Dasi

Establishing shot: the view of the river from Dasi, a bona fide small town (merely 85,000 people per wikipedia), and the location of one of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek's favorite homes. Here's a commemorative mural of Gen. Chiang:
That's him, over there on the right, looking a little like Han Solo. Draw your own conclusions, but remember folks, he was a capitalist (again, like Han Solo).
Our Taiwanese hosts wanted to show us this town because it is so old. While there, we cooed at its oldness, represented mostly by edifices like this:

My guidebook tells me these facades date mostly from a redevelopment project that was begun in 1912. Looks about right, doesn't it? For the most part, that's about as old as things get in Taiwan. It's not that the place doesn't have a very long history, it's just that neither the Chinese nor the Japanese saw fit to invest in many permanent monuments of that history.
Dasi, as a tourist destination, has two specialties: dried tofu and carved wood. About dried tofu, I have nothing to say, because a blog is not the place to talk about a smell, and besides, the most generous term I can use for that smell is "indescribable." As for the wood carvings:

Pretty cool. I should note that I looked inside several of the wood "vases": the lids do come off, but the space inside is too small for storing anything but, um, tea.