Louis Vuitton City Guides
Louis Vuitton contracted me to work as a key writer for their upcoming Louis Vuitton City Guide to Taipei, writing on-brand, relevant and (sometimes irreverent) content about Taiwan's capital.
I living in Taipei at that time and thought that writing about my own city and culture (as a Taiwanese come back from abroad) would be relatively simple. I didn't imagine what a massive undertaking it would be. Some of the sections I wrote - Living Like a Local, The City in Music and Film, and Here and Nowhere Else - led me to realize that while I may have lived Taiwanese culture, it was quite another thing to put it into words. Louis Vuitton wanted the highs (the beauty of Taiwanese New Wave Cinema in the films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien) to the "lows" (garbage trucks blasting Beethoven in the street as they make their nightly rounds).
Project Overview
Client
Louis Vuitton (Louis Vuitton City Guides)
Role
Writer
About the Louis Vuitton City Guides
Since 1998, Louis Vuitton has been sharing its unique take on the world through its City Guides, offering a careful selection of addresses chosen with originality and just a touch of bias. Special guest contributors, secret addresses, city walks, cultural events: it’s the full City Guide perspective."
Select Excerpts
Taipei: The Essentials
Taipei is perhaps the most underrated and understated of the major Asian capitals, often overshadowed by its proliferation of electronics manufacturers and the thriving export trade that enabled it to rapidly industrialize [as one of the Four Asian Tigers] in the latter half of the twentieth century. Those who still fail to look beyond the “Made in Taiwan” trope miss out on a fascinating blend of Japanese and Chinese architecture, tantalizing cuisine, and an abundance of unparalleled natural landscapes.
The city is a study in striking contrasts, showcasing a modernity with an ultra-efficient public transportation system, the world’s highest green-certified building, and a proliferation of both convenience stores and technology parks. Yet it remains a refuge for vestiges of traditional Chinese cultural rituals woven into the fabric of modern life [and long vanished from the Mainland]: spirit money is burned in front of single-origin coffee roasters, and polished high-rises share sidewalk space with polytheistic altars and night markets, the city’s sprawling temples to the stomach.
It’s a city that is more akin to a bucolic island town than an forbidding, futuristic Asian metropolis. Its denizens may commute via the ultra-efficient metro staring at their smartphones, but return home to wistaria-fringed walk-ups, tucked into hushed alleys dotted with swaying palms. An annual array of typhoons may terrorise summer, but it’s perhaps the only unfriendly element to a city that is inherently intimate; both decidedly liveable and lovable.
Select Excerpts Neighborhoods of Taipei
“Nestled in a compact valley edged by two rivers, and fringed by low, lush mountains of tea bushes and hot spring fumaroles, Taipei is Taiwan’s cultural and financial nerve centre. And while an array of residential neighbourhoods collectively known as New Taipei City stretch out endlessly across the riverbanks, Taipei City proper is adorably pint-sized, befitting the city’s obsession with everything cute, or “kawaii”. Particularly in the leafy, labyrinthine alleys of the central neighborhoods, is both possible and pleasant to navigate explore on foot or bicycle, though the city is prone to wet-season spells.
Development ignited with the explosion of the export trade along the riverbanks of the city’s west side and swept eastward with the advent of the Japanese colonial occupation followed by the era of Kuomintang rule; the housing blocks and promenades becoming progressively more modern with the years. This gradation of modernity from west to east remains to the present day, moving from the narrow shophouses and ornate temples of Wanhua and Dadocheng, to the tea-houses and classical architecture of the Japanese era dotting the hushed alleys radiating from Yongkang street, to the tiny-but-trendy boutiques of the East District. It culminates in the city’s architectural icon: Taipei 101, the bamboo-inspired behemoth surrounded by a tangle of sleek shopping malls.”
Select Excerpts
When the City
Shuts Down
Hot Spring It
Taiwan’s location in a tectonic collision zone results in a profusion of hot mineral springs all across the country, although Beitou’s springs are unique for their sulphurous smell. The Japanese began building hot spring leisure complexes in Beitou’s geothermal valley at the end of the 19th century, initiating the beginning of a beloved Taiwanese pastime. For those wanting to experience the therapeutic effects of the waters, options range widely. The luxurious Villa32 can charge up to NT$3000 per hour to bathe in a private suite, where mineral water is piped directly into the room. Mid-range hot spring rooms abound up and down Beitou’s main commercial street, while those of a more adventurous bent may want to opt for the city’s public facilities, sex-segregated operations where local bathers (typically well over retirement age) lounge about in the nude, gossiping incessantly. To be noted amidst the Chinese New Year closures: While most naturally occurring springs in the region are technically labelled off-limits, a number of savvy trekkers have made their way to a number of secluded pools and lived to blog about it.
