted city) he ordered the ship to Lazzaretto Nuovo. There longshoremen unloaded the cargo and subjected it to disinfection procedures to drive off the miasma (exposure to fresh air and sunshine; washing durable goods in vinegar; fumigation with juniper and rosemary). The crew and passengers were assigned lodging and confined for forty days. Unlike its sister facility, people were expected to survive their internment and eventually reach the city. It was a nuisance, but a creative response to this mysterious ailment.

Today, most of the buildings have been dismantled, but the tall brick wall that prevented pilferage and escape still rings the site. Inside, guarded by swarms of mosquitoes, stands the Tezon Grande (“Large warehouse” in the Venetian dialect). This structure—a long, 100 meter brick structure—is the second largest building remaining from the heyday of the Venetian Republic.

Sixteenth century graffiti decorates the interior, a testament to the boredom of the workers and the sailors restricted to the island.

The 1630-31 outbreak of plague tested the Venetian quarantine system. Plague again swept the city and there were so many victims that Lazzaretto Vecchio was overrun. The overflow was diverted to Lazzaretto Nuovo. When the second site ran out of beds the government chartered hundreds of boats to create a floating hospital that encircled Lazzaretto Nuovo.

In two years, nearly 100,000 residents of Venice and the nearby islands died. It was a frightening death toll. Many historians believe that political cowardice amplified the casualty rate. The city’s leaders knew how to check an outbreak, but in seventeenth century Venice, as in the modern world, citizens resented restrictions on their freedoms. The politicians were slow to implement full quarantine procedures and the disease exploded.

Fortunately, this was the city’s last great outbreak. Proactive quarantine practices shielded the city from further episodes and by 1750 the threat of plague had receded. The two large plague islands were mothballed and a smaller facility, Lazzaretto Novissimo (the ‘newest’ hospital), was established on Proveglio.

Today Lazzaretto Nuovo is only a shell of its former self. The harbor, once filled with merchant ships from across the Mediterranean, has silted up and turned to a marshy tideland. Apart from swarms of mosquitoes, the island has no permanent residents. The raw, ragged bricks stand in silent testament to the hundreds of thousands of people who suffered the ravages of the great pandemic. They are also a memorial to the ingenuity of a people who, faced with an inexplicable catastrophe, exercised their minds and found a creative way to face the horror of the unknown.

Outro

I had hoped to write something about Venice’s spiritual response to the Black Death, but the Substack editor is already complaining about the length of this month’s installment. Deo volente, I will return to the topic next month—unless some other shiny object captures my attention. One never knows.

Until then, be safe, be sensible.

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This Month:

• Peripatetic Field Report: Venezia

• The Writer’s Corner

• Then and Now: St Mark’s Campanile

Ready? Let’s dive in:

Peripatetic Field Report: Venezia

Venice has been painted and described many thousands of times...there is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject...There is nothing new to be said about her certainly, but the old is better than any novelty.

— Henry James, Italian Hours

Mr. James is, of course, completely correct. Painted, photographed, captured in prose, poetry, and lyrics—few aspects of the city have evaded notice. There really is nothing new beneath the Adriatic sun.

But let that not blunt our enthusiasm. The pessimistic opinion quoted above served as an introduction to several substantial chapters Henry James wrote about the city in Italian Hours. Venice also served as the backdrop for two of his novels—The Aspern Papers and The Wings of the Dove. He might be right—there may be nothing new to say about the jewel in Italy’s crown—but that shouldn’t discourage a person from trying.

Like Henry James, I am a confirmed Venetophile. For years I have believed that the city is the finest place on the planet.

Yes, it is overpriced, overtouristed, and overrun with AirBnB rental units. The number of permanent residents has declined for decades. Most of the “locals,” those who run the shops, sweep the streets, and drive the vaporetti, can’t afford to live in the city. They arrive for work aboard the morning trains and buses from Mestre. Venice is more Disney park than a living, functioning city.

And yet, despite my intimate familiarity with the city’s deficiencies, I find myself unable to shake off a long standing obsession with the place. Should we be planning a vacation together you will want to ask me what my second choice might be; there is never a mystery about where I would most like to go.

Research, Research, Research

This is all by way of explaining my October plan. While Taiwan shakes off the last of the clinging summer heat, I am going to plant myself in Venice and work on a new book. History, fiction, travel guide? I’m not sure yet.

But like an italian tacchino, I intend to baste myself in the city’s juices, to open my ears to the Muses of La Serenissima. What comes of the exercise remains to be seen.

Alongside my research and writing, I plan to work on a small photographic project. Six years ago I captured a number of long exposure photographs of various landmarks. For example:

A stack of neutral density filters jammed onto my camera lens produces images in which the water smooths into a mystical, misty field. It’s a fun technique, one I hope to extend in my free time.

So that’s October sorted. I’ll be back at the end of the month with a full report.

The Writer’s Corner

Regular readers of this screed are treated (subjected? forced to endure?) a monthly dose of my thoughts about the peripatetic lifestyle. On this page I enjoy a monopoly of opinion here.

Ever wonder how Mrs Peripatetic Historian—my wife, Mary—sees our adventures? She was recently interviewed about the overseas lifestyle and the video podcast is now available for your viewing pleasure:

Then and Now

The campanile (bell tower) that punctures the sky above the Piazza San Marco is one of Venice’s most iconic symbols. Standing 323 feet high, it dominates the skyline, the tallest structure in the city.

Climb to the top and you will be rewarded with stunning views of the five Byzantine domes that cap the Basilica di San Marco as well as a panoramic view of the city spreading away in three directions.

It looks and feels like a permanent part of the city’s fabric, a structure that must have been mortared together during the high middle ages. That perception would be mostly accurate: the earliest incarnation of the tower dates to the tenth century.

Naturally today’s building is not the original structure. Over the centuries, lightning strikes and minor earthquakes took their toll on the monument. Numerous repairs and refurbishments were required to keep the campanile standing.

Despite these adversities, the campanile endured. Right up until the beginning of the twentieth century.

In July 1902, the city fathers decided that it was time to replace the roof of the loggetta, the small building that presses against the base of the campanile. This did not go well. The removal of a structural girder attached to the base of the campanile produced a crack on the north side of the structure.

The tear in the fabric grew rapidly. Soon the fissure stretched from the campanile’s base to the platform that supported the bells. There didn’t appear to be a way to stop it. Duct tape would not be invented until the 1950s. Anticipating a disaster, the city engineers cordoned off the piazza and waited to see what would happen.

At 9:53, on the morning of July 14, 1902, the crack yawned wide. Suddenly gravity took hold and the tower collapsed in a vertical slide of brick, stone, and mortar.

Thanks to the vigilant action of the engineers, no one was hurt. The loggetta was completely crushed, but apart from some damage to the nearby Marciana library, the other structures escaped harm.

Less than twelve hours after the catastrophe, Venice’s city council met and voted to rebuild. Buoyed by contributions from other Italian cities, reconstruction began in the summer of 1903. The project required nine years and more than one million bricks, but the campanile reopened on April 25, 1912.

