City's time-honored brands a dying breed

Chunghwa is a brand of pencil that many generations of Chinese have used to practice writing Chinese characters for the first time. But when it is exported overseas, it is labeled differently so that it appears to be a non-Chinese brand.

Many famous local brands either were, or still are, hard to find, including Hongdeng (Red Lantern) radios and the Butterfly sewing machine.

When overseas Chinese returned to the mainland in the early 1980s, they went directly to those brands out of a sense of nostalgia.