Your Place Or Mine - Episode THREE - Taipei

Iszi Lawrence Daliso Chaponda and Shaun Keaveny

Yes! Episode 3! We got to Taiwan this week and that might sound like a great idea to a tourist but it is a bundle of nerves for a BBC presenter.

You see Taipei is a large island off the coast of mainland China, and for more than a century it was part of China. Then, they lost it to the Japanese (so that the people of Taipei actually fought with the Japanese during WWII). Then when the nationalist forces (headed by Chiang Kai-shek) were losing against the communist party in the Chinese civil war, they fled to Taiwan and set it up as the official Republic of China with Taipei as its capital. They brought with them a load of treasures, people and diplomatic clout. Meanwhile in China, the communists set up their own official Chinese government, the People’s Republic of China. In the last seventy years Taiwan has moved from authoritarian to a representative democracy, preserving traditional Chinese culture, as well as developing its own. China has moved away from communist ideals to a single party authoritarian centrally planned economy. The issue is that China still sees Taiwan as part of their country and Taiwan sees itself as an entirely separate country. Coming down hard either side of this, even calling Taiwan a country causes diplomatic issues for our government, which is a lot of responsibility for an idiot comedian waxing lyrical about the strangeness of oyster omelettes.

Fortunately I managed not to cause a diplomatic incident but did get to try a some grub. Turns out Shaun is rather a picky eater, and didn’t scoff the oyster omelette in one go. He did however, like the sausage.