Taiwan is an island that has for all practical purposes been independent since 1950, but which China regards as a rebel region that must be reunited with the mainland - by force if necessary.
China has claimed sovereignty over Taiwan since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, when the defeated Nationalist government fled to the island as the Communists, under Mao Zedong, swept to power.
China insists that nations cannot have official relations with both China and Taiwan, with the result that Taiwan has formal diplomatic ties with only a few countries. The US is Taiwan's most important friend and protector.
Despite its diplomatic isolation, Taiwan has become one of Asia's major economic players, and one of the world's top producers of computer technology.
Republic of China (ROC)
Capital: Taipei
Population 23,3 million
Area 36,188 sq km (13,972 sq miles)
Major languages Mandarin Chinese (official), Min Nan Chinese (Taiwanese), Hakka
Major religions Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity
Life expectancy 76,2 years (men), 82,7 years (women)
Currency New Taiwan dollar
LEADER
President: Tsai Ing-wen
Tsai Ing-wen became Taiwan's first female president when elected in January 2016.
With 56% of the vote, she led her traditionally pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to their biggest ever victory in parliamentary elections.
Ms Tsai's political message has always revolved around the importance of Taiwanese identity, and she has pledged that democracy will be at the heart of the island's future relations with China.
By pursuing Taiwanese sovereignty, Ms Tsai runs the risk of antagonising China, reversing eight years of warmer ties under President Ma Ying-jeou of the Beijing-friendly Kuomintang party.
In the 1990s, Ms Tsai negotiated Taiwan's accession to the World Trade Organization. She joined the DPP in 2004 after working as a non-partisan chairwoman of Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council. Four years later she became the youngest person and first woman to lead the party. She lost the presidential election to Ma Ying-jeou in 2012.
A former law professor, she hails from the coastal village of Pingtung in southern Taiwan. Her mixed ethnicity - a Hakka father and Taiwanese mother - has been cited as one of the traits that helped her connect with voters.
MEDIA
The media environment in Taiwan is among the freest in Asia, and extremely competitive.
Media freedom organisations say Beijing exerts pressure on Taiwanese media owners.
There are hundreds of newspapers, all privately-owned and reflecting a wide range of views.
Nearly 93% of Taiwanese are online.
TIMELINE
Some key dates in Taiwan's history:
1683 - Island comes under administration of China's Qing dynasty.
1895 - China - defeated in the first Sino-Japanese war - cedes Taiwan to Japan.
1945 - Taiwan reverts to Chinese control after Japanese defeat in Second World War.
1947 - Nationalist troops crush island-wide rioting by Taiwanese disgruntled with official corruption, killing unknown thousands. The event is now known as the 228 Incident.
1949 - Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek loses civil war to Mao Zedong's Communist forces and flees to Taiwan. He rules the island with an iron fist until his death in 1975.
1950s-1960s - Rapid industrial development.
1971 - UN recognises Communist China as sole government of whole country. People's Republic takes over China's UN Security Council seat.
1979 - Washington switches diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taipei. US Congress passes the Taiwan Relations Act promising to help the island defend itself.
1987 - Taiwan lifts almost four decades of martial law and eases ban on travel to China.
2000 - Voters put Democratic Progressive Party in power for first time, ending more than five decades of Nationalist rule.
ART
When a former soldier learned that his village was going to be demolished 10 years ago, he picked up a brush and started painting – and he hasn’t stopped since.
Every morning, Huang Yung-fu flips on a light, shuffles out of his two-room bungalow in sandals and carries a handful of paint tins into the streets outside. While the city around him sleeps, Huang crouches on a stool for three hours and quietly decorates the drab cement walls, pavement and windows with an explosion of playful murals in kaleidoscopic colours.
A spectacular Taoist festival
Taoist festivals do not get much bigger or more spectacular than the Burning of the Wang Yeh Boats, held every three years in southern Taiwanese communities to ward off disease.
The Island that never stops apologizing
Preserving social cohesion at all costs is still the bedrock of Taiwan’s social morality. Here, placing the larger clan, the society, before yourself, the individual, is key.
But the three little words ‘I love you’ don’t come as easily to Lee as they do to his fiancée Chen. His face turns beetroot-red at the thought of uttering the phase, and causes him to feel ‘buhaoyisi’ (pronounced ‘boo-how-eee-suh’) – one of the many ways to feel mortified or to be sorry in Taiwan.
