Taipei in 4 days

Five hundred and eight metres and 101 floors, the tallest building in the world until 2010, its eight flared sections recalling bamboo.

Twenty minutes of concrete steps from Xiangshan metro station up through subtropical forest to the rocks where Taipei 101 stands dead ahead.

A 76-metre white octagonal hall with a blue roof, finished in 1980, reached by 89 steps, his age at death by the traditional Chinese count.

Founded in 1738 in Wanhua, the oldest district, and rebuilt after 1945, with over a hundred deities, from Guanyin to Mazu.

Nearly 700,000 pieces of the imperial collection, moved out of the Forbidden City in 1933 and shipped to Taiwan in 1948 and 1949.

Taipei's largest night market: fried chicken cutlets, oyster omelettes, sausage in sticky rice and stinky tofu, eaten standing or on stools.

A hot spring district developed by the Japanese from 1896, on its own metro branch, with a steaming Thermal Valley.

A former gold-mining village on the hillside above the sea, north-east of Taipei, mined from the 1890s to the 1970s.