Much like its favourite pineapple pastry, Taiwan is a perfect mix of two cultures

It was a first for me. Everywhere at the airport in Taipei, people with varying expressions were taking ‘selfies’ with their mobile phones. Had I but known it then, selfies was a kind of leitmotif of my trip. Wherever I’d go, I’d encounter individuals, couples, pairs of friends or whole families, smartphone angled expertly, their smiles perfectly synchronised.

I was on my way to Sunny Hills because of its fame as the best pineapple pastry on the island. I had envisaged a pineapple pastry as a squishy, cream-laden confection available at every corner bakery in my city, but the image soon was supplanted by oblongs of short-crust pastry with coarsely pounded real pineapple pulp in it. The pastry to pulp ratio was perfect, the textural interplay interesting and for the rest of the week-long trip, I did nothing but kick myself for not buying a kilogram or three of the Sunny Hills product. Pineapple pastry is an east-meets-west confection that embodies exactly what Taiwan is. You get it everywhere. Hotels in the rest of the world offer baskets of fruit: in Taiwan, you get two delicately wrapped pineapple pastries in a quaint box. However, the pastry was industrial and the ‘pineapple’ pulp too sweet and artificial to bear comparison with the masterpiece from the first day. Such was the popularity of the Sunny Hills pastry that their customers came to them: they did not have to go to their customer!

Slightly more than half the area of Sri Lanka, Taiwan sits between China, Japan and the Philippines. It’s a win-win situation: the north-eastern slice of the island has deep Japanese influences which the Taiwanese are proud of. In mainland China, on the other hand, the war memories of Japan are hardly pleasant. The seas around Taiwan have abundant seafood which finds its way into the remarkable cuisine. The beaches of the south have all the trappings of a carefree Filipino seaside, and while the entire island has a relationship with mainland China that would be categorised on Facebook as “it’s complicated”, the Taiwanese have an innate lightness that contrasts sharply with many other Chinese-speaking people. While China has had a giant’s share of culture in terms of painting, calligraphy, music and theatre, Taiwan’s National Palace Museum in Taipei has housed the finest artefacts of three dynasties from China: Ming, Tang and Song. With a roll of the dice, several tens of thousands of the imperial treasures from the Forbidden City in Beijing were spirited away for safe-keeping, first to Nanjing and then to a location in Sichuan Province, before being secreted away to Taipei. That is what history books tell us. What this translates into is the craftsmanship that is clearly visible all over Taiwan. You see, the three most precious artefacts in the museum include a cooking pot, a ‘pork stone’ and a jadeite cabbage. The pork stone is a piece of jasper that has been chiselled to heighten its resemblance to a piece of uncooked meat with a thick rind of fat. The jadeite rock was green at one end and had a marbling of white at the other. An unknown craftsman carved it delicately so that it looks like a Chinese cabbage. The stem is white, while the leaves become progressively green, just as the vegetable looks in a marketplace. Walk down any row of handicraft showrooms, and whatever else you find, you can be sure that their version of the pork stone and the cabbage will hold pride of place. It may not be museum quality, but just the discipline of identifying a lump of jadeite that has the potential to be carved into a vegetable trains the eye. And the actual process of uncovering the outer layers to lay bare a delicate vegetable with its fine tracery of veins is as much as a prayer as any other act of worship. What finally endeared me to the country was one similarity to my spiritual homeland, Kashmir. Sun Moon Lake, roughly in the centre of the country, is a vast natural lake ringed by mountains, a la Dal Lake. Sun and Moon were two separate bodies, shaped approximately like the sun and the moon. The Dal and the Nageen are separate bodies too, and they are spoken of in the same breath as well. What gave me a jolt were the floating gardens that I saw in one or two spots. Hu, my erudite friend from Taichung told me about the Thao tribe, who used to cultivate vegetables on the surface of the lake. However, now that has been declared illegal, together with their primitive methods of fishing, and the Thaos have dwindled in numbers, being merely a visible face for tourism. You could go on about the similarities with the boat people of Kashmir who still cultivate vegetables on the lake on beds exactly the Sun Moon Lake. They too are the most visible face of tourism in Kashmir. Travel for me is not just seeing the unfamiliar. It is seeing the familiar in the unfamiliar. Like looking at the Thao people and remembering the houseboat community in another part of the world.