“Most people here will feel this way,” Lee said.
Welcome to the linguistic minefield of apologising in Taiwan, where simply saying ‘buhaoyisi’ can open a Pandora’s Box of profuse politeness. The word is made up of four characters that literally translate to ‘bad meaning’ or ‘bad feeling’, and serves as a tidy catch-all that can be deployed in all kinds of situations, from meekly catching a waiter’s attention to expressing a guilt-ridden apology to your boss to the paralysing feeling that washes over you as you struggle to confess your love.
Buhaoyisi is forever on the lips of Taiwanese, according to Prof Chia-ju Chang, Chinese professor at Brooklyn College City University of New York. “We use it all the time as Taiwan is a verbally polite culture. So, we use it when we interrupt people or asking of a favour. We can even use it to start a conversation.”
For the uninitiated outsider, Taiwan may seem like the world’s most apologetic country, a nation obsessed with saying sorry – but in fact, the culture of buhaoyisi reveals a lot about the islands’ hidden layers of modesty and shyne
Hiking in the landslide capital in the world
Despite its propensity to earthquakes and typhoons, Taiwan is an excellent hiking destination, whether in its treeless mountain peaks or in the lush sub-tropical lowlands.
If you build it (a trail and a cabin) then they (eager hikers) will come. At least that’s what officials at Yushan National Park in central Taiwan are hoping, after constructing a two-storey steel-framed solar-powered lodge on a narrow bluff below the park's eponymous mountain, the 3,952m coxcomb-peaked Yushan.
The world top coffee city
Taipei, Taiwan
Taipei residents are known for being extraordinarily friendly and extremely polite. Since the island was once a Japanese colony, it is not uncommon for shop employees to smile and bow in unison when someone walks through the doors. And nowhere is this friendliness more apparent than in the city’s surprisingly unique cafes. Topo Cafe, in northern Taipei’s Western-style Tianmu neighbourhood, is so offbeat it has a miniature, gold-fish filled river running through the middle of it.
Allister Chang, an American from the Washington DC area, lived in Taipei for a year, documenting his favourite coffee spots on his blog, Taipei Cafes. He said he especially loves the establishments near the Zhongxiao Dunhua transit station in southern Taipei’s Da’an district. “These cafes are a little bolder,” he explained in an e-mail. “Homey’s Cafe, for example, requires you to walk up two unmarked, sketchy cement stairs to find, while the Barbie Cafe is exactly what the title suggests: completely pink.”
In Taiwan, a quest to reach Sun Moon Lake
Taiwan’s most gruelling cycling challenge heads from the depths of the dizzying marble Taroko Gorge to the KOM summit, ending at a green- and blue-hued lake surrounded by leafy hill.
Taiwan is a striking natural paradise of forest and parkland. Dotted with hot springs and lakes, the country is almost divided in two by its rugged Central Mountain Range, which culminates at the legendary King Of Mountain (KOM) summit, Taiwan’s highest at 3,275m. Crowning Taroko National Park, one of six national parks in the country, KOM is also the centrepiece of Taiwan’s most popular annual cycling race.
Taiwan is the world's largest supplier of contract computer chip manufacturing (foundry services) and is a leading LCD panel manufacturer,[98] DRAM computer memory, networking equipment, and consumer electronics designer and manufacturer.[86] Major hardware companies include Acer, Asus, HTC, Foxconn, TSMC and Pegatron. Textiles are another major industrial export sector, though of declining importance due to labor shortages, increasing overhead costs, land prices, and environmental protection.
Steel and heavy manufacturing[edit]
Taiwan, as of 2017, is the world's thirteenth-largest steel exporter. In 2018, Taiwan exported 12.2 million metric tons of steel, a one percent increase from 12.0 million metric tons in 2017. Taiwan's exports represented about 3 percent of all steel exported globally in 2017, based on available data. The volume of Taiwan's 2018 steel exports was one-sixth that of the world's largest exporter, China, and nearly one-third that of the second-largest exporter, Japan. In value terms, steel represented just 3.6 percent of the total amount of goods Taiwan exported in 2018. Taiwan exports steel to more than 130 countries and territories. Over the decade from 2009-2019, Taiwan grew its steel exports by 24%. In 2018, the US imported 300,000 metric tons of pipe and tube product. Taiwan has developed a vast export trade to its most proximate neighbours in flat products. Taiwan's stainless steel exports numbered in 2018 about 500,000 metric
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