# Identifier: Taiwanese survey markers

> Numeric identifiers are ubiquitous in real life. Taipei has survey markers embedded in the pavement. The physical world, tagged.

I first saw this sort of identifier years ago in Melbourne and, once I dig out the old photos, I'll do a retrospective post. I was obsessed with them long before Johnny.Decimal was an idea. It's quite obvious that I have a certain type of brain.

But right now I'm in Taiwan, and what a lovely surprise to find this in the pavement in the coastal city of Hualien.

<JDImage
  folder="blog"
  src="0216A-Taipei_survey-960x1280.jpeg"
  alt="A photograph, looking directly down from a standing human's perspective. You can see a tiny bit of my shoe, and in the pavement is a circular metal plate about 5cm across. This one is marked `HK33`."
  dropShadow
  caption="Figure 0216A. Hualien survey mark HK33."
/>

That is a [survey marker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survey_marker) and now that you've seen one, you'll find them everywhere. I'm not sure how standard it is to offer a public lookup for these things – Melbourne has one – but even if you do find [a site](https://survey.gov.taipei/LDA/map/map.aspx), the software tends to be … shall we say 'specialised'? By which I mean, from the 1990s, and hideous. (Usually some flavour of [ArcGIS](https://www.arcgis.com/index.html).)

And, as I'm learning, there isn't necessarily one type of marker and one city website that references it. Here in Taipei there seem to be different data sets for the departments of 'Land Administration' vs. 'Urban Development'.

All of which is to say that I tried getting links to these markers, and failed. So just enjoy the photos. ;-)

<JDImage
  folder="blog"
  src="0216B-Taipei_survey-960x1280.jpeg"
  alt="Survey mark 114148."
  dropShadow
  caption="Figure 0216B. Taipei survey mark 114148."
/>

<JDImage
  folder="blog"
  src="0216C-Taipei_survey-960x1280.jpeg"
  alt="Survey mark HA173."
  dropShadow
  caption="Figure 0216C. Taipei survey mark HA173."
/>