All trains also provide non-reserved seats, in which holders can take any train to the specified destination with no assigned seating in a day. Holders of non-reserved seats can only sit in non-reserved seats, usually in car 9-12. All foreigners (except those on government business and certain permanent residents) age 14 and older are electronically fingerprinted and photographed as part of immigration entry procedures.
However, many other places, particular those geared for foreigners, are unisex and require a bathing suit. If you do not feel comfortable getting naked in front of strangers, some hot spring resorts may offer private baths at an extra cost, where you and your group have the entire bath to yourselves. Many Taiwanese hot spring resorts also offer traditional Chinese massage, which will cost extra on top of the admission fee. They are managed by local governments, therefore information can generally be found on the websites of the respective transportation bureaus.
SIM cards
They have the advantage over the electric trains in that they run very late at night. Drivers are required to provide a receipt if asked, though you might find them unwilling to do so. The standard yellow taxis scour roads looking for potential riders such as lost foreigners. But they’ll often stop for you even if you’re just waiting to cross the street or for a bus.
- Vegetarians are better catered for in restaurants and variety than in most other countries.
- For example, Taiwanese Mandarin tends to not differentiate between the “S” and “Sh” or the “f” and “h” sounds in Mandarin.
- Low-paying jobs are also available, common fields are production and elder care.
- Most traffic signs are in international symbols, but many signs only show the names of places and streets in Chinese.
- No visa is required if you are connecting between international flights so long as you do not leave an airport’s secure area.
- As of 2025 the price was NT$500, consisting of a non-refundable fee of NT$100 and NT$400 in electronic cash.
LOCAL
Apart from these requirements, the general rules for a visa on arrival apply to Turkish citizens. Mandarin is the lingua franca, but Taiwanese is the mother tongue of about 70% of the population (although fluency in Taiwanese is declining among the younger generation). Hakka is the main language at the middle elevations of the mountainous parts of Taoyuan, Hsinchu and Miaoli. Mandarin, Taiwanese and Hakka are all tonal languages, and are difficult for most foreigners to master. Indigenous languages can mostly be heard on the East Coast and its offshore islands, as well as at higher elevations in the mountains. The Matsu dialect is a variant of the Fuzhou dialect (also known as Hokchiu or Foochow), and is almost exclusively concentrated in the Matsu islands located close to Fuzhou in mainland China.
Most Taiwanese doctors are able to communicate in at least basic English, and in fact, many of the top ones have obtained their medical qualifications in the US and are able to speak English fluently. Nowadays, walk-ins are often more expensive than online bookings, especially with bigger hotels. It often seems, they cannot even beat their own online prices and you might need to book online instead of paying in cash on-sight—they will even courteously offer their WiFi for you to do that. Either way, it is advisable that you know what is the actual price online, which gives you a good bargaining ground. Sometimes they will quote a higher price, sometimes they will give you NT$50 less, but often it is just the online price.
The current healthcare system, known as National Health Insurance (NHI), was instituted in 1995. NHI is a single-payer compulsory social insurance plan that centralizes the disbursement of healthcare funds. Co-pays are reduced for disabled and low-income households maintain 100 percent premium coverage. Roughly 84 percent of Taiwan’s population are descendants of Han queenwin casino Chinese immigrants between 1683 and 1895. Another significant fraction descends from Han Chinese who immigrated from mainland China in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Contrary to popular belief, the change of the zodiac does not occur on the first day of the Lunar New Year, but instead occurs on Li Chun (立春 lì chūn), the traditional Chinese start of spring. People tend to think of Taiwan as a small, crowded island filled mostly with electronic factories, and if you stay in Taipei or along the west coast you might indeed maintain that impression. However, the island is also home to high mountain ranges, great beaches and stunning national parks, many with hot springs.
The top baseball league in Taiwan is the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL), which features six teams. CPBL teams are sponsored by and named after large Taiwanese and Japanese corporations. Popular locally, and gaining traction with foreign tourists due to YouTube and travel bloggers, is the pastime of indoor shrimp fishing. For an hourly rate (around NT$300/hr), you will be provided with a fishing rod and a seat at an indoor shrimp pool that is regularly stocked with large live Thai prawns.
- Major League Baseball (MLB) and Japanese Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), and the Taiwanese national team is considered to be one of the strongest in the world.
- Unlike mainland China, QR code based mobile wallet payments are not quite ubiquitous or essential to the point that a visitor would have a hard time without one.
- It has partial mutual intelligibility with Japanese Sign Language and Korean Sign Language, but not with Chinese Sign Language or Hong Kong Sign Language.
- Occasionally a bus driver might stop a bus away from the curb at a bus stop.
- However, in 1949 Chinese communist armies defeated Nationalist forces on the mainland and established the People’s Republic of China there.
