[cynwoody]

From a blog post by Jonathan Turley:

About 20 years ago, I was on a delegation to Taiwan and one of my areas of discussion was environmental protection. On the flight over to Taipei, our government sanctioned the Taiwan government for the sale of endangered species body parts in medicines and products. When I arrived, that is all the President and ministers wanted to discuss. They were quite angry and insisted that you could not buy such things as tiger bone on the island.

After days of denials, I decided to investigate the matter myself. I left the meeting early and got into a cab. The Justice minister had just denied that such products were openly sold in Taiwan so I asked the cab driver where I could buy tiger bone. He immediately said “Snake alley.” He offered to drive me that night and I accepted. After driving through the city that night, he walked me down a narrow alley with underaged girl prostitutes on either side behind thin curtains. It was horrible with some girls who looked as young as ten. We then emerged in Snake alley — so named because people often came to drink snake blood as an aphrodisiac. I watched as one large snake was killed and drained into a pint cup and given to a young man. The snake’s beating heart was placed on the table in front of him. He paid a wad of money and drank the blood and was served a snake soup. In addition to open sex acts on display, there was a wide array of endangered species body parts for sale from dozens of open tables. I bought a few and took them to the meeting the next day. I explained that it took me literally minutes to find a place to buy these. The minister looked shocked and then had an interesting response. Instead of again denying the availability of such products, he said that the Chinese culture is ancient and that he can personally attest that these ancient remedies work.

[Brother Cracker]

Snake Alley

This night market is totally at odds with most of the city, not only because snake soup and snake’s gall are on the menu, but because there is a grittiness here that is missing in most other places.

The government have tried their best to clean up this former red light district, and it is much cleaner, but the area still retains its edge. And that is to be celebrated, there are enough shiny, clean malls with chain store fast food restaurants already anyway.

The street has quite a strange combination of stores, which goes something like this snakes, massage, porn, snakes, massage, sex toys… Drinking snake blood or gall is a must here, massages and sex toy purchases are at your own discretion. If you are still not full after your snake soup, there are a whole host of snacks/food available on Guangzhou Street between Snake Alley and Longshan Temple.