On the hunt for the best surf, Edward White discovers an island on the cusp of change

Financial Times
Date: April 26, 21018
By: Edward White 

Driving around a tight bend on a road carved high into cliffs on Taiwan’s east coast, the first sight of the vast Pacific Ocean instantly hijacks the attention. Tracking lines of swell stretching into a sapphire horizon, it is a challenge not to drift across the median line.

This highway connects small industrial and fishing hubs dotted between the island’s northern Yilan and central Hualien counties. As I dragged a beaten-up white Ford around its corners in pursuit of uncrowded surf over the past few years, I have often thought about a compatriot who travelled this road some 70 years earlier.

Allan J Shackleton was a rare western witness to the chaotic and murderous early days of the Kuomintang’s rule of Taiwan. The New Zealand-born UN officer was here in the late 1940s, when Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated Chinese Nationalist army fled to the island from Mao Zedong’s China, quickly seizing control of the government and industries and brutally cracking down on any perceived opposition.    [FULL  STORY]