- Taipei, in the north, is the seat of government of the Republic of China (ROC; Nationalist China).
Recent Political Developments
In fact, if you are a visitor of East Asian descent who cannot understand Chinese, a worker may try speaking to you in Japanese before trying English. Taiwanese culture is largely based on traditional Chinese culture, particularly that of Fujian province, because most Taiwanese are Han Chinese whose ancestors migrated to Taiwan from that region. However, in the 20th century, Taiwanese culture diverged from that of mainland China. Substantial Japanese influences can be seen in modern Taiwanese culture because of 50 years of Japanese rule, and this can be seen in its cuisine and in its pop culture. In addition, the Japanese introduced baseball and hot-spring bathing to Taiwan, and these remain popular pastimes for the Taiwanese to this day. Kuomintang refugees fleeing the mainland in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War also brought their cultures with them, and their influence is most visible in Taiwan’s cuisine.
Japanese rule (1895–
A Chinese diplomat also made what some interpreted as a threat to behead Takaichi.
People of Taiwan
The interior of the island is mountainous and slopes sharply downward on the east side to the Pacific and more gently in the west to the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan, roughly oval in shape, is approximate in area to the Netherlands or to the U.S. states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut combined. It is part of a string of islands off the coast of East and Southeast Asia extending from Japan south through the Philippines to Indonesia. Taiwan is bounded to the north and northeast by the East China Sea, with the Ryukyu Islands (the southernmost part of Japan) to the northeast. To the east is found the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean, and to the south is the Bashi Channel, which separates Taiwan from the Philippines.
Largest cities and counties
Numerous indigenous Taiwanese have had successful careers in the entertainment industry, perhaps the most famous example being the singer Kulilay Amit, better known by her Chinese name Chang Huei-mei, who is of Puyuma ethnicity. The indigenous people of Taiwan are separated into Lowland groups who lived on the plains and Highland groups who lived in the mountains. The Lowland groups were the first to come in contact with the Dutch while the Highland groups were only truly subjugated by the Japanese. The Lowland groups receive limited indigenous recognition today due to having largely culturally assimilated into the Han Chinese, and suspicion from Highland groups on whether they truly qualify as “indigenous”. Things came to a head when student protesters stormed the Legislative Yuan on 18th March 2014, forcing the government to abandon ratification of a trade deal with mainland China, marking the first time the Taiwanese legislature had been occupied by civilian protesters. In the early 20th century, the Nationalists and Communists fought a bloody civil war in mainland China.
This can reduce the amount of cash you need to carry around as some shops that otherwise do not take card payments will take LINE Pay and other mobile wallets. Generally speaking, traditional Chinese games such as Go (圍棋 wéiqí) and Chinese chess (象棋 xiàngqí) are popular in Taiwan too. Both games are played at the professional level in Taiwan, and there are numerous tournaments that visitors may watch. Besides baseball, basketball also has a sizeable following in Taiwan and is quite popular among teenagers. When classes are over, the basketball courts inside schools are not only open to students but also the public.
Several dozen peaks in the range tower near or above 10,000 feet (3,000 metres), the highest being Yu (Jade) Mountain, which rises to 13,113 feet (3,997 metres). The western part of the island, consisting of terraced tablelands and alluvial plains, has most of Taiwan’s flatland and, consequently, the bulk of its farmland and most of its population. By contrast, the east coast—aside from one major rift valley—provides little room for human settlement. Taiwan’s volcanic soil and the frequency of earthquakes on the island indicate a common origin with the other nearby archipelagoes. However, the configuration of its coastlines and the age and formations of rocks on Taiwan’s west coast suggest to some geologists that Taiwan was once part of the Asian mainland. In general, the relief of the island consists of an uplifted crustal block that trends north-northeast to south-southwest.
After losing control of mainland China in 1949, the ROC retained control of Taiwan and Penghu (Taiwan, ROC), parts of Fujian (Fujian, ROC)—specifically Kinmen, Wuqiu (now part of Kinmen) and the Matsu Islands and two major islands in the South China Sea. The ROC also briefly retained control of the entirety of Hainan, parts of Zhejiang (Chekiang)—specifically the Dachen Islands and Yijiangshan Islands—and portions of Tibet, Qinghai, Xinjiang and Yunnan. The Communists captured Hainan in 1950, captured the Dachen Islands and Yijiangshan Islands during the First Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1955 and defeated the ROC revolts in Northwest China in 1958. ROC forces entered Burma and Thailand in the 1950s and were defeated by Communists in 1961. Since losing control of mainland China, the Kuomintang continued to claim sovereignty over ‘all of China’, which it defined to include mainland China (including Tibet), Taiwan (including Penghu), Outer Mongolia, and other minor territories.