The Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures published Walking into Tainan's Past and Present in January this year, the first travel guidebook for Tainan equipped with a mobile app. For the benefit of our readership, we are now publishing the Walking into Tainan's Past and Present, English edition to let international audiences more deeply understand Tainan's history.

This guidebook invites 23 expert scholars to accessibly illustrate Tainan's centuries of geographical change, historical cultural context, and culinary and recreational lifestyles. Included are many rich yet rarely discussed topics, such as the replacement of Tainan's city walls by roundabouts under Japanese urban planning, the peak years of the sugar and salt industries, the Siraya tribe's cultural beliefs and their road to recognition, the splendor and tears of the yidan women hidden in the Shinmachi yūkaku pleasure district, and much more. The book exceeds the confines of the old city to take a full view of Tainan's diverse features and history. 

The book is accompanied by 13 precious old maps spanning the Qing dynasty to the postwar period, 246 photos of old Tainan, as well as the Tainan Historical Maps app utilizing modern-day Google street maps. The ancient and modern are juxtaposed; users are only a swipe of the fingertips away from discovering the glory days of Tainan.

Walking into Tainan's Past and Present, English edition officially goes on sale today. If you would like to purchase a copy, please contact Academia Sinica Press Bookstore 四分溪書坊 (+886-2-2652-1876), or visit San Min, GJ Taiwan; for availability in Taiwanese bookstores, please contact Friendly Book Supplies Co-operative Limited 台灣友善書業供給合作社 (+886-3-5641232).

Walking into Tainan's Past and Present, Chinese edition is already sold in websites and bookstores across Taiwan.