Reprint of sleazy 1960s travel guide to ‘blatant sex capital’ Taipei paints a very different picture to today’s city
- A 50th anniversary reprint of a 1969 guidebook, Taipei After Dark, that described a seamy side to the city in the Vietnam war era prompts some fact-checking
In 2019, posts began popping up on my social media about a retro oddity, a 1969 guidebook called Taipei After Dark, which had just been published in a 50th anniversary edition.
The book’s cover depicts a Western man being massaged by two Asian women in bras and panties, below a title in a groovy comic-book font.
It has the kind of sensational camp of an early James Bond film, but with a subheading that declares Taipei to be the “blatant sex capital of Asia, where vice is legal and the price is right”.
“If you are in Tokyo or Manila or Bangkok,” the introduction reads, “and announce that you plan a trip to Taipei, the reaction is always the same. You will be met with lascivious leers and exclamations of envy, for in recent years Taipei […] has won the reputation among old Asia hands of being the most blatantly sex-oriented capital of the East.”
The book is obviously fantastical, but it also begs the question: how much, if any of this, could possibly be true?
Taiwan as an island of brothels is certainly a far cry from the island’s squeaky clean image of microchips and boba tea. But as I began to pick and poke my way through the book and the story of how it came to be, it turned out that it held much more of a historical record than one might initially assume.
