Daan Forest Park

This guide to Daan Forest Park in Taipei starts with the shantytown of thousands of squatters and Chinese Civil War refugees that once covered this ground, and the towering Guanyin statue at its center, raised after a monastery founder said she received a divine message. When the city moved to clear the settlement in the early 1990s and ordered the statue torn down, the fight over her fate escalated fast: an acid-and-feces attack that backfired into public outrage, a hunger strike staged on this very spot, and a Buddhist master's threat to send hundreds of buses of supporters. Listen for how a wavering mayor and a monastery came to a standoff just two days before the park was due to open.