FOR the rest of us the year is 1997. But in Taiwan it is the year 86, and in the capital Taipei today you would have to date an official letter "March 10th, 86". This is because year zero for the island's 21 million people is 1911, when the Republic of China was founded.
But Taipei is not stuck in the past. It is a bustling metropolis of nearly six million people. To the traveller coming from Beijing, it is another world. This is a Chinese city which not only was never communist, but until 1945 was part of Japan: the result is a legacy of brutality mixed with efficiency.
Many of the old people speak Japanese, rather than the official language, which is Mandarin Chinese. This is the same language as spoken in Beijing (most other Chinese cities have their own dialects) but it is pronounced in a more western style, making it easier for the struggling foreigner to understand.
Taiwan, a dictatorship until 1987, is today celebrated in Asia as a new democracy, but it vies with communist societies in social controls. In the evenings, Orwellian loudspeakers still bark announcements in the narrow suburban lanes.
It is also a heavily socialised society, where government owned monopolies control many big industries, which makes it very different in character from Hong Kong, with its free wheeling capitalist markets.
In one area Taiwan competes with the communist world: that is, in its crushing bureaucracy. Private businesses flourish only by breaking the laws, a local businessman said, rather than trying to satisfy the archaic regulations of the licensing and tax department.
And crime is so rampant on the island that it has been called the "Sicily of Asia". Just recently masked gunmen broke into the house of county magistrate, Liu Pang you, in a middle class suburb, tied up nine family members and visitors and shot them all in the head.
Every week there are revelations in the press of politicians involvement with mafia type gangs. Corruption is rampant. When I was in Taiwan recently there was a big scandal over gangland control of video stores, and the newspapers were full of stories about three baseball stars, including the league's top pitcher, who had just been charged with throwing games for a gambling syndicate.
The infamous Green Gang and the Bamboo Union followed Gen Chiang Kai shek's rag tag army to the island in 1949 and flourished as underworld allies of the dictator. Now the democratically elected Kuomintang government is trying to clean the place up.
The Justice Minister, Liao Cheng hao, told me in his office that since last August when he launched a campaign, within the law, to wipe out organised crime, dozens of leaders of illegal criminal groups had fled to the mainland.
He offered an amnesty to gang members. As a result, 35 underground gangs had been disbanded and 1,068 had surrendered to the police. Thse who failed to comply faced six months to five years in jail and confiscation of property.
Paradoxically, Taipei is also one of the safest cities in the world. There are almost no street muggings. Indeed, the western tourist is likely to be left alone if only because he or she will have less ready cash than the locals. A foreign resident told me if he left his wallet on the seat of his motorcycle, someone would run after him with it.
But the city's main cultural attraction is the result of one of the most breathtaking acts of larceny in history. When Gen Chiang arrived with his 600,000 defeated troops in 1949 he brought with him an incredible hoard of cultural booty, made up of thousands of crates of paintings, calligraphy, books, scrolls, pottery and wood carvings, the private collections of Chinese emperors going back centuries.
The treasure trove had been accumulated in Beijing's Forbidden City for centuries, but was packed in crates by the Kuomintang government in 1933 when war with Japan loomed, and taken by railway to Nanjing for safety. The treasures were shipped a month later to a warehouse in Shanghai, and then transferred back to Nanjing when the Japanese attacked Shanghai.
The 7,000 crates were subsequently freighted all round southern China, ending up for a while in a mid west village. The Japanese were defeated but civil war came. When the communists began to get the upper hand, Gen Chiang shipped the treasures across the Taiwan Straits.
History should be grateful for this outrageous act by a defeated general. It was the saving of China's historic legacy, as 20 years later, fanatical Red Guards on the mainland set about destroying everything connected with the past and in the process virtually extinguished what was left of China's invaluable heritage.
When it became clear that Gen Chiang would never reconquer the mainland, the crates were taken from warehouses and opened. Incredibly, not a single plate or piece of porcelain vase or any of the 5,000 year old pieces of prehistoric pottery among the 700,000 priceless items was cracked.
Today, the treasures are on show in Taipei's National Palace Museum, which is one of the four best museums in the world, ranking with the Louvre. At any one time there are 15,000 pieces to see, and the display is changed every three months.
It is one of the hangovers from the Chinese civil war that the world's tourists can view this wonderful collection, but no one from the 1.2 billion people on the Chinese mainland, who are barred from the island by the Taipei authorities, can come and view their national heritage.