Taipei

Taipei sits in a green bowl of mountains with hot springs leaking at the edges, and fills the bowl with the world's most underrated eating: night markets where dinner is a twenty-stop pilgrimage, dumpling houses with Michelin stars and plastic stools, tea houses in the hills where an afternoon evaporates. Above it all stands the 101, segmented like bamboo, once the world's tallest — the city treats it less as a monument than as a compass.

The sensible traveller does the National Palace Museum in the morning — the emperors' best crate, shipped across a strait —, Dadaocheng's tea and fabric streets after lunch, and surrenders the evening to a night market, jade cabbage traded for stinky tofu; soaks at Beitou, where the metro delivers you to volcanic water; climbs Elephant Mountain's steps at dusk for the 101 lighting up; and keeps one day for Jiufen's lantern lanes, in the drizzle that suits them.

The Guide's honesty: carry the EasyCard and the city goes frictionless — metro, buses, convenience stores, gondola —; the drizzle is a resident, not a visitor: a folding umbrella is citizenship; queuing here is sincere — the line for the famous scallion pancake is the review —; and 'stinky' tofu is honest labeling that rewards courage. The convenience stores are genuinely good and open forever; nobody judges a 7-Eleven dinner in Taipei.