“Sherlock, what have you done?”

“The Great Wallpaper conspiracy.”

*This post may contain spoilers.*

Elementary my dear Watson, 
           this wallpaper is mind-altering.

Oh, the game’s afoot?

Maybe. 

Just remember, you left us cliffhanging by the pool.  

And we are still hanging stateside.

Dear Sherlock, when you are bored your mind scratches itself raw! 

And the trouble you get into…

...For instance, that woman, whatshername, looking magnificently retro-burlesque in some sort of early-twenty-century-style peignoir in Slytherin green. Absolutely stunning although, and btw, we adored THE WALLPAPER!  If only the one woman antagonist we're likely to see wasn't a dominatrix, no matter how well written.

Do you have a wallpaper web-site?

Just calling to find out.

My appologies, but you two look a lot better dressed.

See what I mean? Love the wallpaper.

Are you sure M(ona)?

                                    

I am, absolutely!

I am, is re-assuring, absolutely, is not.

Well then, consider this, did you enjoy having to call on ‘dear’ Mycroft to bail you out.

Lord no!

---

“A Study of that iThing thing”

Go ahead Whatsyourname I know you are itching to text this-

 

Poor darling Inspector Lestrade suffering from wallpaper and texting overload.

Draw your own conclusions, friends. What is the meaning of the Great Wallpaper Conspiracy? Is it merely that the person who does set design for BBC Sherlock has a share in Timorous Beasties? Is it a throwback to the Victorian aesthetic? Or have you, like me, stopped thinking about Sherlock and started thinking about how awesome it is when clothes look like upholstery? Hmm, I wonder whether I should try and find some Sherlock-esque wallpaper print for my next pair of Shakespearean knee-breeches... after all, one can never have too many. 

When I say Sherlock…

The Last Place on Earth

Imagine California before cars, litter, and smog.  Imagine mountains, lakes, and waterfalls left completely alone.  This is New Zealand's state of grace, where quite happily you can't see the forest for the tree.

I cannot remember when I have not wanted to go to New Zealand. I think I have always carried an image of that land in the back of my mind like a man driving across the desert carries a full canteen: He may not need it, but he takes comfort in knowing it's there. This year, I went. It was summer there then. And I returned home from that visit upset. 

 

I could not look upon the landscape of New Zealand's South Island-its golden, grass-covered, undulating ranges, its crystal lakes cascading down boulder-strewn gorges, its sapphire-blue, glacier-gouged lakes, its jagged, granite, snow capped mountains from whose misty flanks waterfalls leap and plunge through forests and ferns into bottomless fjords below- I could not look upon so much undefiled beauty without coming home saddened, angry. 

To be confronted with such loveliness is to be confronted with how much of the rest of the world's natural beauty has been crowded out, how much has been spoiled. The South Island reminds us of what we have given up, of what we have permitted ourselves to pollute, defile, bulldoze away, and destroy. 

This is not to suggest that New Zealand is perfect. A fourth generation New Zealander's controversial and incisive 1976 critique of New Zealand society was called The Passionless People. Just before the end of the nineteenth century, when Australia's six colonies were charily contemplating forming a united federal government, they invited New Zealand to become a part. Sir Joseph Ward, a New Zealand statesman of that time, responded, "There are 1,201 reasons why we won't join Australia. Twelve hundred of them are miles. The one is that we don't want to." 

Three-quarters of the population is concentrated on the Pennsylvania-sized North Island. The South Island is about the size of Florida with less than a tenth its population. The farther you go south in New Zealand, the farther you go into that nation's rural past. But even in the South more than 80 percent of the population is concentrated in a couple of urban areas, which is why the South Island's countryside or that part of it we visited-seemed so empty, as though at times we had it to ourselves.

What was it like? 

Imagine southern California before Los Angeles, before the car, before billboards, telephone poles, litter, and smog; imagine Switzerland with nobody there. Imagine walking through forests of moss-covered beech trees and coming upon beautiful wild pigeons so tame that instead of leaping screaming into the air, they simply step out of your way. And what gorgeous birds they are: big, plump, with snowy white breasts, and heads and necks the iridescent blue-green of a peacock! Two of them watched me pass under the limb upon which they were roosting the day I spent fly-fishing for trout-or, TROUT! I should say, since I've never before seen rainbows and browns so huge. 

