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This graveyard - the only surviving foreigners' cemetery in Taiwan - reveals a great deal about early interactions between Taiwan and the West. Among those buried here are missionaries, seamen, diplomats, and tea traders. Some were passing through; others lived in Taiwan for 30 or 40 years.
The e
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Sanjhih is like many little Taiwanese towns: Small enough that you won't get lost, and that you can get yourself oriented in a matter of minutes; but big enough to supply all your basic needs; and bustling enough to make a food-and/or-fuel stop fun.
The main road from Danshuei, Taiwan Highway 2,
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The Sanjhih Gallery of Famous Sons - part of Sanjhih Visitors Center - celebrates the lives of four scions of Sanjhih families.
The most famous is, of course, former President Lee Teng-hui. Lee - the first president of Taiwan to have been born on the island - held office from 1988 to 2000, and re
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LI TIEN-LU HAND PUPPET HISTORICAL MUSEUM
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Li Tien-lu (1910-1998) was a fourth-generation puppeteer regarded in Taiwan as a "living national treasure." He is known to Western audiences mainly through Hou Hsiao-Hsien's 1993 movie "The Puppetmaster," which through interviews with Li, and recreations of scenes from the Japanese colonial era, re
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Li is one of Taiwan's most common family names, and in the hills above Danshuei there are two splendid old houses which belong to the same branch of the Li clan.
One, the Stone-Walled Farm Garden, is open to the public. Within the compound, which covers 1.2 hecatres, there are 100-year-old trees
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These superbly preserved buildings - also known as the Van Gass trading house storerooms - were built in the 1860s, and cover an area of more than 10,000 square meters. In 1897, they were purchased by British Shell Petroleum Co.
In April 2001, Shell donated them to the Tamsui Cultural Foundation;
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The nearest Taiwan has to Graceland, the mountainside tomb of Teresa Teng - an immensely popular singer who died in 1995, aged 43 - attracts a stream of the lady's most ardent fans.
Teng (known to ethnic Chinese as Deng Lijun) was born in Taiwan in 1953, and remains the most famous female singer
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Danshuei's long history, coupled with its hillside location, means that several lanes in the town center are too narrow or too steep for motor vehicles. A few are essentially broad stairways; exploring on foot is the best and only option. This way, you're more likely to uncover some of the hidden ge
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Yuansing House is where Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan's first native president, was born on January 15, 1923. Lee was born into a well-to-do Hakka family, and he was educated in Japanese-speaking schools, as Taiwan was at that time controlled by Japan.
According to the museum in the Sanjhih Visitors Cente
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Tamsui Oxford College - now part of Aletheia University, a private Christian liberal arts establishment - was founded by Dr. George Leslie Mackay, the Canadian missionary whose work in the final quarter of the nineteenth century shaped Danshuei (then known as "Tamsui").
Mackay put great effort i