The rebuilt campanile stands to this day, a tribute to Venetian engineering and the occasional duct tape patch job. Of course plans to remodel the loggetta are still hooted down in council meetings.

Outro

September brought a typhoon and relentlessly hot temperatures to Taiwan. I expect the heat to release its grip over this coming month. Temperatures in Venice are running 20-25F cooler than Taipei. I am looking forward to autumnal weather—golden days and chilly nights. I may even be able to wear a jacket.

Be safe, be sensible.

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This Month:

• A Foretaste of Hell

• The Writer’s Corner

• Kuai Kuai

Ready? Let’s dive in:

Peripatetic Field Report: A Foretaste of Hell

Family responsibilities extended my summer stay in the United States; I didn’t return to Taipei until the middle of August. That first night, emerging from the air-conditioned, subterranean metro station, felt like stepping into a superheated sponge. The beginning of Ghost Month was still a week away (August 23 in Taipei), but I could believe that the guardians of the underworld had already opened Hell’s gates.

The month limped to a close with a series of near-100F (38C) days. High humidity intensified the brutal temperatures. The grinding sun and a thick blanket of damp air shoved the misery index to fresh records: “feels like 121F” claimed the Weather Underground.

I do so long for the cool days of November. There is no doubt that the best answer for August in Taipei is a vacation in New Zealand.

How About a Cool Dip?

In most places, when heat drives the mercury to the thermometer’s peak, people flock to the beaches for a cool swim. Surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, you might expect the Taiwanese to exchange their sweltering cities for the balmy sea.

It’s not recommended. Ghost Month is underway and one must be extra cautious during this time of heightened spiritual activity. Drowning victims pose a particular threat: they become a special type of ghost, a shui gui, that haunts the waters where it lost its life. Shui gui cannot progress toward reincarnation until they snare a propitiatory sacrifice whose soul can take their place.

Consequently, swimming is a major taboo: the spirits lurk beneath the waves, just waiting to clench an unwary ankle in an ethereal hand. Go in for a dip and you might find yourself dragged to the bottom in a flail of thrashing limbs.

Leisurely strolls beside large bodies of water—rivers, lakes, or the open sea—are also discouraged. You never know when a vengeful spirit might shove you into the drink.

Other things to avoid this month: surgeries, purchasing a car or house, marriage, and leaving freshly laundered clothes outside overnight. Although the heat might seem a perfect way to achieve quick drying, a wandering ghost could attach itself to your blouse, and then—like an annoying mosquito—ride the garment into your home.

In short, there’s more than just heat to worry about during a Taipei August.

The Writer’s Corner

“Book News” has been a consistent feature of the Peripatetic Historian for most of the newsletter’s four year run. Discerning readers will have noted that this section has been rather thin on actual news over the past six months. LA Birdmen took off a year ago, it sold some copies, and then winged away into the mystic. The Pulitzer Prize winners were announced in May, but once again the committee overlooked my works.

By this point in 2025, I anticipated the announcement of an exciting new project. I have spent the past two years researching President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 jaunt across Europe. Teddy's Grand Tour: An American Bull Moose in a European China Shop—as I provisionally titled this epic—focused on the rollicking politician’s three month passage across the Continent, sparking political brush fires and stirring controversy from Cairo to London.

A good time was guaranteed for all.

Unfortunately, 32 US publishers disagreed. While praising the skills of the writer and the clarity of the book proposal, the editors who reviewed the material believed that contemporary politics had exhausted American readers. Moreover, they questioned whether a US audience would want to read a story set in Europe.

To which I had to say: “What?”

It is a head scratcher. I suppose that it is bad luck to sign a publishing contract during Ghost Month, but I would have taken the chance. As it stands, I will now need to retreat to my writer's corner and ponder my next move.

More to come...

Kuai Kuai

The beliefs surrounding Ghost Month hint at significant differences between Eastern and Western religions. I’ve learned a little bit about Taiwanese religions in the year I have been here, but it would take a lifetime to fully comprehend the complexity and (to my mind) contradictory nature of these ideas.

As far as I can tell, rigid beliefs—formulated as dogmatic propositions about the gods—do not underpin Taiwan’s religious landscape. This is a hard idea for a westerner to swallow. A Christian believes that Jesus was the son of God; a Muslim denies this idea and argues that Mohammed brought the Allah’s final message to humanity; the Jews discount both propositions.

Monotheism, by its exclusive nature, advances the claim that one particular set of beliefs is true—and thus all other beliefs must be false. Orthodoxy—right thinking, maintaining ‘correct’ ideas—is a central plank among western religions.

Belief is far more flexible and fuzzy in Taiwan. People pick and choose religious practices from Taoist, Buddhist, Confucian, and traditional folk religions without any apparent concern for the doctrines that underpin these religious systems. Someone who is a committed Buddhist might participate in Taoist rituals without any apparent cognitive dissonance. What works, what maintains harmonious relations with the spirit world, is far more important than dogmatic purity.

Kuai Kuai corn chips top my list of odd things that just work here in Taiwan.

Although Taiwan is one of the world’s technological leaders—a large percentage of the integrated circuits used in electronic devices are manufactured here—the entire enterprise hangs on the efficacy of green plastic bags of corn chips. Travel through the country and you will find the snack food sandwiched around electronic equipment. Take, for example, this wifi router in a hotel ball room:

What is the connection between corn chips and electronics?

According to local legend, a few decades ago a graduate student was struggling to complete his Ph.D. thesis. Unfortunately, his unreliable computer kept crashing as he typed (probably an Apple product). At wit’s end he set a bag of Kuai Kuai chips on top of the machine and, lo and behold, the computer operated flawlessly. The thesis was completed and submitted, but, more importantly, a major discovery was made: Kuai Kuai chips warded off evil spirits and the Microsoft Blue Screen of Death.

News of the discovery story spread across the island. Today you will find green bags tucked around the equipment in high tech chip manufacturing factories and piled on the ventilators in hospital intensive care units. They keep the electronics working.

I am not making this up; it is a real thing here.

Kuai kuai can be translated as “be good,” and green is the color that means “go.” The snack’s manufacturer professes ignorance about why so many people have placed their faith in the mystical properties of their product, but the company does not discourage its use in this unconventional manner. It is a belief that sells many bags of chips.

Do the Taiwanese believe that there is a rational reason to pack bags of Kuai kuai around computer equipment. Probably not—but you cannot deny that it seems to work. Just like feeding ghosts or the Kinmen Island practice of erecting stone lions to divert typhoon winds.

When dealing with the unseen world, do what works, even if it involves talismanic corn chips.

Outro

In case you are thinking of trying this at home, it is important to change the Kuai Kuai bags every six months. And don’t eat the chips in the old bag—they may have soaked up an evil spirit.

Be safe, be sensible.

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This Month:

• Summer Vacation

• A Haven for Seabirds

Ready? Let’s dive in:

Peripatetic Field Report: The Summer Vacation Edition

As noted in the previous issue, I bid a fond adieu to Taiwan at the end of June and set metaphorical sails for America’s Pacific Northwest (Washington and Oregon). Three weeks of grand-parenting, followed by another week visiting my mother consumed the month like a box of doughnuts in a police station.