As a base my friend Charles and I chose Queenstown, in the Central Otago region. With air travel, Queenstown has mushroomed from a small, quiet community on Lake Wakatipu visited by New Zealand summer holiday seekers into the South Island's leading year-round watering hole and what one guidebook labeled "an antipodean St. Moritz... the most sophisticated resort in New Zealand, a sophistication belied by its decidedly masculine energy."

Antipodean it is; St. Moritz-sophisticated it ain't. Its architecture would not be out of place in Fort Collins, Colorado. Its cuisine stars twice-killed lamb-the second time by the chef. And the drink measure is so stingy that when Charles saw what the bartender had- fixed him he said, "Maybe you'd better make that a double."

"That is a double," he responded. 

However, Queenstown does have energy, and has had it ever since the early 1860s, when gold was discovered in the Clutha, Arrow, Kawarau, and Shotover rivers nearby. In 1862 the Shotover was the richest river in the world, yielding as much as 5 ½ ounces of gold per shovelful. One afternoon two native Maoris paused in their efforts to rescue their near-drowned dog and scooped up 19 ¼ pounds of gold! 

Miners poured into lands occupied until then only by the occasional hardy pioneer who, in order to raise sheep, had willingly accepted the harsh isolation of a homestead savaged by winter snows, spring floods, summer droughts. Australians from the Victoria goldfields, Americans from the California gold rush, Chinese from all over, joined New Zealanders seeking their fortunes in Otago's riverbeds. They discovered that though gold might have been plentiful, food was not. 

One bold Irish miner, caught in the act of skinning a settler's sheep, defiantly told his captor, "I'll kill any bloody sheep that tries to bite me!" The sheep man reportedly rode off laughing.

Those who did not starve to death risked drowning in the raging rivers. Between 1840 and 1870, so many men lost their lives in New Zealand's rivers that in parliament a member proposed that drowning be considered a natural death. Miners who survived created small communities like Arrowtown, Macetown, Cardrona, Bendigo. Today only Arrowtown remains; the others have become ghost towns. A pity, since according to one account, at Bendigo's saloon on Saturday nights in the 1860s, "a hideous maniacal yelling ... entirely over-powered and drowned every sound within a radius of a mile or so." 

Topographically, the North and South Islands are quite different: They are separate micro continents in collision, the more temperate North molded by volcanic fires; the cooler South by ice. If the North is "town," the South is "country," the "wopwops" as the New Zealanders call it, their slang for boondocks. Over and over the Otago high lakes country reminded me of the old American West. 

The New Zealanders we saw are a vigorous, handsome, wryly humorous people: lean and sinewy, with glowing, outdoor faces, flat bellies and strong legs. Their accent is softer, less Cockney than the Australian. "Yeh-aae," they say for "yes"; the word soft, like an exhalation of breath. "If yew don't mind moy sighing sew," said a lady behind me in a restaurant, "he was a bit of a pine in the ace." 

New Zealanders on vacation in Queenstown appear devoted to flinging themselves off high peaks and bridges: alpine skiing, tobogganing, para sailing, hang gliding, and bungee jumping. 

When New Zealanders are not launching themselves into space, they are careening in jet boats through narrow gorges, roaring at breakneck speeds on barely ankle-deep rivers, steering as decapitatingly close to rock outcroppings as possible. These boats can reach 40 miles per hour-but it feels faster: Down the Shotover River we raced, zipping through narrow chasms, ducking overhanging rocks, accelerating across gravel bars, swissssshh-thump-swooooosh, then suddenly, in a diamond-bright deluge of spray, spinning into a stomach-churning 360-degree turn, skidding to a dead stop within the boat's length, before rocketing off to do it all over again. 

