Cultural hub
Taiwan's biggest bookshop isn't just a bookshop. The seven floors of the Eslite chain's new flagship store near the Taipei 101 building is in fact a culture mall. It sells Taipei residents the experience of an elegant life centred around books, gastronomy and good design.
It is also, perhaps unexpectedly, one of the most vibrant centres of intellectual life in Taipei. Historians, poets, architects and writers give lectures there, while chefs hold cooking classes, and documentaries are shown and discussed in the seventh-floor theatre. Older men can be overheard discussing sculpture, in Taiwanese, over glasses of Italian wine.
And there are books - hundreds of thousands of them in traditional Chinese, English and Japanese. Casually cosmopolitan, the store also features a large section devoted to books in simplified Chinese, from the mainland. A current, faintly ironic, display is devoted to photo collections of Taiwan by mainland Chinese. The idea is to show how mainlanders see the island.
The Eslite chain was launched in 1989, and has some 50 stores across Taiwan. The flagship opened last December, and quickly became one of the best places to see Taipei's emerging aesthetic - a mixture of highly sophisticated but unabashed consumerism, with a sense of culture in the making. A good example of the Eslite ethos was a recent feature in its house magazine on former pop singer Lin Qiang. He practically reinvented Taiwanese pop music in the early 1990s with his anthem Marching Forward, which told the story of a Taiwanese youngster from the country trying to make it in the city. Today, Lin is a self-taught electronic music auteur who has given up his recording contract to put on free rave parties and work for copyright reform.
The point for Eslite is that Lin has transformed himself from a mere pop singer into a kind of cultural worker who uses the goods and services Eslite sells - books on how to use open-source software, music for inspiration, and a public place to perform or meet like-minded people.
This is the secret of the business model that Eslite - a 12th-century French word for 'elite' - hopes to export to the rest of Asia. Like all true service businesses, Eslite is selling an agreeable experience. In this case it is the feeling that one is no longer a passive consumer, but a participant - in a world where social status is determined more by how many poems you have written, or the number of countries you have visited, rather than how many Mercedes-Benz you own.
Over the past decade, Taipei has quietly undergone a cultural revolution of the good kind, as the affluent Taiwanese middle class has created its own low-key version of the good life. Eslite is a sort of laboratory for that revolution, and a monument to its surprising success.
