Toyo Ito's Curvilinear Theater, Sun Moon Lake Indigenous Heritage, Largest Night Market in Taiwan & Birthplace of Bubble Tea
📍 Taichung, Taiwan📅 3-day itinerary
Taiwan's most architecturally ambitious city — where Toyo Ito's National Taichung Theater (2016) has no straight lines or right angles in its entire 58,000-panel curved concrete structure, where the Fengjia Night Market draws 100,000 people per weekend to 1,000 stalls of oyster omelettes and stinky tofu, where the Chun Shui Tang tea house claims to have mixed tapioca pearls into iced milk tea in 1986 and accidentally created a global beverage industry, and where Sun Moon Lake 60 km south holds the sacred island of Taiwan's smallest indigenous people, the Thao.
The Concert Hall With 58,227 Curved Concrete Panels — No Two Identical — Where the Structural Calculations Required Supercomputer Processing Because the Building Cannot Be Resolved Into Standard Architectural Components & The 91-Year-Old Veteran Who Painted Every Surface of a Condemned Village and Stopped the Demolition Order
The Sacred Lalu Island at the Centre of the Largest Lake in Taiwan — Restricted to Thao Indigenous Ceremonial Access Only Since the Thao Call It "The Navel of the World" — and the Wuling Farm Alpine Meadow at 1,740m Where 1,000 Formosan Cherry Trees Bloom Three Weeks Earlier Than Japanese Cherry Under the Snow-Capped Xueshan Peak in February
The 1986 Tapioca-in-Tea Experiment That Created a Global Beverage Industry — the Chun Shui Tang Tea House Product Development Manager Who Stirred Fenyuan Balls Into Iced Milk Tea at the Siming Road Branch — and the Gaomei Tidal Flat Where 22 Offshore Wind Turbines Behind the Reflective Wetland Surface Create the Most Reproduced Sunset Photograph in Central Taiwan