Visitors who are disinclined to race or leap can simply disappear for days on various nature walks or "tracks." The best known is the Milford Track, often called "the finest walk in the world." The 33 ½ mile, four-day walk through spectacularly beautiful remote west-coast country in Fiordland National Park is something of a national pilgrimage for New Zealanders. The track season runs from November through March; at the height of the season escorted parties, up to forty walkers, make the trek each day. They carry their own gear, but accommodations are provided at huts along the way. 

Hikers follow the boulder-strewn Clinton River, whose turquoise green pools harbor combative trout; they stride through the Clinton Canyon, its steep walls glistening with thin veins of water, pass by hundreds of varieties of mosses and lichen growing on the rocks, scrub and sub alpine plants clinging to what soil they can find. After a while the river slows, dips through fern-lined forest glades; and walkers leave the Clinton to seek out the waterfalls of the little Hidden Lakes. They hike, or "tramp," as the New Zealanders say, through beech forest, rain forest, among trees lagged with moss. Over head flutter robins, bellbirds, tomtits, finches, and keas, New Zealand's mischievous, inquisitive, gray-green native parrots. 

The Milford Track is for the reasonably fit; it's fairly easy hiking, though many of the paths are extremely rocky and there is the 3,681foot MacKinnon Pass to cross. Still, it is the best way to see the mountains and forests, the national park-protected plant and animal life, and the dozens of waterfalls-including the spectacular Sutherland Falls, whose sheets of water tumble and vault in three great leaps from Lake Quill 1,903 feet down to form the Arthur River, which empties into mist-shrouded Milford Sound.

Our first, jet-lagged day in Queenstown we were content to take a leisurely afternoon cruise in a vintage, black-smoke spewing steamship up Lake Wakatipu to visit the Mount Nicholas sheep station (ranch).  Until modern roads were put in the steamship was the sole means of transportation for the bulk supplies and stock needed by the sheep stations on Wakatipu's shores.

Before the radio-telephone was available, there was a simple and effective method of signaling the Earnslaw in case of emergency: A fire was lit on the beach. One fire meant passengers were to be picked up, two meant someone was ill, three that there had been a death. There is the story of the Nicholas Station musterer (ranch hand) who, out of grog and desperate for a drink, saw the Earnslaw steaming past Mount Creighton on the far side of the lake. He lit a fire on the beach and waited to be picked up; the steamer ignored him. He set a second fire; the Earnslaw sailed on. Not until he lit a third fire did the ship speed across the lake. As she tied up at the Mount Nicholas station wharf, the Earnslaw's captain called down, "Who's dead?"

"I am," the musterer replied. "Dead sick of this place!" 

Sheep are the reason why the New Zealand we saw seemed so empty. Each sheep requires three acres to graze in, and while stations raise tens of thousands of the animals, very few hands are needed until mustering and shearing time. Since that work is contracted out, there is little need for outbuildings. Although the Mount Nicholas sheep station we visited is quite typical of the high country sheep and cattle station, it is the largest operating on the shores of Lake Wakatipu. It runs 25,000 sheep and 2,000 cattle on 100,000 acres of sun-bronzed range, empty, it appeared, but for a stockyard, wool shed, and sheep-sheep who, from a distance, look for all the world like flecks of lint on a scorched, golden blanket. 

Otago's hills do look like blankets: like worn, pliant old bedding someone tossed over an aged sleeping giant whose gray, craggy, wrinkled elbows have poked through the covering here and there. My friend, being Scot, is drawn to mountains; I am drawn to hills. Some of the most august peaks and stunning fjords of New Zealand's Southern Alps are less than fifty miles from the center of Queenstown by air; by car, however, one has to drive nearly two hundred miles. For us the trip was the best of both worlds. 

Traveling in most of the rest of the world consists of visiting a beautiful spot, then moving on to another one, carefully editing out of our vision the horrors we pass on the way. In the high country of New Zealand's South Island, the beauty just goes on and on and on. For mile after mile, as we drove from Queenstown toward the west coast, the land would take our breath away. The first part of our journey paralleled The Remarkables, the 7,500-foot-high chain of mountains that form Queenstown's backdrop. We passed through broad valleys scoured and shaved by ice millennia ago; crossed rivers floury-blue with glacial silt; passed farms behind whose fences sheep and white-faced Herefords and red deer quietly grazed. But always what held our eye was the play of light upon the hills. 

