Ma Ying-jeou Graffiti Wars

Jason Cox, the brains behind the excellent blog That's Impossible, and his lovely wife came up this weekend to give us one of his cats, and we ate, drank, played Spades, and went hiking on the trails in Ta-ken near my house. Jason is world-class company, brainy and humorous, and very well informed about Taiwan.

As I chronicled last week, someone had scrawled anti-Ma graffiti on the wooden footbridges along the path on Trail 7.

A few days later I noticed someone had come along and painted out Ma's name in the Chinese, though they left the English.

Someone then restored Ma's name -- actually, a nasty variant on it. In fine Chinese style, speakers of Taiwanese who don't like Ma frequently change the last character of his name to the Taiwanese for "dog" (Ma Ying-GAU). Here the character "dog" is incorporated as the second character in Ma's name.

Anti-Ma graffiti may also be seen elsewhere. On a wall along the path someone scratched "The Tomb of Ma Ying-jeou."

On all the bridges someone, perhaps the local government, painted this warning: "Beware of Scammers!"

Someone scrawled an angry message at China Life Insurance Company on this water tank. Don't ask me to explain.

[Taiwan]