When COVID-19 brought global supply chains to a standstill, USB Type-C components used for charging and data transfer became critically scarce. Meanwhile, an electoral authority in South America was scrambling because electronic voting machines for a presidential election lacked audio codec chips. Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturers ultimately helped resolve both crises.
Taiwan’s complex and varied geography has fostered exceptional cultural diversity among its many peoples, making the island a magnet for ethnographers during the era of Japanese rule. Some 130 years ago, the Japanese anthropologist Ryuzo Torii, then in his twenties, visited Taiwan for the first of his many excursions to the island, bringing with him a heavy camera that used bulky glass dry plates and boundless curiosity. At a time when the Japanese administration’s reach had yet to extend deep into Indigenous communities, Torii risked his life crossing mountains to conduct fieldwork, meticulously documenting Indigenous ways of life.
