Plum Garden

This guide to Plum Garden in Taipei's Beitou hills follows Yu You-ren, head of Taiwan's Control Yuan and the very watchdog built to catch corruption, as he slips away from birthday parties and officials angling for favors. It traces the house that waited for him from 1949 until his death in 1964, raised in the last years of Japanese rule with wooden beams above and a concrete air-raid shelter below. He was ranked the finest grass-script calligrapher of his generation, his scrolls scattered by the thousands into private hands.