Not many global cities can place the exact date of their first rave, but in Taipei it’s canonically remembered as 29 July 1995: the day Allen Chen and some friends set up a turntable and speakers under a bridge in New Taipei City. He spun techno tracks and set into motion the beginning of a movement.

The flyer for the event—decorated with a red handprint and the characters “同心 (shared heart)”—listed scant details: a phone number, email address, and the alluring promise of “hypnotic sound and lights”. As Chen—better known as DJ @llen—remembers it, fewer than 200 partygoers showed up on the floodplains of the Tamsui River. But the rave lit a fire among young Taiwanese at a time when the island was relearning how to party. “After that first one, a lot of people… kept asking me to do another,” he recalls. “I did a second one there at the same place—and then I did a third and a fourth one.”

The growing rave culture in mid-1990s Taiwan added to a steady stream of avant garde art shows, performance art, and festivals that characterised a newfound freedom in the country’s post-martial law era. By 2000, Chen was hosting parties of more than 1,000 ravegoers in increasingly creative, open-air locations on the outskirts of Taipei. This period is remembered as the zenith of Taiwan’s rave scene, before a moral panic swept through the media over the increasing use of ecstasy and MDMA—the party drugs of choice among dispassionate ravers. “The scene became politicised because raves created spaces for people excluded by mainstream society: queer people, drug users, youth subcultures, and ‘improper’ nightlife,” says Lin Chen-yu, a lecturer in creative and cultural industries at Cardiff University.

• Tags: Erin Hale, Issue 45, Taiwan