About

I have spent my whole life explaining Taiwan to people. Now it is written down.

My name is Justin Liu. I grew up between Taiwan and the United States, which means I have spent roughly equal amounts of my life being the Taiwanese kid in America and the American kid in Taiwan. Both sides of that turn out to be useful when you are writing a travel guide.

Two people standing on a wide sandstone shelf where green headland meets deep blue sea on Taiwan's northeast coast — Northeast coastWalking the rock shelf where the hills drop into the Pacific. The kind of place I take visiting friends when they say they have already seen Taipei. · Shot on location by Justin Liu

The short version

Mandarin is a first language for me, English too, and I can hold my own in Taiwanese Hokkien, which is the language you actually want at a market stall or in a taxi in Tainan. I have family in Taiwan. I have lived in or spent serious time in nearly every major city on the island: Taipei, Kaohsiung, Taichung, Tainan, Hualien, and out to Kinmen.

Before this site, I hitchhiked through more than 120 countries. I mention that not as a badge but as a baseline: I have a lot of places to compare Taiwan against, and I still chose it as the place to keep coming back to. That is the strongest opinion on this entire website.

Professionally, I went to NYU and then spent years on Wall Street, including deal work in Asia, which kept pulling me back toward this side of the Pacific. These days I advise Taiwan-based startup founders and companies. It keeps me close to the island's business community and keeps my information current in a way a tourist visit never could. I split my time between New York, Los Angeles, and Taipei.

Why you can trust the advice

Over the years I have personally talked hundreds of people through their Taiwan trips. Solo travelers, families with strollers, girls' trips, honeymooners who wanted the good bathtub, backpackers counting every hundred-NT note. I have also walked people around the island in person, as an actual guide, which teaches you quickly which recommendations survive contact with a jet-lagged family of five.

The same goes for the other direction of travel. I have spent real time with digital nomads and founders on Taiwan's Gold Card, American retirees pricing out a life here, and English teachers who came for a year and stayed for ten. So when this site talks about living in Taiwan, it is not extrapolating from a two-week visit.

How I decide what goes in a guide

If I have not stood there, eaten it, or booked it, it does not get a recommendation. Where something is secondhand, the guide says so plainly. Where something changed recently, the guide says when I last checked. And if a famous place is not worth your time anymore, the guide says that too, by name.

The photography

I am a filmmaker and photographer by passion, and the photos on this site are part of the record: they were taken standing in the places the guides describe. Each caption names the location and tells you why the frame matters. If a page has no photo yet, it is because I would rather show you nothing than show you stock.

The Taipei basin at dusk from a mountain ridge, Taipei 101 and the skyline catching the last warm light beyond the river bridges — TaipeiThe whole basin in one frame at dusk. Views like this are a bus ride from downtown, which is the quiet miracle of Taipei. · Shot on location by Justin Liu

What this site is, and is not

LivingTaiwan covers travel and daily life: where to go, how to get there, what things cost, what to eat, and how to handle the unglamorous parts like typhoon days, missed trains, and finding a doctor. It stays out of politics entirely. You are here to plan a trip or a move, and that is the job this site does.

It is also honest about money. Some hotel and flight links earn a commission if you book through them. It never changes what gets recommended, and the full disclosure is one click away from every page that has such links.

Say hello

Planning something specific, found an error, or want to tell me a place has slipped? Write to me here. Corrections make the site better and I take them seriously.