EAST OF THE EAST CHINA SEA

This is a story about the rise and fall of a forgotten internet empire in Taiwan and a journey of the fall of a genius.

The 1990s was a decade of drastic changes in Taiwan’s political environment. It was also a crucial decade of entering the era of the internet. A group of talented teenagers created the earliest model of internet search engine, they left the engineers in Silicon Valley far behind. They were lucky to get a huge injection of money from Intel and forged an empire earlier than Amazon, Facebook, and Google. They had a chance to acquire Pony MA’s Tencent, but they were at the top at that time and saw Tencent as beneath them. However, after the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, their efforts vanished, and today, only sporadic information can be found about them online.