Home safely from Japan, my thoughts turned to Taiwan. My friend Luke (Su Jingsong) had suggested I visit, and the weather in November is usually good in Taiwan.
          My good friend Lapping Wong, originally from Hong Kong, had become interested in helping with the vortex opening. He had personally helped me open a latent vortex not far from Ryegrass, above the Columbia River, in 2004. In 2005 he bought my airline tickets to Europe and Japan. Now Su bought me a ticket to Taiwan.

          I landed in Taipei on the first day of November, with the goal of generating a sheng canopy over Taiwan. The qi in the heavens when I landed was not so bad as it had been in Japan a month and a half earlier, but perhaps a little more negative than that in the heavens above most of the US.

          Many people helped me with this project. Besides Luke, an inventor and ME professor at China Institute of Technology in Nankang, foremost were Professor Zhuang Zhenliang of National Taiwan University (Tai Da), Zhang Bincun of Academica Sinica in Nangang, and Professor Chen Jinzi also of Tai Da.
          Luke drove me around Nangang, up north to Geelong, down along the east coast to Hualien, up over a typhoon damaged road to Alishan, down south inland to the southern tip of the island, and then back up again along the western coast.
          Zhang and Zhuang picked me up at the airport, put me up at Taizhong, and drove me around that area to open my first vortices on the island. Zhuang took care of my lodging for six nights in Nangang.
          Chen drove me around Taipei and the Yang Ming Shan area of Northwestern Taiwan, and put me up for the rest of my stay in an apartment he owns in Taipei.

          It would be difficult at this point to give a sequential history of my activity there. By the end of the first week, there had appeared a sheng canopy in the heavens over Taipei and environs. By the end of the trip, the sheng canopy covered all of the Taiwan except the extreme southeast part of the island. I will mention a few vortex-hunting episodes:
          There was in particular one important latent vortex which would not have been opened without Professor Chen. It was at the top of a hill in a gated community in a wealthy area of Taipei. We drove to the two separate entrances, and were turned back by the guards at both. Finally Chen demanded to speak with the President of the building association, and persisted until the guard phoned him up the President, and persuaded him to come down to the entrance. Chen identified himself as a Professor at Tai Da (which is quite prestigious in Taiwan), and presented me as an American expert in feng shui, who had come all the way to Taiwan to treat certain places having special qi . Finally the President agreed to take us up to the top of the hill. In retrospect it was a good thing he was with us, for there was a high chain-link fence around the summit of the hill, and the President had a key to the gate. I rushed up the remaining slope and began placing TBs on the critical points . The building association President reached the top just as I was planting the last one, and wanted to know what I was doing. So I told him. Surprisingly, he believed what I said, and thanked me for coming to his island to open the vortices.
          In the Yang Ming Mountain area there was a latent vortex just where the jungle met a mountain meadow. Chen and I tried the meadow first, but the grass was taller than ourselves, and so thick that we could make little headway, even with machetes. So we took the dense jungle option, the lesser of two evils, and eventually made it to the vortex.
          Eagerly running down a sand hill toward a latent vortex on the western side of the island, I tripped on a root, and after a short but abrupt flight, had the wind knocked out of me as I hit the beach.
          Driving down the eastern coast with Luke, we came to a latent vortex north of Hualien, just before dark. It was on a steep hill in the jungle, and I underestimated the time needed to reach it. Halfway there, it became so dark I had to give up and head back. Couldn’t find the return trail, so had to keep to a ravine and work my way by feel. Unfortunately what I was feeling was nettles, and by the time I reached the road, I was so covered with welts, I slept very little that night. Next morning in the daylight, we found another, more easily accessible latent vortex.
          In the south of the island one late afternoon, I felt a latent vortex from the highway. After some wandering about awhile on country roads, we eventually came to it. I was elated, for this vortex was on a medium-sized hill, and not too far from the road. Luke stayed with the car at a parking spot on the side of the road, while I took off. It would only take fifteen or twenty minutes I thought, so I did not bother with a long-sleeved shirt or a hat: it was hot and muggy that day. When I reached the hill, I found it was an old grave yard. I hadn’t seen the graves from a distance, because the hill was covered by thorny vines: the thorns gripped any flesh with which they came in contact, almost as if they were sentient beings. I had to climb very slowly up the hill -- both to keep from making a false step and falling onto a grave, and to avoid having my skin torn away by the vines. It was an hour or so before I reached the vortex near the summit, and by then dusk had begun to fall, and the mosquitoes had come out. With no hat and shirt, and an inability to move quickly, I was at their mercy, of which, of course, they had none. By the time I got back off the hill, my skin was pretty much equally divided into bloody cuts, and insect bites: another night with little sleep.

          During my stay, Luke and I built what may have been the first CB on the island. Now there are more. I know of one in particular, in the yard of another professor friend of mine near Tai Da.

          I had spent two years on the island in former times: the first back in 1983-1984 and the second in 1990-1991. It was good to see so many of my old friends again, and once again enjoy the good food.

          The return flight to the US had a stop-over at Tokyo. I found that the sheng canopy over the southern half of Honshu in Japan had extended north as far as Tokyo. The sheng qi was weaker here than over Osaka, but it was present.

          When the plane took off from Tokyo/Narita, I intended to watch carefully to see how far this high canopy of sheng qi would extend into the Pacific to the east. I was rather surprised to find that it wasn’t until the plane reached a region southeast of the Kamchatka peninsula of Russia that I could detect the edge of the sheng canopy to the north. In the map below, the approximate plane route is indicated by a red line. The solid yellow line approximately indicates the observed northern boundary of the sheng canopy , and the yellow dots indicate area where the sheng qi was observed on the flight back to the US: