I am a Hong Kong user. I use traceroute from my computer to connect to a Taiwan website. However, I find that the route path is very strange. The packets pass through German and then go to United States and then go to Taiwan. Why do the packets pass through the far hops and then go to the destination? Why don't the packet go to the Taiwan hops directly?

Thats the Internet for you. A lot depends on you ISP and how they connect to the Internet.

Then there is the political situation to consider regarding the relationship between China and Taiwan. There may not be a direct connection between China and Taiwan so you have to go by the long route. There is a link between China and the USA and the USA and Taiwan. Germany just happened to be a convenient stop along the way.

Stuart

As you say there is the political reason between China and Taiwan. Therefore I can't connect to Taiwan website directly. However, another problem arises. When I connect to the China website, I try to trace the route path. I discover that the packets pass through Japan first and then go to China!
After that, I try to connect www.yahoo.com. The packets pass through Australia before they reach U.S.! The packets seem travel around the world before they reach the destination. That seems nonsense with the political reason.

Is there any method to change the route path manually so that I can connect the Taiwan website directly? Or is there any method to optimize the route to make the connection faster?

There is no way you as a user can determine the routes packets take. Indeed, it is possible for different packets of the same web page to take different routes and the packets are then re-assembled in the right order by your ISP. It all depends on how much congestion and the availability of networks to route through that determines the route individual packets take.

Bear in mind that the routers used on the Internet are a little more complicated than the routers you have at home or in your office. It is those that determine the route your packets take.

To give you an example of what can happen. Last year the main trans-Atlantic route between the USA and Europe went down for a few hours. The effected every Internet user in the UK wanting to connect to a site in the USA. It didn't stop them from connecting, just meant packets went by via Africa before crossing the Atlantic which made things just a little bit slower. ISPs just needed to adjust their routing tables until such time as the link was back up again

It is even possible for packets to go swanning around the Internet trying to find it's destination for ever. To prevent that from happening each TCP/IP packet has a parameter called TTL (Time To Live). This value is decremented every time the packet goes through a router on its way to its destination. It is usually set at 128 by the sender. If it ever decrements to zero the packet is dropped and is lost.

You ISP might have some control of the routing of packets, but even then, once the packet has left your ISPs network the routing is determined by the other networks the packets traverses.

An understanding of how the TCP/IP protocol works will make it all clear.

Stuart