There is softness to those hills, a nappy leonine texture to their stark, bronzed, Henry Moore-sculpted forms. The shadows of passing clouds caress them, smooth their fur. The warm, bright sunlight beaming down through that dry, pure air seems to melt them, shape them into ever more dazzling forms, paint them in ever more subtle colors: beiges, yellows, whites, ochers, siennas, golds. Here and there are tall stands of poplars-as if such tableaux needed exclamation points! On the bus we took to Arrowtown, I recall the guide saying as we looked out at lovely Lake Hayes with mountains reflected in its mirror-smooth surface, "Landscape painters are thick on the ground hereabouts."

 

For two weeks we hiked and climbed and floated and flew around the broad Otago plains, the narrow, misty, rain-swept West Coast, and the majestic cloud-shrouded Mount Cook. Much of the time-those times we enjoyed most-we were totally alone. We saw glaciers inexorably grinding their way down to the sea; we saw dense, fecund virgin forests; fern-fringed, blue-black lakes. At some point I copied down a Maori saying I had been struck by: Toitu he kainga, whatu ngarongaro he tangata. It means, "The land still remains when the people have disappeared." 

Towards the end of our stay in Queenstown I spent a day fly-fishing for trout while Charles climbed the 3,000-foot hill.

  

My guide was a school friend married to a New Zealander. He took me across Lake Wakatipu in his motorboat. We navigated south down the Kingston Arm behind Cecil Peak to an abandoned sheep station where a battered Land-Rover awaited us. Then we drove along dirt roads past Popeye Lucas's handsome old homestead, his once-elegant Humber car now rusting in a stand of pines, and paused in places to open and shut gates to pastureland where sheep and Herefords grazed. 

We bounced and climbed, scared up hares and New Zealand harriers, passed poplars and willows and walnut trees, forded the Lochy River and continued up its other side until we stopped about five miles upstream from where we had left the boat, then we got out and continued on foot, avoiding the needle-sharp gorse, until we came to the pool we wanted to fish. We set up the fly rod, tied on a hairy Royal Wulff dry fly, and we went to the bank of the river. 

Whip-whip-whip. Whip-whip-whip.  My line and leader straightened out, the rod tip flexed backwards. There was a swirl and the fly was taken. A rainbow trout the size of my forearm leaped out of the water. "What a little beauty!" My friend said. "It's about a two-pounder." 

The trout stripped a dozen feet of line off the reel. I was standing beside my friend, watching him play the fish. He knew that what little experience I have had fly-fishing has been on American rivers where a two-pound rainbow would be considered a monster trout. 

"Here," he said, passing me the fly rod. "You play him. Get the feel of the rod and this size a fish." About three minutes later we landed and released the trout. We moved upriver to another pool and on my third cast I hooked a jive-pound brown. I must have played that fish for ten minutes, but I lost him. It could have been for anyone of a number of reasons. I am just not a very good fly fisherman. Yet. 

For the rest of the day we fished our way upstream, sometimes wading in our khakis and tennis shoes along the Lochy's slippery stony bottom. At other times we followed paths through moss-covered beeches and evergreens to the next beautiful pool. When we were thirsty we dipped water out of the river. We fished with Royal Wulffs, Black Gnats, Adamses, Pheasant Tail Nymphs. 

At about eight that evening, when I got back and met Charles in a Queenstown restaurant, he was no more able to tell me how beautiful it had been for him on that hilltop overlooking Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu than I was able to describe what it was like to see five pound trout swimming in the Lochy, to watch a pair of rare New Zealand falcons whistling overhead, to have spent a dozen hours on that river and not seen another person but my companion all day!

Back to “civilization”.  I can hear car after car going by, people talking, everything sounds too loud a cacophony of sounds.  I took a walk this morning and stepped in a dog turd. Toitu he kainga, whatu ngarongaro he tangata. 

That other China.

