Taiwan is an island in East Asia. "Taiwan" is also commonly used to refer to the territories administered by the Republic of China (ROC), a state which governs the island of Taiwan, Lanyu (Orchid Island) and Green Island in the Pacific off the Taiwan coast, the Pescadores in the Taiwan Strait, and Kinmen and the Matsu Islands off the coast of mainland Fujian. The main island of Taiwan, also known as Formosa (from the Portuguese Ilha Formosa, meaning "beautiful island"), is located in East Asia off the coast of mainland China, south of mainland Japan but west of the end of Japan's Ryukyu Islands, and west-north-west of the Philippines. It is bounded to the east by the Pacific Ocean, to the south by the South China Sea and the Luzon Strait, to the west by the Taiwan Strait and to the north by the East China Sea. The island is 394 kilometers (245 miles) long and 144 kilometers (89 miles) wide and consists of steep mountains covered by tropical and subtropical vegetation.

Simplified Chinese is one of two standard sets of Chinese characters of printed contemporary Chinese written language, simplified from traditional Chinese by the People's Republic of China in an attempt to promote literacy. It is used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia.

Traditional characters are used in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and many overseas Chinese communities, but simplified characters are gradually gaining popularity among overseas Chinese as more mainland Chinese emigrate from their homeland.

Simplified character forms are created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizeable proportion of traditional Chinese characters. Some characters were simplified by applying regular rules; for example, by replacing all occurrences of a certain component with a simpler variant. Some characters were simplified irregularly, however, and some simplified characters are very dissimilar to and unpredictable from traditional characters. Finally, many characters were left untouched by simplification, and are thus identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies.