When I first came to Taipei I didn't know much about its history. One thing I did know, though: Taiwan had been under Japanese rule for half a century and Taipei had been the capital of the colony. But when I walked around, I wondered why there were barely any Japanese buildings. If you go to Macau , for instance, you find thousands of houses from the Portuguese colonial era. But in Taipei, all the streets seemed not to be older than 60 or 70 years. I just came to the conclusion that Taipei must have been a colonial backwater, a small village, and that present-day Taipei had been entirely constructed after 1945. It was only after reading some books and seeing old pictures that I realised the Japanese had built a lot, and that indeed many of today's roads and thoroughfares had been created during the colonial era . It's just that after 1945 most of these buildings were torn down, with the exception of the most representative ones. Something similar can be seen in