As July limps to an end, I am taking 6-8 mile hikes in Champoeg Park every day to keep my peripatetic spirits up. The park is a treasure. Alive with oak trees shaped like gigantic broccoli stalks and massive cedar trees that miraculously escaped the logger’s ax, it is a pleasant place to walk. The brambles are loaded with juicy blackberries and quail lead their broods on short dashes across the trails.

As attractive as it is to stroll the trails, I cannot imagine settling into this way of life on a permanent basis. There is still so much to see, so much to write about. A few more days and I will be back on history’s trails.

Call this American interlude a Summer Vacation.

Book News

And speaking of vacations, my two recent books—Comet Madness and L.A. Birdmen—are fabulous beach reads.

Learn more at: https://richardjgoodrich.com/Books.html.

Three Arches NWR

Finley, Middle Arch, and Shag—names that evoke musicians in a sixties psychedelic rock band. In fact, these nicknames are attached to the three stone islands that lift from the water off the beach at Oceanside, Oregon. For two weeks in July, they were my constant companions, the view that filled the windows of a rented house.

Not only are they visually appealing, appearing and receding in the summer fog banks, but they also carry the distinction of being one of America’s earliest National Wildlife Refuges.

The islands are home to a large population of seabirds—murres, petrels, puffins, and the inevitable gulls—as well as sea lions and seals who stretch out on the lower levels to bask beneath the summer sun. In the evenings gray whales patrol the waters around the islands, nosing mouthfuls of small crustaceans from the sandy bottom.

In 1901, two American naturalists—William Finley and Herman Bohlman—arrived here to photograph sea birds. The scientists were treated to a horrific display. A tugboat from nearby Tillamook brought a crowd of gun-toting roustabouts out to the islands for a Sunday excursion. As the ladies cheered, the men folk blasted away at sea lions and sea birds, using the rookeries for target practice.

The mindless carnage shocked Finley and Bohlman; shotgun-slaughtered birds littered the beach the following morning. The two naturalists decided to end the bloodbath. They employed a local fisherman to row them out to the largest rock. Risking their lives—the islands rise perpendicularly from the sea and are covered in slick guano; sliding off into the water and drowning was a real possibility—the naturalists landed and, after climbing a 200 foot stone wall, set up their base camp. They spent fourteen days photographing the birds in their natural habitat. Having secured documentary evidence of the variety of birds that used the islands as a nesting ground, Finley and Bohlman appealed to US President Theodore Roosevelt for protection.

Roosevelt, no stranger to blasting away at birds, indulged the pair, and in 1907 designated the islands a National Wildlife Reserve, the first established west of the Mississippi.

Thanks to the efforts of Finley and Bohlman, as well as the backing of President Roosevelt, that protection endures. Humans are not allowed to visit the island—a 500 foot exclusion zone surrounds the islands. The birds and sea mammals carry on their lives as they have for thousands of years, spared the unwelcome incursions of real estate developers and selfie snappers.

Outro

Shortly after I return to Taiwan, the Zhongyuan Festival—known locally as “Ghost Month”—kicks off. The Gates of Hell will open and wandering spirits will overrun the unseen world. Who knows what will happen? Tune in next month for an update.

Until then, be safe, be sensible.

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This Month:

• One Year in Taipei—A Retrospective

• The Wind Dragons Stir

Ready? Let’s dive in:

Peripatetic Field Report: The One Year Retrospective

My first year in Taiwan (an academic year—our lives are still governed by a university calendar) has been fascinating, invigorating, sticky and sweltering. Glancing back over the past eleven installments of the Peripatetic Historian, I can little believe how much we have packed in—and that doesn’t count side trips to Japan and Hong Kong.

Most of my coverage focused on the big adventures; I’ve spilled little ink on the quieter routines that pack around the major jaunts like crumpled newspapers in a china box. It has long been my contention that expatriate life is no different, 90% of the time, than what a person experiences in their home country. We all sleep, eat, take showers, and perform our daily chores. Whether I am living in the United States, Palestine, or Taiwan, I still write, research, and read every day. I drag a consistent core of activities behind me, no matter where I park my desk.

But that final 10% slice—well that, is why I choose to live abroad. It is the enervating difference, the unique experiences that make the life of a peripatetic historian so fulfilling.

So, in the spirit of celebrating the 10%, I thought I would tie a ribbon around the first year in Taipei with a couple of observations about daily life—the commonplaces that are probably different from where you live.

The Daily Walk: Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Gardens

My peripatetic historian’s license stipulates that I cover at least four kilometers each day. (The requirements for the ‘sedentary historian,’ as you might imagine, are somewhat different). Although Taipei has several wonderful parks, the space around the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial earns my seal of approval.

The park contains four major attractions: a huge white pyramid that honors the former president, the National Theater, the National Concert Hall, and the Peace Arch. A blue-tiled portico covers three-quarters of the circumference, an elegant structure that offers shelter from the Plum Rains and the skin-scorching sun.

Depending on my mood, most days usually find me making one to three spins around the park’s perimeter. It is a wonderful place to walk and a fascinating encounter with Taiwanese culture. In the city center, Taipei residents live in apartment buildings; CKS is the communal backyard.

One always sees tai chi practitioners—whether alone or in large groups—as well as the more esoteric forms of the martial arts, like sword and staff forms. Musicians, of varying skill, practice beneath the portico. From drums to the reliably painful erhu, saxophones to the ocarina, music enlivens the route. The park owns a large, portable karaoke machine, which always attracts a circle of elderly users sharing their talents.

Then there are those who practice the quieter arts: Qigong masters contemplate the noble Banyan trees, elderly couples eat picnic lunches and pour tea from portable pots, old men square off for fierce duels across Chinese chess boards.

It is a place I find ever-charming, a wonderful walk, and definitely part of the 10% that makes it worth living here.

Politics: Taiwan style

Of course no matter where one flees it is difficult to outrun politics. Taiwan, like most countries, has its own version of the governmental soap opera. Here the fault line runs between the Kuomintang (conservative party) and the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party). The DPP holds the presidency at the moment while the KMT controls more votes in the legislature. This has led to popular unrest, a round of petitions, and the invocation of the Public Official’s Election and Recall Act. Twenty-four KMT legislators face recall. If successful, the DPP could take full control of the executive and legislative branches of the government. A vote on the targeted legislators is scheduled for later this summer.

That means it is time for all good politicians to hit the hustings. Campaign materials are already spreading, and one of the most innovative was this pack of tissues my charming wife was handed on a street corner:

According to Google translate, the text reads:

Go against evil

Come out and vote

I don’t agree with the recall

Very good legislator

Luo Zhiqiang

Presented with this example of electioneering, the obvious jokes bubble up like an overflowing cesspool:

1. Once again politicians trot out their tissues of lies.

2. There’s nothing like free tissues to help clean up the [expletive deleted] we’re about to hear.

Have a better joke? Drop it in the comments section below.

Book News

And here’s a brief commercial reminder: If you enjoy the stories you read in the Peripatetic Historian, you will probably also enjoy the extended content found in my recent books—Comet Madness and L.A. Birdmen.

