At 1:47 a.m. on 21 September 1999, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck Nantou. The Chi-Chi quake killed more than two thousand people. It is the date a lot of households still use, quietly, when they look at a beam.
If you live here and did not, you will hear it this month. Older buildings get a sentence. Newer ones get a different sentence. Neither is a structural survey. The useful move is to know the year of your block, where the stairs are, and what the Central Weather Administration earthquake page actually shows on a phone at night.
Memorials and school drills cluster around the 21st. You do not need to tour the wreckage. You do need to notice that this is not an abstract Pacific hazard. It is a Tuesday the country already had.
We put history in the letter when the calendar is close. The 21st is that date. Check the building. Then go to work.