AS TAIWAN IS DRAWN INTO CHINA’S ORBIT, THE STORY OF ITS SURPRISING CAPITAL — AT ONCE CHAOTIC AND PEACEFUL, GRITTY AND SUBLIME — IS BEING REWRITTEN YET AGAIN. (CREADIT FROM NY TIMES / WRITTEN BY DOUGLAS MCGRAY)

There is nothing particularly Taiwanese about the Astoria Café. That’s what made it specialwhen Archibald Chien opened the place over a half century ago, on the west side of Taipei, the old downtown. The bakery sold fresh bread and homemade cakes downstairs. Upstairs, Chien served dark, bitter coffee, Italian style. Well, not really Italian. “French,” he told me. “Swiss,” he said, picking up a plate of perfect little cakes. Then he laughed. The coffee, the pastries and the cakes — actually, all Russian. “But we could not call anything Russian.” Just about everything gets political in Taipei. Even dessert.

History in Taiwan’s capital has unfolded like a foreign-affairs soap opera. In the 1500s, mainland Chinese, mostly from Fujian Province, began to move here to farm. But the newcomers clashed with the locals, dozens of tribes with their own languages and cultures. Then, in the 17th century, the Dutch moved in. Then a Chinese faction, hostile to the new Qing dynasty that ruled the mainland, threw them out. Then the Qing army conquered the Chinese in Taiwan and put the island up for sale. When they couldn’t find a buyer, they kept it until 1895, when Japan seized the land — and things got really complicated.

It’s more than history to Chien. He explained that he spoke Taiwanese as a young boy, in the 1930s. (Taiwanese is related to the local tongue of Fujian Province; just how closely related is, you guessed it, political.) But Chien had to give up Taiwanese for Japanese during elementary school — when imperial Japan was trying to scrub the island clean of native and Chinese influences. When China reclaimed Taiwan after World War II, Japanese was banned, so as a young man Chien got to work on the new national language, Mandarin Chinese.

Chien founded the Astoria in 1949 with a few Russian guys who had left the Soviet Union. That same year, Communists seized control of mainland China and General Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists fled to Taiwan. They took over Taipei and installed a thuggish government, nearly as hard-line in its anti-Maoism as the Communists in Beijing were anti-bourgeois. Mysterious men started showing up at the cafe, watching Chien’s Russian partners and tracking who came and went — especially the writers.

Business boomed for a while. Taiwan bet early on high-tech manufacturing, and by the 1970s the island was gadget maker to the