Taiwan Emoji & Symbols

🇹🇼 the Taiwan flag comes first: home, pride, a game, a trip. Its colours work as hearts, ❤️💙🤍, and ☀️ stands for the white sun on the blue corner. 🧋 bubble tea is an emoji the world strongly links with Taiwan: pearl milk tea, zhēnzhū nǎichá, was first shaken in Taiwanese tea shops in the 1980s (Chun Shui Tang in Taichung and Hanlin in Tainan both claim it), and a boba run is a daily ritual for many students and office workers.

🐻 is the Formosan black bear, the island's best-loved animal, with a white crescent on its chest; a cartoon version, Oh! Bear, is the mascot of Taiwan's tourism board. 🌸 stands in for the plum blossom, méihuā, Taiwan's national flower, which has no emoji of its own; real cherry blossoms also draw crowds to Alishan and Wuling Farm each spring. 🍠 is a fond in-joke: the island is shaped like a sweet potato, so Taiwanese sometimes call themselves han-tsî-á, sweet potato kids, in Taiwanese Hokkien.

Everyday Taiwan has its own emoji too. 🛵 is the scooter, the way millions get to work; every morning a famous scooter waterfall pours off the Taipei Bridge into the city. 🏪 is the convenience store, where people pay bills, pick up parcels, print documents and buy tea eggs 🥚 and rice balls 🍙; Taiwan has one of the densest networks of them in the world. 🎤 is KTV, the private karaoke rooms where friends sing Mandopop late into the night, and 🌃🏮 is the night market, Taiwan's favourite evening out.

Taiwan flag emoji: copy and paste 🇹🇼, and why some iPhones hide it

The Taiwan flag emoji is two regional indicator letters, 🇹 and 🇼, the code TW, which phones and Macs draw as the flag. It is a standard emoji, listed as "flag: Taiwan" since the first emoji list of 2015, and works on Android, Samsung, WhatsApp and the web. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so a Windows PC shows the letters TW; the reader on a phone still sees the flag. On Discord type :flag_tw:.

The reason people search for "taiwan flag emoji removed" or "banned" is Apple. iPhones whose region is set to mainland China do not show 🇹🇼 at all, and since iOS 13.1.1 in 2019 the emoji keyboard in Hong Kong and Macao no longer offers it, although a 🇹🇼 received there still appears. Everywhere else it is on the keyboard under Flags, and copying it from this page works on every system.

The flag itself is the flag of the Republic of China, "Blue Sky, White Sun and a Wholly Red Earth" (青天白日滿地紅). It was adopted in 1928 and has flown in Taiwan since 1945. The twelve rays of the sun stand for the twelve months and the twelve two-hour periods of the traditional day; blue, white and red are read as the Three Principles of the People. It flies everywhere on 10 October, National Day, called Double Ten. At the Olympics Taiwan competes as Chinese Taipei under a different flag, a plum blossom with the Olympic rings, so sports fans often add 🇹🇼 themselves. China 🇨🇳, Hong Kong 🇭🇰, Macao 🇲🇴, Japan 🇯🇵 and South Korea 🇰🇷 have collections of their own; every other flag is in our Flag Emoji collection.

Taiwanese food emoji: night markets, boba and breakfast

A night market crawl at Shilin or Raohe in Taipei, Fengjia in Taichung or Ruifeng in Kaohsiung reads like a row of Taiwanese food emoji: 🍗 for the giant fried chicken cutlet, jīpái, 🍢 for skewers and Taiwanese oden, 🦑 for grilled squid, 🌭 for the garlicky Taiwanese sausage, often served in a sticky-rice "bun" as big sausage wraps small sausage, and 🦪 for the oyster omelette, ô-á-tsian.

🍜 is beef noodle soup, Taiwan's comfort dish, with whole festivals and contests devoted to it. 🥟 is the xiaolongbao soup dumpling that Din Tai Fung made famous worldwide, 🍚 is lǔròufàn, rice with braised minced pork, 🍲 hot pot, eaten even in summer, and 🍱 the railway lunch box sold on Taiwan Railway trains and platforms. Breakfast is its own world: 🥛 soy milk, 🫓 scallion pancakes and shaobing flatbreads, 🍙 the Taiwanese rice roll fàntuán with fried dough inside, and 🥚 tea eggs.

Fruit is a point of pride. 🥭🍧 together are mango shaved ice, the summer dessert; 🍍 fills the pineapple cake, fènglísū, the gift every visitor brings home. Tea is serious here: 🍵🫖 stand for the high-mountain oolongs of Alishan and Lishan, Dongding oolong and the honey-scented Oriental Beauty. 🍺 is Taiwan Beer, the island's own lager, and 🥢 the chopsticks for all of it.