Quick, now: what nation boasts an unbroken culture of 3,000 years, a thriving Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian tradition, one of the world’s great cuisines, and the finest collection of Chinese art on the planet?

The answer, of course is China – that other China, 121 miles across the jade green waters of Taiwan Strait on the rugged island of Taiwan. In the flush of great expectations, travelers tent to pass Taiwan on their rush to China, on the mainland. That is unfortunate for the Republic of China, as it calls itself, offers some of the best travel values and scenic vistas in today’s Asia. Despite it’s astonishing economic rise, it has lovingly preserved the ancient Chinese culture. Taiwan’s attractions are ample reason to choose it as an independent destination.

True, Taiwan boasts no Great Wall, no Forbidden City, no Temple of Heaven. The island republic stands as a reminder that culture is not just monuments to a great and storied past but a state of mind that binds one generation to another and unites the past to the living present. Under Mao, literature, art, and history were made to serve the class struggle – rewritten, redrawn, banned, and destroyed at whim. Confucianism, the foundation of the Chinese social order, was purged. Buddhism and Taoism, China’s principal faiths, were suppressed. The Chinese written character, the essence of the Chinese aesthetic, was “simplified”. The food, which 2,700 years ago the sage Kwan Tze declared to be “heaven”, went to hell. “Every winter some aspect of culture disappears for good,” writes the Belgian Sinologist Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), “some cultural legacy of the past is gone forever, and every spring there are fewer flowers.”

China’s flowers are blooming in Taiwan. The Confucian tradition is alive and well. Buddhism and Taoism are living faiths to believers young and old. Poetry, calligraphy, painting, drama, music, and the dance are thriving. And, all over the Island one encounters that zest the Chinese call ren-ch’ing-wei: a combination of furious energy, unfailing hospitality, and raucous delight in just being alive – and Chinese. The Communists may have won the mainland, but lost the culture. It is in Taiwan.

Taipei, the capital, is the obvious and richly rewarding place to embark on one's discoveries. A building boom has changed the city's size and shape and made it one of the world's most densely populated metropolises. It is an unplanned, over-crowded city, gray, and to me, unappealing.

But Taipei's soul remains Chinese-and nothing underscores that more dramatically than the magnificent old Grand Hotel, a red-and-gold, pagoda-roofed behemoth that looms over the city, like the imperial palace of some ancient emperor.

The Grand is the largest, and surely the gaudiest, structure ever built in China's classical Ming architectural style.

Its lobby, which is roughly the size of Wrigley Field, boasts forty-two red pillars five feet thick, eight blue-carpeted parlors upholstered in blue-and-gold-brocaded silk, a white marble staircase fourteen yards wide, and a gold loom carpet so large it took twenty-four Chinese workmen nine months at two shifts a day to weave. Guest rooms are similarly outsize; the terraces alone are larger than most rooms in the newer hotels. To some, it is all a bit much.

So, certainly, is the National Palace Museum, known as the Kukung (Old Palace), a short taxi ride from the Grand.

The Kukung is the repository of no fewer than 242,592 masterworks dating back more than ten centuries before Christ. James Cahill, a historian of Chinese art, calls the trove, in terms of both size and splendor, "simply incomparable".

The collection was begun by Tai-tzu, founder of the Sung dynasty, more than a thousand years ago, but it was chiefly amassed in the eighteenth century by the Ch'ing dynasty's illustrious Ch'ien-Iung emperor. Its 27,398 paintings and pieces of calligraphy date back 1,700 years. Its 23,863 pieces of porcelain go back to the thirteenth century (and include 23 of the 35 pieces of Ju ware known to exist in the world). Its 4,389 bronzes and 4,636 pieces of jade go back to the dawn of recorded time. Only a tiny portion of the holdings is ever on display. Most of the rest  2,345 cratefuls - is stored in two bombproof, temperature-and-humidity-controlled tunnels that wind the length of three football fields into the mountain that backs the museum. Museum officials claim they could change their entire display every six months and not repeat themselves for thirty years.