Learn more at: https://richardjgoodrich.com/Books.html.

The Wind Dragons Stir

Sharp readers will recall that my earliest reports from Taiwan (Peripatetic Historian, Sept.-Nov. 2024) featured earthquakes and typhoons. A pair of rollicking temblors struck shortly after our arrival and three typhoons crossed the island before the season fizzled.

After months of stable soil, mid-June tossed a 6.4 earthquake at us. Like reluctant jelly we jiggled about for thirty seconds—and might I add that there is something truly disconcerting in the sound of concrete grinding in the walls—before the earth steadied.

Then, just to keep life interesting, the first Invest of the season popped up on my master weather console. “Invest” is meteorologist-speak for “investigative area,” a low pressure dimple in the atmosphere with the potential to develop into something more interesting. This particular invest bloomed in the vicinity of Yap, a small Pacific island group that rarely makes the international news. It slowly sidled west, strengthening and drifting toward Taiwan. As it took on a personality, it received a name, Wutip.

Ultimately it passed over the Philippines, reached typhoon strength (75 mph), and came aboard China near Hainan. Curving like a boomerang, it tracked up China’s interior before collapsing in rain showers and turbulent winds. Seventeen people were killed during the storm’s passage.

Wutip inaugurated the 2025 typhoon season. For some reason—namely that I had never bothered to look into the matter—I didn’t expect typhoons until August. As it happens, June typhoons are not unusual. Indeed, they have been recorded as early as May.

Nevertheless, I am thinking about taking a page from the Kinmen Island playbook and erecting a Wind Lion on my front balcony (see last month’s edition of the Peripatetic Historian).

Now I just need a heavy weight to keep the ground from frolicking…

Outro

By the time Substack drops this post into your inbox, I will be wheels down in the United States. It is going to be a compressed visit, with half the time dedicated to the cool breeze and sea salt of the Oregon coast. I hope to uncover a fresh historical angle for the August issue, and, failing that, I shall fill the post with starfish photography. Until then:

Be safe, be sensible, and I will see you next month.

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This Month:

• Standing on the Shore

• In Pursuit of Wind Lions

• Shells to Ploughshares

• Plumb Raining

Ready? Let’s dive in:

Peripatetic Field Report: Standing on the Shore, Staring at China

For a spot positioned on the front line of the ongoing squabble between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China, a place that was on the receiving end of more than a million artillery shells during the twentieth century, Kinmen Island appears far more peaceful and prosperous than I imagined. I expected to find bunkers and razor wire fences, large military bases and green camouflaged tanks rolling through the streets.

Instead, as our Mandarin Air flight dropped toward the runway, I saw houses, apartment buildings, high-rises and factories, knit together with a skein of roads that spread across the landscape. The island has made a great leap forward, transitioning from combat zone to nascent vacation destination in two decades. The enemy that once threatened invasion is now courted—a ferry shuttles mainland tourists across six miles of ocean, the moat between Kinmen and the Chinese city of Xiamen (roughly 300 miles northeast of Hong Kong). Luxury hotels welcome the same communist citizens that once gave military planners sleepless nights.

A Failed Invasion

Tension between Kinmen Island and the Mainland dates back to 1949. After the communist forces drove Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist government to Taiwan, Chairman Mao turned his attention to recovering this small island group. It would serve as a stepping stone for the ultimate invasion of Taiwan.

At 0200 hours, October 25, 1949, an invasion fleet carrying 9,000 soldiers crossed the channel and landed on the northern end of the island at Guningtou. A ferocious two day battle erupted as each army struggled to dominate the battlefield. Ultimately, Mao’s forces were forced to retreat or surrender. The nationalist army repulsed the invaders.

Having failed in this attempt (and a subsequent try on the adjacent Lieyu Island) the communists were compelled to look for another path to repossession of the island group.

Meanwhile, the nationalist forces worked to convert the island into an impregnable fortress. They seeded the beaches with landmines and sank anti-landing craft barriers in the breaking waves. Engineers carved an elaborate network of forts and artillery platforms into the island’s stone core; sea-level tunnels were excavated in granite cliffs to provide a refuge for small warships and supply vessels. The island was hardened against a marine attack, forcing the People’s Liberation Army planners to alter their strategy.

In 1954 and 1958, the PLA fired brutal artillery barrages at the island, hoping to force the occupiers to withdraw to Taiwan. An estimated one million shells fell on Kinmen. At one point the United States—then committed to the defense of Taiwan—contemplated nuclear bombardment of the adjacent mainland.

Ultimately these crises subsided and the two sides settled into a pattern of firing token shells at each other on alternate days. Most of these missiles contained propaganda rather than explosives. This odd duel lasted until 1979, when the United States formally recognized the People’s Republic of China.

The conflict de-escalated to a war of words—literally. On the northwestern coast of the island, the army erected a three-story concrete structure—the Beishan Broadcasting Wall—that housed 48 massive speakers. This auditory weapon blasted music and propaganda at the city of Xiamen. Propaganda speeches promised a warm welcome to defectors; the songs of Teresa Teng, a popular Taiwanese artist, were projected at volume that could be heard 15 miles away.

The conflict slowly petered out. Martial law was suspended on Kinmen Island in 1992 and the ferry to Xiamen began operation in 2001. The military has largely withdrawn from the island, and the forts, artillery emplacements, and tunnels are now tourist attractions—visited, ironically, by thousands of Mainland visitors each year.

Book News

And here’s a brief commercial reminder that if you enjoy the stories you read in the Peripatetic Historian, you will probably also enjoy the extended content found in my recent books—Comet Madness and L.A. Birdmen.

Learn more at: https://richardjgoodrich.com/Books.html.

In Pursuit of Wind Lions

As you might imagine sites associated with military history serve as the island’s principal tourist attractions. Although I served my country as a young man, I must confess to a deep antipathy toward the pointless violence that nations routinely use on one another. To put it another way: After a day admiring artillery pieces, tanks, bunkers, and the rest of war’s detritus, I was more than ready to look for a different vein to mine.

I found it in the wind lion gods.

These are the totemic statues of lions, standing erect on their hind legs like agitated bears, whose statues arise from the earth at strategic spots around the island. The Kinmen people believe that the wind lions have the power to divert typhoons and thwart all manner of evil.

Their principal purpose is to tame the relentless winds that track along the Taiwan Strait. Beginning in the thirteenth century, clear-cutting denuded the island. Absent foliage, every fresh breeze turned the island into a post-apocalyptic hellscape of blowing sand and dust.

Desperate villagers imported the wind lion statues from the Mainland. When their influence was deemed efficacious more statues were carved and installed.

Today the statues protect the reforested Kinmen Island. Standing at village entrances and beside roads, they are found in male or female variations; the female is distinguished by a modest sash, while the males sport a calabash or a more realistic depiction of gender.

They have also earned a reputation for managing floods, and assisting crime victims—they are said to be particularly good at finding rustled cattle. As a local deity of unusual potency they enjoy wide support among the people, and perhaps played a small role in turning back the PRC invasion in 1949.