Taiwan holidays and festivals in emoji

Lunar New Year is the biggest holiday of the year, a week when families travel home. Its emoji are 🧧 red envelopes, 🏮 lanterns, 🧨 firecrackers, 🦁🐉 lion and dragon dances, 🍊 mandarins for luck and 🐟 fish, a pun on plenty. The greetings are written in Traditional characters: 新年快樂 xīnnián kuàilè, Happy New Year, and 恭喜發財 gōngxǐ fācái. In 2026 it opened the Year of the Horse 🐎 on 17 February; the Year of the Goat 🐐 begins on 6 February 2027. The twelve zodiac animals are all in our China collection.

Fifteen days later the Lantern Festival lights up Taiwan: thousands of paper sky lanterns rise over Pingxi near Taipei, and in Yanshui, Tainan, the beehive fireworks 🎆🎇 are fired into the crowd. On the Dragon Boat Festival crews race 🐉🚣, and many people try to stand an egg 🥚 on its end at noon. The seventh lunar month is Ghost Month 👻, when offerings are laid out for wandering spirits and many people avoid moving house, weddings and swimming.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is the full moon 🌕, mooncakes 🥮 and the Jade Rabbit 🐇, but in Taiwan it is above all a barbecue night: families grill meat 🍖 on the pavement, eat pomelos and put pomelo peel on the children's heads as hats. On 10 October, Double Ten Day, there are parades and fireworks 🇹🇼🎆, and on New Year's Eve the whole country watches the fireworks on Taipei 101. Taipei also holds the biggest Pride march in East Asia 🏳️‍🌈, and in 2019 Taiwan became the first place in Asia to allow same-sex marriage.

Taiwan symbols: the NT$ sign, Zhuyin ㄅㄆㄇㄈ and Traditional characters

The New Taiwan dollar symbol is the dollar sign: prices are written NT$100 or just $100, code TWD. In Chinese text the number is followed by 元, 100元, said as kuài in speech, and banknotes print the formal 圓. Chinese keyboards type the full-width ＄. The currency has been in use since 1949; 💵 is the US dollar note, but people use it for any dollar.

Taiwan has about 23.6 million people by CLDR's estimate. Mandarin, written in Traditional characters, is the common language of about 22.4 million; Taiwanese Hokkien (Min Nan) is spoken by about 13.4 million and Hakka by about 2.6 million, mostly in Taoyuan, Hsinchu and Miaoli, all estimates. The 2019 National Languages Development Act made all of them, the languages of Taiwan's sixteen recognised Indigenous peoples and Taiwanese Sign Language national languages. Each spoken one has a collection here: Traditional Chinese, Min Nan Chinese and Hakka Chinese.

Zhuyin, also called Bopomofo after its first four letters ㄅㄆㄇㄈ, is the phonetic alphabet Taiwan uses instead of pinyin for learning and typing Mandarin. Its 37 symbols were drawn from old character forms, ㄅ from 勹 for example, and made official in 1918. Children learn them in their first weeks of school, and children's books print them beside each character. A syllable is two or three symbols plus a tone mark: ˊ rising, ˇ dipping, ˋ falling, ˙ neutral, while the high first tone ˉ is usually left unwritten, so 好 hǎo is ㄏㄠˇ. In chats single symbols stand for whole words, ㄉ for 的 and ㄇ for 嗎, and ㄏㄏ is a dry laugh; this Zhuyin slang is frowned on in formal writing.

Most Taiwanese type with Zhuyin: keyboards sold in Taiwan print the symbols on the keys, with ㄅ on 1 and the tones on 6, 3, 4 and 7 (space gives the first tone). On Windows add Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan) to get Microsoft Bopomofo, on a Mac add the Zhuyin input source, and phones offer a Zhuyin keyboard; copying ㄅㄆㄇㄈ from this page is quickest for one or two. Hanyu pinyin has been the official romanization since 2009, but many place names keep older spellings, so you still read Taipei and Kaohsiung. Taiwan's own word for itself is written 臺灣, the form the Ministry of Education prefers, or 台灣 in everyday writing; 加油 means go on, you can do it, and 讚 zàn, great, is the Like button on Taiwanese Facebook.

Taiwanese Hokkien letters and Taiwan punctuation

Taiwanese Hokkien is written in characters and in Latin letters: the church romanization Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) of the 19th century and Tâi-lô, which the Ministry of Education adopted in 2006. Both mark the tones on the vowel: á for tone 2, à tone 3, â tone 5, ā tone 7, and a small vertical line, a̍, for tone 8, as in tsia̍h, to eat. Taiwan itself is Tâi-oân in POJ and Tâi-uân in Tâi-lô. POJ writes a nasal vowel with a raised ⁿ (saⁿ, three; Tâi-lô sann) and the open o with a dot beside it, o͘ (Tâi-lô oo). The vertical line and the dot are combining marks: copy them and paste them right after the vowel.

Taiwan's punctuation is full-width, every mark filling a whole character square: 。 the full stop, ， the comma, 、 the enumeration comma between items of a list, and ！ ？ ： ；. Quotations use the corner brackets 「 」, with 『 』 for a quote inside a quote, where mainland China prints “ ”. Book and film titles go in 《 》 and chapter or article titles in 〈 〉, the parts of a foreign name are joined with ·, and the dash and the ellipsis are written double: —— and …….