I normally travel at my own pace, under my own steam. I don’t like being herded around to a rigid schedule with strangers. For Taiwan I made an exception: booking an 11-day organised tour to see a lot of the island in a short time. The trip gave me a good overview of Taiwan, with its surprising mix of high modernity and traditional life and architecture. It also gave me an education in group dynamics, in sharing a room with a stranger, and in the complexities of geopolitics.

My eight fellow participants on the Intrepid tour included a 26-year-old fitness coach from northern England, an octogenarian retired businesswoman from Australia, and two sisters in their sixties who were born in Hong Kong before emigrating to Canada in their teens. Also, a 55-year-old American teacher, a retired Canadian nurse, a 77-year-old British chartered surveyor and an extremely tall American IT specialist of around 40 who turned out to be my roomie. Not an easy mix.

The guide charged with bringing us all together and showing us her country was Joanna Lee, whose father came to Taiwan with the nationalist leader Chiang Kai Shek in 1949. Chiang fled China with two million soldiers after losing a postwar struggle with the Communists led by Mao Zedong.

On the threat of Taiwan being absorbed by China — President Xi has said Beijing will take the island by force if necessary, and some observers believe this could occur during the new Trump presidency — Joanna was critical of Taiwan’s current government for, as she saw it, alienating China by stressing the island’s independence too strongly. She blames students and the CIA for this and does not want Taiwan to become "another Ukraine".

The 11-day tour started and ended in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital. The city is dominated in the east by a 101-storey tower, with its distinctive eight sections inspired by notches on bamboo. ‘Taipei 101’ was the world’s tallest building until Dubai’s 828-metre Burj Khalifa was completed in 2010. Though much of the city is far from beautiful, unlike many other Asian cities Taipei is spotlessly clean and has a well-functioning bus and metro system. The population is patient and obedient at the numerous traffic lights, and visitors feel very safe. There is very little crime.

Our group convened in a modest Taipei hotel before dining on noodles in a nearby street market. On the following two days we visited the historical Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall, the National Palace Museum, which showcases priceless Chinese treasures brought by Chiang from Beijing, and older parts of the city including Dihua Street, claimed to the oldest street in Taipei, parts of which date back to the mid-17th century when Formosa (as Taiwan was known then) was ruled by the Dutch. These old streets lie alongside wide modern boulevards filled with far newer and better cars than the one I drive in France.

The Memorial Hall is a vast marble edifice over several floors set around a seated figure of Chiang looking out onto a large park. It reminded me of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. A museum in the Hall documents the political and personal life of Chiang (1887-1975), houses his two Cadillacs, and displays photos of him with world leaders, including Churchill. Also on show are records of Chiang’s beautiful and accomplished second wife Soong Mei-ling (also known as Madame Chiang), who died in New York in 2003 aged 105. There is an art gallery in the basement, and a well-drilled changing of the guard, involving the skilful twirling of shiny guns with bayonets, takes place regularly outside. The park also contains an impressive national theatre and concert hall.

The National Palace Museum, in the Shilin district north of the Keelung River, is a superbly-curated institution that displays the finest of precious objects in the very best of conditions, without crowding. In a feature no doubt aimed at younger visitors, though also enjoyed by this older one, modern digital technology offers the sensation of flying around inside 3-D landscapes of ancient Chinese art works.

Taking off on my own, I also visited the nearby Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines. (Taiwan was christened Formosa — "beautiful" — by Portuguese explorers in the 16th century and retained the name until after World War II.) Sixteen tribes of Taiwanese indigenous people are recognised. They are considered to be of "Austronesian" stock related to populations as far away as Polynesia and Madagascar, and including the first inhabitants of New Zealand. Most are now largely integrated into modern Taiwanese society, while receiving social advantages such as early pensions. Their villages and townships are increasingly promoted to tourists, even when the inhabitants no longer live as they did. The museum focuses on the clothing, festivals, weapons, musical instruments and rituals of the nine most prominent tribes, but also includes a disturbing section on the now extinct practice of head-hunting.

Less interested in shopping or eating than other members of my group, I walked from Taipei 101 to the National Dr Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. Sun is revered both China and Taiwan for overthrowing China’s Qing dynasty in 1911. Alas, the Hall was cordoned off for renovation, but instead I enjoyed the nearby Songshan Cultural & Creative Park, where shops, galleries and the Taiwan Design Museum now occupy the site and premises of Taipei’s old tobacco factory.

From Taipei, our group proceeded by van to Yilan, a northeastern town which produces a prize-winning ‘whisky’ called Kavalan. Unfortunately a visit to the distillery no longer features in the Intrepid tour after complaints by some killjoy teetotal travellers. But we stopped en route at a local farm to don rubber boots and harvest spring onions. These we rolled in pastry to be fried into a popular form of Taiwanese pancakes.

The following day was spent with members of the Atayal tribe, who taught us how to cook rice in bamboo, barbecue skewers of meat over a fire, set traps for animals, and dance and sing according to ancient Atayal customs. The tribe’s 70-year-old ‘Grandpa’ boasted of how, until very recently, he hunted wild boar in the local forest and carried carcasses down to the village to be cooked.

Like many young people worldwide, the newer Taiwanese generations are abandoning their villages and small towns to seek work and excitement in the big cities. To save and promote the traditional market traders and their work in Yilan, a ‘young grandpa’ called Zu-Wei Fang, 40, has set up a project that won a World Agrotourism Award in Italy last year. He showed us round Yilan’s old market, where we rolled our own ice-cream crêpes in a shop where the 78-year-old owner takes only one day off a year.