Shells to Plowshares

As noted in this month’s lead story, more than a million shells fell on Kinmen during the thirty-year artillery duel. What do you do with all of that scrap metal once the gun smoke has blown away?

One clever solution is to work it into fine knives.

Maestro Wu Zeng-dong is a third generation blacksmith who specializes in re-purposing spent ammunition. It’s a family obsession: During World War II, Wu’s father faced a steel shortage and began to experiment with the artillery shells the Allies shot at the Japanese occupiers of Kinmen.

Recognizing the excellence of the material, the Wu clan collected shell fragments. This activity continued through the long decades when Kinmen suffered PRC shelling. The family accumulated enough raw material to sustain the business for decades.

Each shell is cut into small steel squares that are then heated in a forge and reshaped as knife blades. Depending on size, Wu can create between ten and sixty blades from each shell. A large stockpile displayed at his factory suggests that he will not soon experience a shortage of raw materials.

The quixotic recycling experiment has earned an international reputation. Kinmen knives are prized by cooks and culinary artists around the planet. The steel intended to slaughter people now slices meat, cheese, and vegetables.

And that is the kind of ending I appreciate.

Plumb Raining

As advertised last month, the Plum Rains did arrive in Taipei this month. To commemorate the event, I made a little video:

Program Announcements

Just a couple of life updates:

• Our first year in Taiwan officially wraps up on June 30.

• Next month’s installment of the Peripatetic Historian, will land in your email box at roughly the same time we touch down in the United States. We shall spend July in Western Oregon and Washington, and then back to Taiwan for a second year in August. There’s still so much to experience and explore here that we couldn’t refuse a chance to return.

• And, finally, I have just completed the arrangements to spend October in Venice. I will be engaged in research for a new book, adding to my massive archive of Venice photos, and enjoying the city I love above all others.

So that’s the rough schedule through autumn.

Outro

I cannot conclude without mentioning that this issue marks the beginning of the fifth year of publication for the Peripatetic Historian. For those of you have been along for the entire ride (and those of you who have hopped aboard along the way), my sincere thanks. Here’s to the next five.

Be safe, be sensible, and I will see you next month.

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This Month:

• A Visit to Green Island

• Then and Now: The Perils of Autocracy

Ready? Let’s dive in:

Peripatetic Field Report: A Visit to Green Island

When I think of southern Taiwan, sticky heat is the first thing that springs to mind. Tucked below the Tropic of Cancer, this region endures endless sunshine and hydroscope-busting levels of humidity. If you are a person of northern heritage like myself, southern Taiwan stands a few paces short of Signore Dante’s Inferno—a place of punishment, heat stroke, perpetual damp, and torrential sweat.

My armpits clench just thinking about it. Only April’s special expedition would have enticed me away from the (relatively) cooler northern end of Taiwan.

Nineteen miles off Taiwan's southeastern coast, Lüdao—Green Island—floats like a dusky emerald in the blue Pacific Ocean. Constructed on a base of lava and ancient coral, human life is concentrated on the north and west side of a mountainous jungle core. The steep interior and the typhoon-vulnerable eastern side remains wild and virtually uninhabited.

Scuba diving is the island’s main cash crop. Lüdao boasts white coral beaches, stunning reefs, and at least a hundred dive shops. Ranks of parked motor-scooters fill the gaps between the Scuba outfitters. During the summer, thousands of scooters must turn the single road through town into a heaving, howling hell worse than what we encountered in Xiaoliuqiu (see Peripatetic Historian 4.6 if you’ve forgotten that horror).

Fortunately, our visit coincided with the off-season. Most of the motor scooters remained parked in long lines and there was never a problem securing a restaurant table. The counterbalance to these positives was the weather, which tended to the stormy during our three day visit. We spent a delightful hour in the ocean on our first afternoon, but a howling gale, first from the south and then reversing into the north, whipped the sea into a froth our final two days.

Restricted to land pursuits, we visited the island’s notorious prison (see below) and, despite my reservations, rented electric motor-scooters on our final day to circumnavigate the island on a 19 km ring road.

I know.

After my history of raillery against two-wheeled transport, I could be charged with hypocrisy. But had I not compromised my ideals it would have been near impossible to visit island wonders like the Guanyin Cave, where a solitary white stalagmite stands, bearing a vague resemblance to the many statues of the Buddhist deity one finds across Taiwan.

I also would have missed the Little Great Wall, an East Coast staircase that offers a vague resemblance to the (Big) Great Wall on the mainland.

It is a place where all the sights resemble miniature versions of something I’ve seen elsewhere. The green rounded bluffs of Fanchuanbi, trailing off into the sea at the southern end, reminded me of Ireland. The massive, wind-pushed waves smashing ashore to break against the untamed northern coast reminded me of my home waters in Oregon. And, just like there, I spent far more time than was reasonable attempting to capture a perfect saltwater explosion.

The visit felt both novel and nostalgic. I can’t envision myself returning during the high heat, humidity, and scooter traffic of summer, but I did enjoy my April visit.

Book News

A brief reminder that information about my recent books—Comet Madness and L.A. Birdmen—can be found on my website: https://richardjgoodrich.com/Books.html.

Then and Now

Despite the colorful brochures that now decorate Taiwanese Tourist Information outlets, during the second half of the twentieth century, no one would have associated Green Island with vacation pleasure. Green Island hosted Taiwan’s most notorious political prison, a place of confinement for those deemed enemies of the Kuomintang, Taiwan’s ruling political party.

This prison is intimately connected to Taiwan’s “White Terror.” Originally a campaign to identify and eliminate Communist spies, agitators, and sympathizers, the program quickly expanded to include anyone who dared speak against the policies of the ruling KMT. It spawned a political witch hunt, rife with informers, torture, and secret treason trials.

Green Island was Taiwan’s Gulag, a place of internment for the State’s enemies.

The prison’s limited capacity meant that each cell hosted up to fifteen victims. They endured summer heat and the winter cold in concrete cell blocks that lacked heating or air conditioning.

A popular uprising compelled Taiwan’s leaders to end martial law and the White Terror in 1987. During the campaign’s twenty-seven year run, more than 140,000 people were convicted of anti-government activities; 3-4,000 were executed; more than 2,000 served sentences at Green Island.

Today the prison is a Human Rights Memorial Park, a reminder of the horrors facing any society that cedes power to a single group, abandoning the protections afforded by democracy and the rule of law. It attests to the dangers of dictatorship and the concentration of power in the hands of a few.

Plum Rains

Taiwan has entered the seasonal period known as the “Plum Rains.” Days of downpours are interspersed with short blasts of sunshine which remind us that summer’s heat is imminent. Although once attributed to ripening Yangtze River plums—believed to release excess moisture into the atmosphere—meteorologists now offer a more prosaic explanation for the phenomenon: a shoving match between the air rising from the warming Pacific Ocean and the cold air flowing off the continent creates a stationary battle line that stretches from Taiwan to Japan and Korea. Heavy rains are produced where the two systems meet. Eventually the Pacific system prevails and high pressure ends the Plum Rains in June.