No less astounding was the sixteen-year odyssey that brought the treasures to Taiwan. It began in Beijing's Forbidden City, their original home, when Japanese forces overran Manchuria in 1931. Perceiving the threat to China proper, museum officials spirited the trove south by night, aboard six big trains, to Shanghai, and thence, as war clouds darkened, to Nanking, 150 miles inland. In 1937, with the onset of full-scale war, it was split into three separate caches and transported by truck, train, and riverboat, a step ahead of Japanese bombers, to the farthest southern and western reaches of the nation.

It survived fire, rains, mountain landslides, and insect plague, to be returned at wars end to Nanking-only to be threatened anew by the resumption of civil war between the Communists and the Kuomintang (Nationalists). In late 1948, with the Nationalist regime collapsing and Communist armies closing in on the city, Han Lih-wu, then Nationalist minister of education, somehow commandeered three decrepit ships and loaded the treasures aboard. They sailed out the Yangtze River mouth under the barrels of Communist guns, across the strait to safety on Taiwan. "In all that time, over all those miles," says Dr. Han, "there was not so much as a teacup broken!"

While most of the Ku-kung holdings rotate on and off display, certain exhibitions are now permanently established. One features a time line based in part on Joseph Needham's monumental Science and Civilization in China; it lays down the history of Chinese art against cultural and scientific milestones elsewhere. A spacious new gallery is intended to serve as a lasting bridge between old and new. Its rotating exhibition, under the title "Creating from Tradition," includes a wild, Tao-inspired contemporary wood sculpture, entitled Sword Dance of Lady Kung-sun, set against the equally wild cursive script of the eighth-century calligrapher Huai-su. Singled out for special notice are three completed permanent installations: exquisite snuff bottles from the Ch'ing dynasty (1644-1911), Hindustan jade, and the ink stone collection of Un Po-shou, the late industrialist.

If this all sounds esoteric, be reassured. Unlike mainland museums, where legends invariably are in Chinese alone-and are often misleading even in Chinese-the Ku-kung provides clear, informative English legends, free information sheets explaining each exhibit, knowledgeable, friendly English-speaking guides, and English-language lectures on Chinese art. And if one wearies of the galleries, one may contemplate timeless beauty in the museum's Chih Shan Garden, a Sung-style Eden of winding pathways, bare wood pavilions, and celadon green ponds, replete with mandarin ducks and swans and reminiscent of old Soochow.

If the Ku-kung is the past brought forward, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, across the river from the Grand, is the future looking back.

The night begins and ends with food, and Taipei's food is as varied as China itself. When the mainland fell, the great chefs from all over the nation followed their moneyed, Kuomintang patrons to Taiwan and turned Taipei into the world's greatest Chinese restaurant. Gastronomically speaking, one can travel the length and breadth of China within Taipei's city limits. An after-dinner stroll through Taipei's Hsimen (West Gate) district is a splendid way to end a day. Any and all of Taipei's streets and alleys are safe, except for traffic.

“The compassionate man goes to the mountain,” Confucius declared. “The wise man goes to the seaside.” To the traveler possessed of both virtues, Taiwan offers both climes: no fewer than sixty-two peaks on the island soar above 10,000 feet. In these, along the shores, and in the lush subtropical countryside between, one sees Taiwan as Portuguese sailors did in the sixteenth century, they named the island Ilha Formosa (Beautiful Island).

The 120-mile East-West Cross-Island Highway, running from just outside Hualien, a city of marble facing the Pacific, across the island's high mountain spine to Tungshih, near Taichung, is on no account to be missed. Hacked out of marble and granite by Kuomintang-army civil-war veterans, the road tunnels and snakes through breath-catching Taroko Gorge; over Chin Heng (Flowing Fragrance) Bridge, where waterfalls tumble hundreds of feet through a jungle fastness spangled with black-and-yellow butter-flies; through Yin-tzu Kou (Swallows' Grotto) and the Tunnel of Nine Turns, where dripping, black-rock half tunnels open on the gorge, swarms of passerines dart and swoop, and gnarled, stunted pines jut from granite cliffs that plunge to the thundering Li Wu (Fog) riverbed, far below. At the Shrine of Eternal Spring, a monument to the 450 workers who perished while building the road, a narrow footpath twines up through mossy rocks and wild orchids, green ferns, blue morning glories, and a giant bamboo grove trilling with crickets to a tiny pavilion on a ledge of a cliff. Here a Westerner can sense the inspiration for Chinese landscape painting-and perhaps catch a glimpse of Tung-t'ien, the Taoist dream of paradise.