On the western coast, at a fishing village called Wanggong, we harvested clams and ate freshly roasted oysters with farmers who cultivate the sandy shores. Oyster omelettes are a frequent offering in street markets in Taiwan, but it was a surprise to this Western tourist to see the oysters served not from their shells but from plastic containers with no shell in sight. In Wanggong, oysters are grown on strings above the tidal beaches. The oysters’ edible interiors are removed in situ and parts of old shells serve as cradles for the next generation.

Other highlights of our tour included cycling round the beautiful Sun Moon Lake, climbing up the nine-storey Ci En pagoda erected by Chiang in memory of his mother overlooking the lake; a visit to the vast modern Chung Tai Chan monastery complex, where associated museums house treasures of Buddhist sculpture in wood and stone respectively; and a hike in the ‘Alishan National Scenic Area’ from which the Japanese logged many huge and ancient cypress trees before shipping them back to their homeland.

We also visited the historic Lukang Longshan Temple complex in the western coastal city of Lukang, Changhua county.  Built in the 17th century, the temple is the best-preserved building in Taiwan dating from the Qing Dynasty. The temple buildings were the first in the nation to incorporate triple-eaved hexagonal roofs. This distinctive design was subsequently copied in the architecture of many other temples throughout Taiwan.

Japan ruled Taiwan, then still known as Formosa, from 1895 until its 1945 defeat in World War II. Taiwan’s emergence as one of Asia’s fast-growing ‘tiger’ economies (the others were Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea) rests in large part on industrial foundations laid by Japan to further its war efforts. Taiwan’s gross national product per capita is far higher than China’s, and unemployment far lower.

After 1945, the US backed Chiang’s ‘Republic of China’ in Taiwan as a strategic bulwark against communism, and his nationalists dreamed of returning across the Taiwan Strait to re-take power from Mao’s People’s Republic of China (PRC). That dream evaporated after the United Nations admitted the PRC in 1971, and Taiwan left the UN rather than share a seat. In 1972 US President Richard Nixon met Mao in Beijing and in 1978 President Carter switched US recognition to the PRC, severing formal ties with Taiwan. Our Intrepid guide Joanna said Taiwan felt greatly betrayed.

Today, Taiwan has formal diplomatic relations with only 11 of the 193 UN member states, plus the Vatican, though contacts and business are cultivated less formally. Taiwan's main exports are electronics, metals and metal products, plastics and rubber, chemicals, and machinery. Its principal trading partners include the U.S., Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, and Germany. Major Western banks, companies and brands such as HSBC, McDonalds, Burger King, and Carrefour are widely present and visible on the streets.

Asked about the attitude of Taiwan’s 23 million citizens towards Beijing’s China, with its population of 1.4 billion across the Taiwan strait, Yilan’s ‘young grandpa’ Zu-Wei Fang distinguishes between the oldest generation, who remember (or whose parents remember) the Japanese; Taiwan’s aboriginal tribes; ‘the Chiang Chinese’; and the youth. The latter are the most independent-minded, he says, valuing democratic elections and free press in Taiwan that do not exist in China. If China were to move in on Taiwan, he would leave the country to make his fortune elsewhere with a view to returning in old age to the homeland he loves. He has already worked in Australia.

In Jaoxi, a spa town in Yilan county, where middle-aged friends sit and chat in a park while dangling their feet in free thermal water, I spoke to patrons of a famous 50-year-old Snow Ice café. A man in his thirties sharing a huge strawberry ice with his young son said he did not fear China "at least for the next 10-20 years. They are more interested in developing their economy."

But a professional couple who worked in Taiwan’s semiconductors industry were more concerned. Spending a romantic weekend in Jaoxi, they told me they will soon visit Kuala Lumpur and Penang with a view to choosing a place to emigrate. The husband said Taiwan’s economy is already suffering from the uncertainty of whether Donald Trump would defend Taiwan in the case off any Chinese attack. (China’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, has declared his intention to "reunify" with Taiwan by force, if necessary.)

Back in Taipei at the end of the Intrepid tour, a taxi-driver told me he worked in China for eight years and that he could not bear the idea of Beijing taking over Taiwan. "They are evil," he said.

That evening, I had my last supper before flying back to Europe in a packed local fish restaurant that had no menu in Mandarin, let alone English. (You simply pointed at the ingredients or a picture and waited for it to be served.) Two 35-year-old Taiwanese men, friends since high school, approached me for a chat, surprised to find a Westerner in such a place. They bought me a bottle of their favourite beer and introduced me to a local spirit similar to grappa, but much stronger. The first man was about to move to Milan with his girlfriend to work in shipping. But he vowed to return to fight the Chinese if they tried to take his country by force. His friend has three daughters, runs a kindergarten business and a cramming school. He hopes his family can emigrate to Australia.

One woman in her 50s saw no problem if China were to take over Taiwan. "You can still visit Hong Kong, can’t you?" she told me earlier in my tour. I pointed out that journalists and students have been imprisoned in Britain’s former colony in recent years for challenging China’s leaders. That didn’t seem to worry her — perhaps because she was neither a journalist nor a student. But the two young men in my last restaurant were quite clear: they don’t want their country to become another Hong Kong.

Images: © David Lewis