In this Mother’s Day edition, we celebrate the extraordinary life of Chen Shu-chu (陳樹菊), a humble vegetable seller from Taitung who quietly donated millions of NT dollars to schools, charities, and orphaned children – while continuing to live a modest life behind a market stall.

Born in 1950 into poverty, Chen Shu-chu was forced to leave school at just thirteen after her mother died in childbirth. For half a century she worked at the stall and saved her earnings, giving them to the needy. Chen’s lifetime of extraordinary generosity eventually brought her international fame.

In 2010 she appeared in Time magazine’s list of the world’s most influential people. This is an uplifting story of how a seemingly ordinary market vendor became one of Taiwan’s most admired figures.

Ghosts of all kinds – wandering spirits, water ghosts looking for substitutes, mountain demons, and many more; welcome to the strange supernatural world of Taiwan.

Eryk and John, fortified with protective amulets and holy mantras, bravely step into the murky shadowlands of Taiwanese ghost lore and modern supernatural encounters.

For this episode, they draw heavily on anthropologist Lin Mei-rong’s collection of more than 150 ghost stories from across Taiwan.

You’ve probably heard of water ghosts. But have you heard of the mysterious “Little Girl in Red” who lures hikers deep into the mountains? Or paper funeral dolls that come alive? How about “Yin” temples dedicated not to gods, but to wandering spirits? Lock your doors and windows, light some incense, and prepare to be spooked (and amused).

We head into the mountains to tell the story of the deep relationship between Taiwan’s Indigenous communities and firearms. The warriors’ incredible skill and ingenuity with guns enabled them to hold off Qing dynasty forces, Western punitive expeditions, and even the modern Japanese army well into the 20th century.

Far from the familiar image of bows and arrows versus modern rifles, Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples were quick to adopt and adapt firearms. Early on these firearms were simple matchlock muskets – slow to load but still deadly in skilled hands – but in the late 1880s, the Indigenous groups acquired modern rifles. Sometimes they had firepower equal to, or better than, their opponents.

Through the centuries, guns became essential tools for hunting and warfare. They also became items of status and cultural importance. Guns were gifted in marriage, buried with the dead, and woven into customs of justice and belief.

For this episode, we drew on the excellent dissertation by Pei-Hsi Lin(Susan Lin), Firearms, Technology and Culture: Resistance of TaiwaneseIndigenes to Chinese, European and Japanese Encroachment in a Global Context(c.1860–1914).

Join us as we step into the strange Cold War world of The Chairman, a forgotten 1969 spy thriller starring Hollywood great Gregory Peck. The movie, which was partly filmed in Taiwan, is about a scientist sent behind the Bamboo Curtain to steal a miracle agricultural formula.

The plot is outlandish, but behind the absurdity lies an interesting snapshot of global fears in the late 1960s, from overpopulation and famine to superpower rivalry. We follow the filming production here in Taiwan (a stand-in for off-limits communist China).

This takes us to locations such as Taipei’s spectacular mountainside Zhinan Temple, where Peck plays ping-pong with Mao Zedong. Yes, The Chairman was a flop – deservedly so, we think – but the film certainly makes for a fun podcast episode.

It’s 1965, and Henry (27) and Margaret (26) Lee have moved to the USA. She’s working as a schoolteacher, and he’s trying to make ends meet however he can, including by washing dishes at a Chinese restaurant and teaching kung fu. After some hard years — and a long stint in school — Henry Lee secures an academic position at New Haven University and builds its forensic center into a world-class institution. He soon begins working with legal authorities and solving cases.

Being called as an expert witness for the defense in the 1995 OJ Simpson trial cements Henry Lee’s status as a modern Sherlock Holmes. But unlike fictional characters, Lee was human, and humans make mistakes and sometimes also lie. There’s no question Lee made some significant mistakes. Some, however, think he crossed the line into deception. Still, the errors, big or small, can be counted on one hand — most of the roughly 8,000 cases he worked on are not under review.

Stick around after the end for a five-minute reading from Wiki on the 2004 assassination attempt on former Taiwan president Chen Shui-bian, which was, of course, one of the cases Lee was asked to help solve.

To mark the recent passing of Henry C. Lee (李昌鈺), one of the world’s most famous forensic scientists, we examine his extraordinary life. In Part 1, we’re in impoverished postwar Taiwan. Lee is the eleventh of thirteen children. That, and his father dying on “China’s Titanic,” means it’s a childhood marked by tragedy and hardship.

Lee walked barefoot to school to save his shoes. We follow his police training and work, service on Kinmen, a visa-overstay romance, and an unlikely detour running a tiny newspaper in Borneo.

Part 2 follows Lee to the United States, where he rises to international fame through major criminal cases and where his golden reputation is somewhat tarnished by controversy.

John talks with Professor Dafydd Fell of SOAS University about "The Twilight Years of Taiwan’s Sugar Railways", his new book co-written with Wang Xiang, a researcher who has spent years documenting the remains and memories of this once vast railway network. Fell’s own fascination with the sugar railways dates back to the 1990s when he was living in Taiwan. John and Dafydd explore how sugar helped build modern Taiwan, how the narrow-gauge railways moved far more than just sugar cane, and how the network had a Cold War strategic purpose. The episode is full of nuggets, from mystery Belgian locomotives to propaganda train tours.

In 1904, colonial Taiwan tried to impress America with oolong tea at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Just five years later, two American spies disguised as South African zoologists were secretly roaming Japanese Formosa – but they weren’t investigating tea. They were on a U.S. Army mission to gather military intelligence. In this episode, John and Eryk explore tea, empire, espionage, and the strange relationship between Taiwan and the United States in the early 1900s.

For names, sources, and other show notes, please visit the Formosa Files website.

That little green blob of spicy paste beside your sushi and sashimi has an amazing backstory. The notoriously fussy plant is grown in the mountains of Taiwan (special shoutout to Chiayi County). It arrived in Alishan with the Japanese colonists and their forest railway and flourished in the cool mountain air. After disappearing for a time, it has recently made a comeback. Listen to learn the history of wasabi and find out whether you’ve been eating the real deal or a fake sauce.

Huang Chin-tao (黃金島) was never a household name, but his life story is the story of modern Taiwan. In this concluding episode, we follow Huang from the 2.28 uprising in 1947 as he joins a resistance group led by a rare combination: a Taiwanese woman communist guerrilla commander, Xie Xuehong, whom we've dubbed Agent "Red Snow." After fighting bravely but losing the Battle of Wuniulan Bridge in Nantou, Huang becomes a fugitive and then spends more than two decades in Taiwan’s prisons. There is, however, finally some happiness: a few years after being released, he found love and became a political activist in what would become Taiwan's first real opposition party. For this tale of resistance, survival, and a regular man’s refusal to be broken by history, we drew on Anna Beth Keim’s excellent biography Heaven Does Not Block All Roads.

This is part one of the extraordinary life story of Huang Chin-tao (黃金島 Huáng Jīndǎo). In fact, he seemed to live not one life but many; he was a Japanese naval recruit, a combat soldier, a survivor of typhoons and pirates, an armed rebel during the 2-28 Incident of 1947, a man on the run, a prisoner, and a politician. His lifetime, 1926 to 2019, also gives us the background story of Taiwan’s turbulent 20th century. Although the turns and twists of history were often brutal for Huang, he was unbreakable, a man who refused to let fate decide his path. In the words of the title of Anna Beth Keim’s excellent biography: Heaven Does Not Block All Roads.