Taiwan Visit

While not a great photo, this picture does show the surrounding mountain landscape that encompasses Taipei (Taibei). On this particular morning the clouds were doing their best to overrun the hills and invade the Taipei valley.







As we drove from Hsin Chu (Xin Zhu, meaning new bamboo) towards Taipei the Taipei 101 quickly came into view. If you look the building up in Wikipedia it states that this building is taller than the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur.




I think the architecture blends well into the surroundings and fits with the Buddhist/ Daoist cultural heritage of Taiwan. If you wikipedia 'lotus blossum stupa' you'll see a visual representation of what I am referring to.

Within the Taipei 101 at the top of the building is this engineering marvel. Called, 'The Super Big Wind Damper', this very heavy suspended ball reduces the effects of wind on the Taipei 101 by absorbing some of the dynamic wind forces exerted on the building.

One final comment regarding Taiwan's names. If you are wondering why you will see Taiwan's capital and other city names spelled in different ways it is because the Kuo Ming Tang (Guo Ming Dang, but called the KMT) adopted a certain form of translating Chinese to English during the period when the Guo Ming Dang ruled mainland China from 1912-1945. The KMT as they translated their name to English, adopted a Western form of translating the Chinese to English called, 'Wade-Giles'. This system is a little confusing, using the 'K' to represent the 'G' sound, the 'T' to represent the 'D' sound and the 'P' to represent the 'B' sound. All I can say is that I'm not a linguist and there must have been a reason Mr. Thomas Wade and Mr. Herbert Giles back in the mid 19th century chose to do this, but the reason escapes me. As an example, this is the reason you will sometimes here Beijing refered to as Peiking; it's a remnant of the Wade-Giles system. After the Communists took over China they introduced a more sane translation system called Hanyu Pinyin, or just Pinyin for short. This system reverted the Peiking back to Beijing, etc. and was adopted as the international standard for translating Chinese in 1982.