Forty-five kilometers inland, the gorge opens into a giant bowl. Mountains stack behind mountains. A tributary spills into the Li Wu in a careless jumble of giant boulders. Dangling above them, a suspension bridge leads to a mountainside shrine and a pagoda silhouetted

against the sky. Atop a promontory sprawls comfortable, red-and-white Tienhsiang Lodge, a decent place to eat and spend the night. And the best of reasons for doing so is to listen to the river tumbling through the night and then awaken in the cool of dawn, watch the sun's bright light splash one peak after another, and reflect a moment on the grandiloquent words carved in a marble slab on the nearby mountainside, the last words of Wen Tienhsiang, for whom the inn was named. Captured by Mongol invaders more than seven hundred years ago and about to be put to death, he said this:  "There is an aura in the universe which permeates all things and makes them what they are. In man it is called spirit, and there is nowhere it is not."

Farther south, nestled in the dense green foliage of the same mountain spine, lies tranquil, beautiful Sun Moon Lake. In the Chinese yin-yang cosmology, the sun represents the yang, or male element; the moon rep-resents the yin, or female. Uniting the two, the lake, not surprisingly, is a honeymooners' idyll.

And a poet's dream. From the airy, open Moon Terrace restaurant at the hotel, the reflection of the moon shimmering on the water recalls Li Bai, the lonely T'ang dynasty poet, who, drunk with wine, set forth in his rowboat to embrace the moon's bright image. "I raise my cup to the moon to join me," Li Bai wrote. "With my shadow, we make a party of three." On a later boating expedition, alas, Li reached out, lost his balance, and drowned.

The sights around the lake call up old China, too. At the south end of the lake rises the elegant, nine-tier Tzu-en (Filial Piety) Pagoda, erected by the late president Chiang Kai-shek to honor the memory of his mother. The fabulous view from the top, unfolding for miles in all directions, is worth the climb.

On a knoll just downhill from the pagoda stands Hsuan Tsang Temple, one of the most important in all China. A seventh century Buddhist monk who spent seventeen years studying and wandering in India, Hsuan Tsang returned to his homeland with more than 1,000 sacred Buddhist sutras and spent the last two decades of his life translating them into Chinese. Inside the temple are two miniature gold pagodas: one holds a shard, said to have been verified, of the holy man's skull; the other, nineteen pure white stones believed to be his immortal remains, exhumed from the ashes of his cremation.

By far the most popular of Taiwan's mountain resorts is Alishan village, in Yushan (Jade Mountain) National Park. The journey to it begins in the little city of Chiayi, on the western plain, where an old, narrow-gauge diesel-powered onetime logging train departs each morning at eight o'clock for a spectacular, three hour climb that crosses 114 bridges and burrows through 50 tunnels in an ascent from steamy, subtropical lowlands into chilly alpine forests. Here, stone paths twine among towering stands of cypress, juniper, and pine, through a plum garden adorned with fragile foxglove, and around tranquil Sisters Pond, where local growers sell a superb, light-gold tea, called ying-hua ch' a, found nowhere else in the world.

To Taiwan Chinese, Alishan's greatest attraction is the sunrise over Yushan, across a misty valley.

The rustic Alishan Guest House offers food and rest-and a summons for the train ride to the summit at the awful hour of 3:30 A.M. Come rain or sometimes even snow, the train is packed with Chinese tourists. In Chinese lore, morning clouds and mountain mists embody the spirit of the goddess of Sorcery Mountain. Their presence is a metaphor for the mating of heaven and earth; the mountain mist is the source of chi, the life force, which brings longevity to those who inhale it. Rising 13,114 feet into the clouds and mists of the Central Range, Yushan is the highest peak in east-central Asia, higher even than Japan's Mount Fuji. At daybreak, the sun's first rays light up a sea of clouds that stretches off as far as the eye can see, and Yushan summit is utterly redolent of chi.