We’ll see if I am still whistling the same tune next month, but at the moment I am enjoying the half inch or so of rain that falls on our wet days. Bring it on. Far better than sunshine and heat.

Be safe, be sensible, and I will see you next month.

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On the other hand, if you’re ready to get started…

Peripatetic Field Report: In the Garden of the Generalissimos

What is the best way for a nation to handle a history that many would rather forget?

The Romans practiced damnatio memoriae (lit. the “condemnation of memory”). After the fall of a tyrant or the death of a disgraced emperor, the state could choose to chisel that person out of the historical record. Statues were destroyed, laws repealed, and official records altered.

They attempted to cleanse their history, sluicing away a painful past.

The urge to sanitize is not restricted to Rome. The question of how to deal with the reminders of the Civil War still divides the United States. Many would happily melt down statues of Confederate leaders and consign their battle standards to the flames.

Taiwan suffers from a similar division. For the first 26 years of its existence the country was ruled by Chiang Kai-shek. A hero or despot, depending on where you stand on the political spectrum, the general’s mixed legacy has produced a mild form of damnatio memoriae. In 2006, after the Democratic Progressive Party came to power, the government launched a series of initiatives to efface the departed leader from the country’s history. Chiang Kai-shek International Airport became Taoyuan International; debate continues over whether to rename the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Gardens.

The Generalissimo poses a problem; the country is seeded with visible reminders of the former strongman. During his tenure, an estimated 43,000 statues were cast and planted in public spaces across the country. Every park, police station, and military base hosts a reminder of the country’s leader.

Many of these statues remain in situ; some have been destroyed. But other examples have been relocated to a small park near Daxi, southwest of Taipei. Here, at the foot of a bamboo-shrouded hill, we find a thoroughly unique approach to the past: the Garden of the Generalissimos.

Workers have uprooted hundreds of statues and transported them to the park. There, on the banks of a crescent moon-shaped lake, the relocated images stand at attention in lines, formations, or simply small groups communing with one another.

It is even possible, for those who still esteem the departed leader, to share a picnic lunch with him:

The garden moves the needle into the red zone of the surrealism meter. Wandering through hundreds of manifestations of the former leader is a distinctly odd experience. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the Taiwanese have produced an adroit approach to the problem of the past. The forced relocation has reduced Chiang Kai-shek’s public presence, while simultaneously preserving a reminder of his legacy. Visitors are encouraged to contemplate—while not necessarily endorse—the memory of the former president.

Book News

Chatting with History Nerds United

This month features a podcast interview with Brendan Dowd of History Nerds United. We discussed early aviation and L. A. Birdmen.

I normally can’t bear to listen to myself speak, but this one sucked me in. Brendan is an engaging interviewer and our discussion devolved into some witty (sophomoric?) repartee that held my attention to the end.

Highly recommended.

The Head Relics of Xuan Zang

Sun Moon Lake is one of Taiwan's best-loved tourist destinations. Standing at 3,300 feet above sea level, the small body of water cuddles in the mountains east of Taichung. When the lower altitudes begin to swelter and steam, people flee the cities for this vacation paradise.

Or, if you’re like me, you visit on a drizzly, off-season March day.

We stepped off the bus in the tiny resort town of Shuishe. Bicycle hawkers huddled before open garages of two-wheeled steeds. Desperate voices called as we strolled past, extolling the joy of cycling beneath a steady rain.

Not interested.

Instead, we caught one of the small ferries that shuttle passengers across the lake. There, on a hill that commanded the southern shore, was Sun Moon Lake’s finest attraction: the Xuanzang Temple.

Xuan Zang was a Chinese monk who lived at the beginning of the seventh century. After joining a Buddhist monastery, the young man grew disillusioned by the lack of consistency among his country’s teachers. Every abbot taught something different about the religion, and the true message had vanished behind the overgrowth.

The monk decided that his religion required a good pruning. He set off on a journey to India, hiking across China to the source of the “Buddhist Dharma” — the authentic teachings of the master.

He spent seventeen years studying in India and then returned to his homeland. Isolating himself in a monastery, he composed an epic account of his pilgrimage (the Record of Western Lands) and is said to have translated 1,335 Buddhist treatises into Chinese. After decades of work and several million words, Xuan Zang passed away at age 64.

During World War II, the Japanese discovered Xuan Zang’s relics in Nanjing, China. Recognizing the pilgrim-scholar as an important precursor of Zen Buddhism, they transferred his bones to Japan.

In 1955, after benevolent discussions, Japan offered to return half of the relics. An honor guard of Buddhist monks escorted a piece of the skull—the “head relics”—to Taiwan. Ten years later, the Xuanzang Temple was completed and the relic was placed on permanent display.

The precious remains rest in a brass urn on the third floor of the temple. Visitors are not allowed to approach the vessel, but a camera mounted inside the urn transmits live images to two video monitors mounted at the back of the room. Since no one expects a sudden change in the bit of bone, I don’t know why we need live surveillance. Perhaps television is just more “real” than a photograph.

In an adjacent building, an informative museum details the highlights of Xuan Zang’s career. I have not hiked as many miles nor written as many works as the peripatetic scholar, but I did feel a certain kinship with him. Those of us with a peripatetic vocation must stick together.

The temple was the highlight of my visit to Sun Moon Lake, a place of words, walking, and the sound of a gentle rain slipping through wet cedars.

Moving Ahead

I’m sure you remember the old adage: April showers bring May flowers. As I ink in the final strokes on this month’s newsletter, torrential rains wash the streets. I’m not certain what that presages: April monsoons bring bassoons? Raccoons?

Perplexing. I’ll monitor the situation and let you know what happens.

Be safe, be sensible, and I will see you next month.

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This Month:

• Peripatetic Field Report: Falling into Japan

• Book News

• Culture: The Mandarin Road

Let’s get started…

Peripatetic Field Report: Falling into Japan

Deeply-rooted beliefs about Japanese attention to detail and perfectionism were shaken the afternoon I fell through the man-hole cover.

Prior to that unfortunate event, Japan had been confirming my preconceptions. Our Tokyo hotel was a model of harmonious perfection, from the spotless tatami mats (please remove your shoes at the hotel entrance and store them in the designated cupboards) to the elegant bathhouse in the basement.

Vigilant eyes policed this perfection. When, at the breakfast buffet, I randomly selected two apple tarts from a tray, an attendant scurried in behind me and rearranged the remaining desserts to restore harmony to the platter.

Before leaving Tokyo, a cleaning crew went over our train carriage with vacuums, brushes, and tweezers, ensuring that no trace of dirt would spoil our onward trip to Nagano. After buffing the interior to a factory-fresh gloss, they lined up outside the carriage and bowed to the passengers waiting to enjoy their labors.

We bowed back.

The attention to detail was awe-inspiring; I marveled at this society’s proximity to perfection.

Until the manhole.

Striding up a busy Kyoto street, threading through a slow-moving clump of tourists, I planted my right foot on a manhole cover.

Like a steel tiddly-wink, the cover tilted, flipped, and slid aside. My foot plunged into the void; I toppled forward like a logger-slashed Douglas Fir, smashing my thigh against the pavement.

