Tears and Trembling

By Jeffrey Kluger

You probably won't notice any butterflies in Puli this week. The little town in central Taiwan has long been known for its butterflies as well as its Buddhist temples, its scenery and its rice wine. If you could forget that Puli, along with the rest of Taiwan, sits directly atop the juncture of two great tectonic plates, the town would seem idyllic.

Last week the plates made it impossible to forget. At 1:47 on Tuesday morning, Taiwan was slammed by a 7.6-magnitude earthquake. Centered near Puli, the quake left nearly 2,000 dead and at least 100,000 homeless and toppled some 6,000 buildings. Relief agencies from around the world, including the U.S., Turkey and Russia, mobilized to help. In financial centers, stocks took a pounding of their own as investors fretted about what the shutdown of Taiwan's microchip industry would mean to the always jumpy electronics sector.

But it was the pictures pouring out of Taiwan last week that told the real story. Buildings were peeled open like dollhouses, with walls stripped away and still furnished rooms absurdly exposed to the air. Tall buildings leaned drunkenly against smaller neighbors. Taipei's Sungshan hotel-apartment complex accordioned from 12 floors to just four, but a temple nearby remained standing, its paper lanterns hanging from the perimeter of the roof.

Just which buildings survived was partly determined by which ones conformed to Taiwan's sometimes laxly enforced construction codes. Puli was especially hard hit because many of its buildings are made of mud and straw. The Sungshan complex might have survived except that earlier this year, a bank on its first two floors reportedly stripped steel beams of concrete reinforcement during renovations.

How well the world's financial foundations will stand up to the quake is a more complex question. Taiwan produces more than 30% of the world's chip sets and motherboards, and by week's end most of its factories stood silent, awaiting repairs that could take weeks. It will be years, however, before Taiwan fully demolishes the wreckage and rebuilds. For a nation that sits in such a tremor-prone part of the world, that may be just long enough to brace for the next one.

--Reported by Hannah Beech/Puli and Donald Shapiro/Nantou

With reporting by Hannah Beech/Puli and Donald Shapiro/Nantou