Taiwan Trivia
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47 free Taiwan trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Taiwan trivia questions with answers. Taiwan trivia for travellers, expats, students and quiz nights. The history round runs from the Portuguese sailors who wrote 'Ilha Formosa' on their maps in 1542, through Dutch Fort Zeelandia, Koxinga's Kingdom of Tungning, Qing annexation, fifty years of Japanese rule, the 228 incident, the KMT's 1949 retreat, 38 years of martial law and the first direct presidential election in 1996, right up to Asia's first same-sex marriage law and President Lai. Then the island itself: why Yushan makes Taiwan the world's fourth-highest island, the marble of Taroko Gorge, Sun Moon Lake, the Tropic of Cancer, typhoons and the 921 earthquake, plus Kinmen and Penghu. There are rounds on the economy (TSMC, Acer, Foxconn and the 'Taiwan Miracle'), on food (bubble tea, night markets, beef noodle soup, stinky tofu, Din Tai Fung) and on culture from Teresa Teng and Jay Chou to Ang Lee and Cloud Gate. Easy questions first, then ones only someone who has ridden the high-speed rail to Zuoying will get. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which river in central Taiwan, about 186 kilometres long, is the island's longest?
Zhuoshui River
The Zhuoshui River carries so much silt that its water stays murky all year, which is how it got its name: Zhuoshui means 'turbid water'.
Q 02Which sea washes Taiwan's eastern coast?
Philippine Sea
The Philippine Sea meets Taiwan's steep east coast, while the strait on the western side is so shallow that it became a land bridge to Asia during the ice ages.
Q 03Which European trading company built Fort Zeelandia in south-western Taiwan from 1624?
The Dutch East India Company
The Dutch East India Company held the fort for 38 years, drove a rival Spanish colony out of northern Taiwan in 1642 and brought in Chinese labourers to grow rice and sugar.
Q 04Which Ming loyalist drove European colonists out of Taiwan in 1662 and founded the Kingdom of Tungning?
Koxinga
Koxinga, also known as Zheng Chenggong, won Taiwan after a nine-month siege but died within months, aged 37; his heirs held the island until a Qing fleet took it in 1683.
Q 05Which 1895 treaty, signed in a Japanese port, handed Taiwan to Japan?
Shimonoseki
The Treaty of Shimonoseki ceded Taiwan and the Penghu islands to Japan; when the news reached Taiwan, local leaders proclaimed a republic to resist the handover, but it proved short-lived.
Q 06Taiwan became the Nationalist government's refuge in December 1949 after it lost which conflict?
The Chinese Civil War
The Chinese Civil War ended on the mainland with a Communist victory in 1949; the defeated government moved its seat to Taipei that December, and more than a million soldiers and civilians followed it.
Q 07The February 28 incident of 1947 began with what event?
The shooting of a civilian
The shooting of a civilian followed a raid on a widow selling contraband cigarettes in Taipei: monopoly agents struck her, an officer fired into the angry crowd, and protests spread across the island.
Q 08Which measure did Taiwan's government lift in July 1987 after 38 years in force?
Martial law
Martial law had been in force since 1949; activists founded the Democratic Progressive Party in defiance of it in 1986, and its end the next year lifted the bans on new parties and newspapers.
Q 09Who became the first Taiwan-born ROC president in 1988 and later won the first direct election?
Lee Teng-hui
Lee Teng-hui, a Cornell-trained agricultural economist, won the 1996 vote with a clear majority even though China fired missiles into nearby waters in a bid to scare voters away from him.
Q 10Which organisation voted in October 1971 to give China's seat to Beijing instead of Taipei?
The United Nations
The United Nations seated Beijing under Resolution 2758; Taipei's delegates, whose government was a founding member with a permanent Security Council seat, walked out as the vote went against them.
Q 11Under what name does Taiwan compete at the Olympic Games?
Chinese Taipei
Chinese Taipei became the Olympic name under a 1981 agreement with the IOC, signed after Taiwan boycotted the 1980 Games over the issue; a 2018 referendum on competing as 'Taiwan' failed.
Q 12On 17 May 2019, Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalise what?
Same-sex marriage
Same-sex marriage passed the legislature one week before a deadline set by the Constitutional Court, which had ruled in 2017 that barring it was unconstitutional; couples could register from 24 May.
Q 13Who won Taiwan's presidential election in January 2024?
Lai Ching-te
Q 21Which lake, home to Taiwan's Thao people, opens to swimmers only for one mass crossing each autumn?
Sun Moon Lake
Sun Moon Lake is closed to swimmers all year except for its Swimming Carnival, a 3-kilometre crossing that draws entrants by the thousand; the Thao, who number under a thousand, live on its shore.
Q 22Many linguists trace which language family, spoken from Madagascar to Hawaii, back to Taiwan?
Austronesian
Austronesian languages span half the globe, yet in one leading classification all but one of the family's primary branches are found only in Taiwan, which is why many linguists place its homeland there.
Q 23Which ethnic group, native speakers of Taiwanese, makes up about 70% of Taiwan's population?
Hoklo
Lai Ching-te won with about 40 percent in a three-way race, giving the DPP a third straight presidency, which no party had managed since direct elections began, even as it lost its majority in the legislature.
Q 14Whose design gave Taiwan's government five branches instead of three?
Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-sen proposed the five-power system, adding to the usual three an Examination Yuan to run civil-service tests and a Control Yuan to audit and impeach officials.
Q 15What did the Japanese call Taiwan's highest peak, a name later used in the coded order to attack Pearl Harbor?
Mount Niitaka
Mount Niitaka means 'new high mountain': surveyors found the peak stood taller than Mount Fuji, and 'Climb Mount Niitaka' was the signal that set the Pearl Harbor attack in motion in December 1941.
Q 16Which peak, the highest in Taiwan, makes it the fourth-highest island in the world?
Yushan
Yushan, or Jade Mountain, is out-topped only by summits on New Guinea, Hawaii and Borneo; it rose from the seabed as two tectonic plates collided, and that boundary is still active.
Q 17Which line of latitude passes through Taiwan?
The Tropic of Cancer
The Tropic of Cancer crosses Taiwan through Chiayi and Hualien counties, splitting its climate: the north is subtropical with real seasons, while most of the south is tropical.
Q 18Which disaster struck central Taiwan in the early hours of 21 September 1999, killing more than 2,400 people?
Earthquake
An earthquake, known as the 921 or Jiji quake, toppled buildings as far away as Taipei; Taiwan now marks every 21 September as its national disaster-prevention day, with drills across the island.
Q 19Taipei 101 was the world's tallest building from 2004 until overtaken by which tower?
Burj Khalifa
Burj Khalifa passed Taipei 101's height in 2007 while still under construction, then opened in Dubai in January 2010 at 828 metres, 320 metres taller than the tower it dethroned.
Q 20Taroko Gorge, carved by the Liwu River, cuts through which stone?
Marble
Marble lines the gorge because ancient seabed limestone was squeezed into marble as colliding plates lifted Taiwan, and the Liwu River kept cutting down through the rising rock.
Hoklo people descend from migrants who crossed the strait from southern Fujian from the 17th century onward, bringing the Hokkien speech now known as Taiwanese.
Q 24Which chipmaker, founded in 1987 by Morris Chang, was the world's first dedicated semiconductor foundry?
TSMC
TSMC makes chips only to other firms' designs, which let 'fabless' companies such as Apple and AMD sell chips without owning a factory; Philips and Taiwan's government put up the launch money.
Q 25Which city's science park, opened in 1980 on the model of Silicon Valley, became the home of Taiwan's chip industry?
Hsinchu
Hsinchu Science Park was planned to draw Taiwanese engineers home from abroad, and the island's two leading chip foundries both grew out of a state research institute beside it.
Q 26Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are three of the Four Asian Tigers; which economy is the fourth?
South Korea
South Korea completes the Four Asian Tigers, economies whose export-led growth topped 7 percent a year from the 1960s and made all four high-income by the 1990s.
Q 27Which two Taiwanese companies are best known as personal computer makers?
Acer and Asus
Acer and Asus share roots: Asus was founded in 1989 by four engineers who had left Acer, and the two went on to compete as global PC brands.
Q 28What are the chewy 'pearls' in Taiwan's bubble tea made from?
Tapioca starch
Tapioca starch comes from the cassava root; by one teahouse's account the drink was born in 1988, when a manager at Taichung's Chun Shui Tang tipped her tapioca dessert into iced tea at a staff meeting.
Q 29Taiwan's red-braised beef noodle soup is traditionally credited to veterans from which Chinese province?
Sichuan
Sichuan veterans are credited in the best-known account, which is why the dish is sold as 'Sichuan-style' beef noodles, although it was created in Taiwan and is not a dish of Sichuan itself.
Q 30Which Taipei restaurant chain, now famous for soup dumplings, began in 1958 as a cooking-oil shop?
Din Tai Fung
Din Tai Fung's founder sold cooking oil until tinned oil gutted his trade around 1970; on a friend's advice he gave half the shop over to xiaolongbao, which sold so well that the oil was dropped in 1972.