6,000 years
of identity

The most important English-language documentary on Taiwan — made for audiences who know nothing about the island and its precarious name.

The first film to openly address the 228 Massacre — and the first Taiwanese film to win Venice's Golden Lion. Follows one family through 1945–1949: Japanese surrender, 228, KMT takeover.

The first Chinese-language novel to win the International Booker Prize. Set in 1930s colonial Taiwan — language, identity, and power.

Five Taiwanese men serve as Japanese military guards in WWII Borneo — then face war crimes trials. Loyalty, identity, and impossible choices. 5 Golden Bell Awards.

Taiwan's White Terror and democracy movement told through one couple's lifetime. Free on YouTube globally.

Women political prisoners on Green Island speak for themselves. Oral histories from White Terror survivors — told before it's too late.

White Terror 1954 — not through heroes, but through ordinary people choosing silence, compromise, survival. Four Golden Horse Awards.

"Hotel Saltwater" is the sardonic nickname inmates gave a detention centre under martial law — a prison called a hotel. The title itself is the point. On Netflix.

An Amis woman returns to her village in Hualien to revive the family rice paddies — and discovers the land is being sold. Indigenous identity and land rights in modern Taiwan, told from the inside.

Three stories, three moments in Taiwan's democracy: the Formosa Incident 1979, the Sunflower Movement 2014, the disappearance of a human rights activist 2017. Conceived as a trilogy. Free on YouTube.

A Chinese student activist and a Taiwanese activist — filmed over five years through the Sunflower Movement. What does it mean to fight for Taiwan's democracy? And what does it mean to call Taiwan home?

A Taiwanese man is too Chinese for Japan, too Japanese for China — invisible to both. Written the year Japan surrendered, this is the defining novel of Taiwan's colonial identity crisis. English translation by Columbia University Press.

A US diplomat stationed in Taiwan witnessed the 228 Massacre firsthand. This is his account — why it happened, how Washington knew, and why it was buried. Still the most important primary source on 1947.

The book to give someone who knows nothing about Taiwan. A political scientist who has spent her career on the island explains why it exists as it does — and why the rest of the world should care.