It was a femur-shattering blow. I was lucky to escape with asphalt-scuffed hands, a dirt streak on my trousers, and a red face.

Nearly 63 years of life experience, thousands of manhole covers, and never a failure. Yet here, in perfection-focused Japan, I almost suffered my first broken leg.

Did the team of workers who installed this manhole cover line up and bow to the passing pedestrians when they completed the job? What about the local inspectors charged with monitoring the condition of the city’s infrastructure?

My illusions, like my trust of manhole covers, have been shattered.

Monkeys in the Mist

Here’s another surprise: Japan is cold in the winter. I knew that the northern island, Hokkaido, could be chilly, but even in the south—Tokyo and Kyoto—the late January temperatures dipped well beneath our Taipei norms.

This was especially true when we climbed away from the sea, up into the mountains that surround Nagano, home of the 1998 Winter Olympics. It is a frigid land, snow falling through dark cedar and pine forests.

What, you may wonder, induced us to leave the comfort of heated hotel rooms to tramp through this sub-alpine zone?

Japanese Snow Monkeys.

The Jigokudani Snow Monkey Park is built around a group of geothermal hot springs. Jigokudani (literally “Hell’s Valley”) is one of the magical places where the earth’s crust is thin, and sulfurous geysers remind us that a fiery pit seethes beneath our feet. And it is here, among the vapor plumes that we found these famous animals.

The monkeys are a leading tourist attraction. Hoping to beat the crowds, we stayed in a nearby village (Yudanaka) and set off early to reach the park as it opened (9:00 a.m.). We timed our arrival perfectly. A thirty minute hike on a packed snow trail brought us to the river bank in time to see the resident monkeys sauntering down from the surrounding hills.

Jigokudani is a wildlife refuge forged out of interspecies conflict. These monkeys once ranged widely through the mountains, but a booming ski industry led to clear-cuts and new ski resorts. The habitat destruction reduced the natural food supply; the monkeys moved out of the mountains, invading lowland farms in search of sustenance. This produced a predictable response from local farmers: they began shooting the primate pests.

In 1964, Sogo Hara, a Japanese railroad worker, proposed a refuge to protect the animals and keep them away from “civilization.” Thus was born the Jigokudani Monkey Park.

The park is not fenced—the monkeys could leave at any time. To encourage their continued residence, the staff spreads a mixture of barley, soybeans, and diced apples across the snow every morning. This morning feeding was underway when we reached the park. Monkeys gamboled across the snow banks, gathering breakfast like teenagers picking strawberries.

Although free range monkeys possess undeniable charms, their adoption of Japanese bathing customs launched their careers as international celebrities.

After the park’s foundation, curious monkeys began to wander down the river to Korakukan Inn, a traditional bathhouse that had served customers since 1864. Inspired by the sight of humans taking the waters, the monkeys decided to join their cousins. This produced a fresh round of consternation, an uproar that was resolved by the construction of a “monkeys-only” bathing pool in the park.

Species-segregated bathing is a reality in Japan.

It also draws vast crowds of tourists eager to view this unusual behavior.

On the day of my visit the monkeys did not disappoint. Breakfast complete, the younger members of the troupe entertained the human observers by wrestling and performing gymnastic feats on cables stretched across the river. The elders retired to the bathing pool for a morning soak.

Like a band of hirsute humans, the monkeys eased slowly into the hot water. They spend their nights in nearby trees; I can only imagine that the bath feels wonderful when dawn arrives.

I am not a wildlife photographer, but they did make an irresistible sight. Having arrived early, I was able to snap some clean shots. That opportunity quickly slipped away. Forty-five minutes after the park opened, an expanding ring of photographers encircled the bath.

The crowds would only grow as the day progressed. Once the tour buses arrived, the competition for position around the bathing pool would be fierce.

Of course these daily encounters with the paparazzi are no novelty for the snow monkeys. Like jaded movie stars they maintained a lofty indifference to the camera-clutching crowd. Since the monkey troupe does roam freely among the human visitors I would imagine that interspecies conflicts still pop up, but everyone was on their best behavior during my visit.

As odd as it might sound, the Jigokudani Monkey Park was one of the highlights of my Japanese expedition.

Book News

Book of the Month

Britain’s Aeroplane Monthly chose L.A. Birdmen as its February Book of the Month:

[L.A. Birdmen] is engaging, at times whimsical, but always eminently readable, and brings to life the story of American flying with a great deal of detail and some wonderful asides. -Denis Calvert, Aeroplane Monthly.

Learn More

Culture: The Mandarin Road

The publication of this month’s installment of the Peripatetic Historian coincides with the end of my second semester of intensive Mandarin. For the past six months I have spent 15 hours per week in a class at the Taipei Language Institute struggling to acquire a rudimentary knowledge of one of our planet’s most difficult languages.

The US Foreign Services Institute, which provides language training for the country’s diplomatic corps, ranks Mandarin as a “Category IV” language. It is a form of communication that will demand approximately 2,200 hours (84 weeks) of classes before a native English speaker acquires a reasonable level of communication competence. Contrast that with Italian—a truly lovely language—which can be embraced in a mere 552 hours (roughly 24 weeks of class).

My experience supports the FSI claim—Mandarin is a brutally difficult language and, despite averaging 25 hours a week in class and independent study, I have made far less progress than I would have expected. After a diligent struggle, I’ve come to the conclusion that vocabulary acquisition may be the greatest difficulty a learner faces.

There is the well-known fact that Mandarin is a tonal language and words that sound the same are only distinguished by the tone that is applied to them. A first tone word like mā means “mother;” the third tone mǎ means “horse.” This subtle difference provides many opportunities for confusion, but I knew this would be true before I started my training.

What I didn’t realize is that words can have the same tone and the same pronunciation but mean completely different things. In Mandarin the word pronounced yào means “to want;” it can also mean “to cost,” “to need to,” “medicine,” a “sparrow hawk,” the “upper section of a boot or sock,” “brilliant,” and “glorious.” How do you distinguish between these options? Context.

The other major obstacle is the writing script. Language learning theorists emphasize reading as the golden road to vocabulary acquisition. That works well with a phonetic language—where you can sound out words based upon the alphabet—but Mandarin’s pictographic system of representation further slows the student. It is not enough to learn the word—you must also learn the character that corresponds to that word. And to this Mandarin neophyte, those characters are often distressingly similar.

I could write an entire newsletter about the difficulties of learning this language. After six months of hard work I have probably only achieved a mid-A2 level—advanced beginner—in Mandarin. I am able to engage in extremely rudimentary conversations, but after a great deal of effort and study, my ability is frustratingly limited.

As this semester finishes, I am suspending my studies. The question of whether we will spend next year in Taiwan has yet to be resolved. If it looks like we shall return I may take some more lessons. On the other hand, I may decide that a rudimentary knowledge is more than adequate for my needs and leave it there.

Stay tuned…

Back in Taipei

We returned to Taipei in the second week of February. Our time in Japan offered far more experiences than I have recounted here, but the newsletter is beginning to stretch toward novella length.

