Northern Taiwan Culture & Language

Northern Taiwanese culture draws on Chinese tradition, Japanese habits and a strong local identity, and it does so without much visible friction.

The National Palace Museum

The single greatest concentration of Chinese art anywhere, moved from Beijing’s Forbidden City ahead of the Japanese invasion and then to Taiwan in 1949. Nearly 700,000 objects, of which only a fraction can be displayed at once — Song ceramics, Shang bronzes, calligraphy, and the jadeite cabbage that Taiwanese visitors queue for.

Tea

The hills south of Taipei at Maokong grow baozhong, and tea houses there and in Dadaocheng serve it in the full gongfu style, with small pots and repeated short infusions. Tea is a serious northern tradition rather than a tourist activity.

Japanese inheritance

The hot-spring bathhouse culture at Beitou, with its etiquette of washing first and bathing naked in single-sex pools, is Japanese in origin and Taiwanese in practice. So are much of the civic architecture and a good deal of the vocabulary.

Temples and folk religion

Longshan Temple in Wanhua, rebuilt repeatedly since 1738, is crowded from early morning with people consulting deities using crescent-shaped divination blocks. Temple fairs, spirit mediums and the Mazu cult are all active.

Calligraphy and the written character

Taiwan kept the traditional characters when the mainland simplified them in the 1950s, and the consequence is that ordinary signage here uses the same forms as a Song dynasty manuscript. It matters culturally as well as practically: calligraphy remains a living practice, couplets are brushed and pasted beside doorways at New Year, and the National Palace Museum’s calligraphy galleries are visited by people who read them rather than look at them.

Contemporary culture

Taipei has a strong independent music and bookshop scene, a film tradition running from Hou Hsiao-hsien to the present, and a lively design and cafe culture.

Mandarin is the official language and is what you will hear and see, written in traditional characters rather than the simplified forms used in mainland China.

Taiwanese Hokkien — Taiyu — is widely spoken, particularly by older people and in informal settings, and is a distinct language rather than a dialect of Mandarin. Hakka is spoken in Taoyuan and Hsinchu, and Atayal in the mountain communities.

English is reasonably widespread in Taipei — signage, metro announcements and younger people — and less so in the smaller towns. Taiwan has a national policy aiming at bilingualism, and the standard is rising.

Some Japanese is spoken by the oldest generation and in hot-spring towns.

Useful Mandarin: ni hao for hello, xie xie for thank you, duo shao qian for how much, and hao chi for delicious. In Taiwanese, to-sia for thank you is warmly received.