Window on China

Yesterday we took a family trip to Window on China, the badly-named theme park outside of Lungtan in northern Taiwan (should be Window on the World now). The park consists of one site containing rides catering largely to children (no serious roller coasters), and another site containing scale models of famous buildings in Taiwan and China.


The entrance.

The kids had a pretty good time and I recommend a trip to the park for anyone with kids in the 6-12 bracket. The scale models of buildings were nice, but the park had been built thirty years ago, so landmarks outside of Taipei were scarce. However, they did offer architectural remarks in English, Japanese, and Chinese, which was good. For me it was very much a Dad day, holding bags, watching the kids, and standing around waiting while they had fun, marred only by a bad case of sunstroke that left me too dizzy and nauseous to go on any of the rides.


Taichung Port project

Window on China is not only interesting as an amusement park, but also as a window into the mindset of Taiwan 30 years ago. As far as Taiwan goes, the park has many items from the Ten Great Construction projects -- the freeway, the port of Taichung, the airport in Taoyuan, but also has some of the prime landmarks of KMT Taipei, especially the hideous memorial to that revolting butcher, Chiang Kai-shek. The many historical sites of Tainan, that bastion of Taiwanese nationalism, are almost ignored. The Taiwan models have a focus on successful large development projects, a strong political and economic theme of that era, a theme practically gone from national political discourse today. What does that tell us about how Taiwan regards itself?


The water slide.

[Taiwan]