To summarize: we enjoyed our stay in Japan. It is a fascinating country, filled with history. I could easily envision living there for an extended period.

For the moment, however, it is back to an exploration of Taiwan and whatever interesting experiences the coming months hold.

I hope all is well with you. Be safe, be sensible, and I will see you next month.

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This Month:

• Peripatetic Field Report: A Return to Hong Kong

• Book News

• Then and Now: The Star Ferry

Let’s get started…

Peripatetic Field Report: A Return to Hong Kong

Long before I became a peripatetic historian, Hong Kong was my favorite city on earth. As a roving engineer in the mid-1990s, the city was my favorite stop when shuttling between Asia and the US.

I booked my flights strategically, slipping weekend Hong Kong layovers into itinerary cracks. I was enthralled, hooked, mesmerized. Hong Kong offered all of the fascinating culture of China without any of the Mainland’s inconvenience (or dysentery).

It was, as far as I was concerned, the greatest place on the planet.

My misspent youth came to an end; I abandoned engineering and went to history school; Hong Kong was handed back to China. Decades passed as I explored Europe and forgot about my former infatuation.

That all changed this month. With Taiwan only a ninety minute flight from Taiwan, the time arrived to renew an old acquaintance. Would it be awkward—two high school sweethearts exchanging doubtful glances at a thirty year reunion? Or would banked passion flare anew, reigniting an ardor I’d long thought extinct?

It was time to find out.

Ringing the Changes

Pre-1997 I was a handover skeptic—I doubted that the return of Hong Kong to the PRC would prove a positive development for the city. After a long weekend, I don’t know what to think. The city has not crumbled into dust—crowds pack the sidewalks, modern skyscrapers pack the shorelines, Porsches and Mercedes wheel through the street. Superficially, it remains the same fascinating place I knew thirty years ago. I fear that it would require months or years to discover what is roiling beneath the surface. The stalagmite of knowledge crystallizes, drip by drip, over time.

Some changes were obvious. Our inbound flight set down at the new (to me) Hong Kong International Airport. Thirty years ago one landed at Kai Tak, a single runway wedged between the high-rise apartment buildings of Kowloon. Aircraft on final approach slipped through a concrete canyon, jet engines stirring drying laundry before touch down.

That rustic (some would argue hair-raising) arrival is one of change’s casualties of the past. One lands on Chek Lap Kok Island, passes through a shining airport terminal, and then hops a metro train into the city. Quick, clean, efficient—although a little boring.

We had the good fortune to engage a hotel room right on the Kowloon waterfront. From our lofty perch, nine floors above sea level, we could look across the channel to the light show on Hong Kong Island. A display to rival Las Vegas—complete with a laser show every night at 8:00—cast luminescent patches of red, blue, and green across the darkened waters. A pair of Chinese junks, fake orange sails glowing, carried tourists on harbor cruises, east and west along the channel.

My memory insists that in 1996 one could still see traditional boats working the water. Some of them still harnessed the wind rather than petrochemicals. Today they’ve vanished, and one sees only ersatz junks, fake sails flapping in the breeze, plying the waterway.

10,000 Buddhas Can’t All Be Wrong

After realizing that an insightful essay on the past, present, and future of Hong Kong lay beyond my expertise, I relaxed and turned my attention to something new and fun: a morning spent with 10,000 Buddhas.

In 1933 a Chinese missionary named Yuet Kai moved to Hong Kong to stimulate a Buddhist revival in the city. He gathered disciples, cash, and, in 1951 began construction of a temple complex on a hill overlooking Sha Tin. Six years later the 10,000 Buddhas Monastery was complete.

The name is a two-headed misnomer—the site is not a monastery; Buddhist monks do not live there. Moreover, there are more than 10,000 Buddha statues at the temple complex. Estimates vary, but most sources place the actual number a little north of 12,000.

431 concrete steps lead visitors up to the temple. Both sides of the path are lined with golden statues representing a cross section of (primarily male) arhats—sages who have achieved enlightenment. The statues span the gamut of physiognomy and emotions: fat monks chuckle, rage, or roll inebriated eyes; emaciated sages grimace and leer. Look long enough and you will stumble across the perfect representation of your present state of mind.

On July 2, 1997, one day after Hong Kong’s handover to the PRC, torrential rain loosened the soil of the slopes around the monastery. A massive mudslide struck the complex and killed one of the caretakers. Since that time, the temple has been locked in a battle with a government that would like to shut it down over safety concerns, an unlicensed restaurant, and an unsanctioned columbarium.

To date, it prevails.

A Buddhist Conundrum

I enjoyed practicing my portraiture skills on the 10,000 Buddhas. The experience was not, however, without its little mysteries. There was, for example, this guy:

He is one of the divine magistrates who attend the Heavenly Emperor. I can’t explain his strange ocular configuration. Perhaps it is a carved representation of my father’s adage: “Look with your eyes, not your hands.”

Have a better idea? Drop your thoughts in the comment box at the end of the newsletter.

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Then and Now

One thing hasn’t changed since my last visit to Hong Kong: it is still possible to cross between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon aboard one of the redoubtable Star Ferries.

Emperors still ruled China when the Star Ferry Company began operation. In 1880, a Parsi cook named Dorabjee Naorojee Mithaiwala purchased the one ship owned by the Kowloon Ferry Company and renamed the business. The Star Ferry Company flourished. Mithaiwala added new routes and additional ships to meet the demands of a growing city.

Although is cross-channel transportation monopoly was threatened by underground car and metro tunnels, passengers continued to patronize the service. And why not? A lovely jaunt in the fresh air is vastly superior to the recycled air and crowded cars of the subterranean subway.

For a surprisingly inexpensive fare (less than one US dollar), commuters enjoy the salt-scented breeze from one of the white iron and varnished mahogany benches on the upper deck. Boarding is conducted in the traditional manner: a free-for-all. Passengers queue at the top of a chute, and, when the green gate swings open, race down the ramp like rollicking oxen.

With the stragglers aboard, a gout of black diesel smoke blossoms from the midship exhaust stack, and the ferry pulls away from the pier—which in paint scheme and architecture, mimics the rounded stern of a Star Ferry.

Eight minutes later the ferry noses into the dock and the journey is at an end.

Two-and-a-half days is not enough time to assess the present state of Hong Kong. Nevertheless, I did form a few impressions. Were I to select an Asian city in which to spend the rest of my days, Taipei would trump Hong Kong. It has all the fascinating culture, without the crowds or the cost. Hong Kong’s waterfront location is appealing, but if it was truly important, Taiwan offers hundreds of miles of beachfront property.

In short, like a Star Ferry shuttling between docks, Hong Kong is a place I would like to return to, but it won’t return to its previous number one position in my heart.

On to Japan

Hong Kong offered an interesting weekend diversion, but, in an attempt to pack as much traveling possible into the short window of the Chinese Lunar New Year, four days after our return to Taipei we were back at the airport for another adventure.

As this newsletter hits your inbox and leeches into the groundwater of the internet, I am exploring Japan. Look for a full report next month.

Until then, be safe, be sensible.

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