Taiwan's rugged eastern coastline is no less dramatic, in its way, than its central mountains. At Yehliu (Wild Willows), on the island's northern tip, vast coral bluffs the color of sand have been sculpted over time by savage winds and seas into strange and wondrous shapes - giant mushrooms, stupas, even a formation called Queen's Head, resembling a profile of Nefertiti.

Midway down the island, the Suao-Hualien Highway dips and snakes for 69 tortuous miles across the face of black-rock cliffs that plunge as much as 2,600 feet into the perpetually raging Pacific.

And on 18.5 square miles of Taiwan's southernmost Hengchun (Eternal Spring) Peninsula, Kenting (pronounced kun-ding) National Park presents an array of wonders above and below ground and water-among them a botanical garden, bird preserve, and ecologically protected tropical rain forest, an upland cattle, sheep, and goat ranch, a tangle of limestone caves, a tidewater moon-scape of coral tableland, an undersea Eden for scuba divers, safe, swimmable warm-water beaches, and one tidal boulder playfully dubbed Ni-ke-shen Tou (Nixon's Head), bearing a remarkable resemblance to the former U.S. president, up to his nose in the waters of the South China Sea.

The one place that best sums up Taiwan's devotion to old China is the tiny coastal town of Lukang (Deer Harbor), on the Taiwan Strait. Throughout the late Ming and Ch'ing dynasties (from the seventeenth century to the revolution of 1911), Lukang was a major commercial-crafts center and bustling port of entry for emigrating mainlanders. It was known then as San Pu-chien (Three No-See-'Ums) City: residents never saw the ground, because it was covered with firecracker paper left over from the birthday celebration for Matzu, the patron deity of Taiwan fishermen; they never saw the sky, because Lukang's streets were roofed over against typhoons; and they never saw a virgin, because proper Chinese maidens scurried across the rooftops rather than be seen in the public streets.

Today, Lukang's roofs are mostly gone; the girls putt-putt by on motor scooters, skirts aswirl. But tradition remains very much alive. Matzu Temple, whose statue of the deity was brought to the island by Manchu invaders in 1684, remains jam-packed day and night-and the temple grounds are still strewn with firecracker paper. Food carts crowd around it, proffering old-fashioned, quick-fried flat breads called niu-shi-ping (ox-tongue cakes). In open-front shops along the narrow, crowded streets, cabinetmakers, calligraphers, wood-carvers, and makers of incense, lanterns, fans, dolls, and silk butterflies and birds pursue their ancient crafts just as they always have done. In the Lukang Folk Arts Museum, a creaky, Sino-French provincial mansion built 200 years ago and deeded to the government in 1973, one walks among the household effects of a Chinese-gentry family-elaborately carved furniture, brocaded costumes, old books and musical instruments, even a gallery of grainy gray photographs depicting women with bound feet, sing-song houses, opium dens, and the brutalizing effects of China's nineteenth-century collision with the West.

Open to visitors is a cultural center, featuring one gallery of classical painting, pottery, and calligraphy (including a number of copies of Ming and Ching that can be purchased at remarkably modest prices), one of traditional crafts, as well as a dim sum parlor, an airy roofed court, and an old fashioned tea house, where classical airs are played on ancient Chinese instruments.

Totally rebuild was the magnificent, eighteenth-century Lungshan (Dragon Mountain) Temple, in Lukang, one of Taiwan's oldest landmarks. "Our past tells us who we are. It is our duty to preserve it."

An old friend of mine still greets visitors with a vise like handshake and an earnest "Huan-yin, huan-yin!" ("Welcome, welcome!"). He may add in classical Chinese, "When friends visit from afar, is this not indeed a pleasure!" It is his own little joke, one that foreign visitors rarely understand but that, like Lukang itself, is in keeping with Chinese tradition. The words are the opening lines of the Lun yu-better known in the West as the Analects of Confucius.