entrepôt

South of Taichung is the old port town of Lu-kang. Here again we come face to face with Taiwan’s past, sometimes in dramatic fashion. Founded in the seventeenth century, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Lu-kang was an important port city with strong ties to Ch’uan-chou—the eighteenth-century classic but declining entrepôt of southern Min Fukien.

The country has, in effect, installed a “keep out” sign over the white cliffs of Dover. Even as Mr Cameron defends the City of London as a global financial centre, and takes planeloads of business folk on foreign trips, his government ratchets up measures that would turn an entrepôt into a fortress.