It was dark inside. A thin cloud of smoke settled on the ceiling around a disco ball. We found seats by the stage. All around us, old men sipped tea from paper cups; a bunch of them had nodded off. Onstage, a woman, not quite middle-aged but not young either, slinked around in a red sequined dress with a plunging neckline, singing an old Mandarin torch song. When she finished, the house lights came up, and a few old men shuffled to the stage with red envelopes, small bills stuffed inside.

Most of the men around us were in the army, Luo explained. Chiang showed up in a small city with 600,000 Chinese soldiers, most of them single or permanently separated from their families; it made for a skewed dating scene. “Most of the songs are about homesickness,” Luo said.

There used to be lots of red envelope clubs in the city; now there are just a handful. The generation that remembers these melodies, and the mainland, and the war, and the fight for Beijing, and the flight to Taipei — it’s dying. A song ended; the lights came up again. A few more men shuffled to the stage.

Taipei’s shiny east side is home to the world’s tallest building, Taipei 101. But Chiang Kai-shek’s memorial casts a longer shadow. It sits in the middle of a sprawling walled garden, towering over a severe plaza that spans several city blocks.

Like the camphor trees, a lot of the postcard attractions in Taipei hold political meaning that’s lost on most visitors. Take Lungshan Temple. Built in 1738, it’s one of the largest temples in Taiwan — an explosion of bright color and intricate sculpture. It’s also where, in 1986, a crowd of activists first publicly called for an end to martial law. Or there’s the National Palace Museum, set back in the steep, green mountains that rise at the northern edge of the city. When it fled the mainland, Chiang’s army brought along the world’s most significant collection of Chinese art, which fills the museum’s galleries. “I was always fascinated by that decision,” Irmin Pao, the publisher, told me. “They’ve lost the battle, they’re trying to get out of China, bullets are flying, and someone has to pack all those vases. It’s very Indiana Jones,” he joked. “For that reason alone, China will never let us be independent.”

Here at Chiang’s memorial, students from all over Taiwan gathered in 1990 to demand democratic reforms, including popular elections for the presidency. They called themselves the Wild Lily movement. Early last year, the central government took Chiang Kai-shek’s name off his memorial. Now it’s the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall. The new sign, marked with a lily, went up just before I got to Taipei. Politicians were still bickering about it.

The memorial’s collection is a cult-of-personality shrine, assembled in the days when Chiang’s party, the Kuomintang, ran the government. It has displays like the Late President Chiang’s Everlasting Contributions to the Entire World. Cases full of medals. Chiang’s black, rapper-fabulous Cadillacs. And his favorite slippers. (“He loved to wear these shoes when he was pacing during the war against Japan.”)

A new exhibit called “Bye-bye, Chiang Kai-shek!” told a different story. There was a tally of suspected political criminals from 1949 to 1952, more than 240,000 names. A list of more than 1,500 prisoners sent to