You’ve seen it dozens of times in movies and on TV: a bird’s-eye view of a red sports car screeching through hairpin curves one after another, racing down a precipitous granite mountain with a thousand-foot plunge below into inaccessible ravines. Don’t you wish you were driving the sports car?

Now the camera zooms down onto the sports car, but in this Mercedes commercial it isn’t a red sports car. It is a yellow postbus of the Swiss Postal Bus network negotiating with eardrum-blasting...

by Jay Brunhouse

Costumed greeters wearing comic heads dance before the crowds passing out of Neiwan’s modern train station in the high hills of Taiwan. Children squeal happily at the sight. The street is lined with endless stalls offering delicious treats, which together form a special kind of market. One sight nearby is the Taoist Jai Kung Temple of Mercy.

Neiwan, a part of Hengshan Town in Hsinchu County, is a mountain village. It used to be home to several coal mines and...