"Billiards are one of Taiwan's few hopes at winning international games," said Simon Chang (
He points to a teenage boy practicing alone at a table. "This kid is joining a national tournament next week. He's defeated a lot of good players older than him and been on TV. He has a pretty decent look for TV, eh?" Chang asks.
Hsimenting has more pool halls than any other part of Taipei and, by extension, Taiwan. In the same building as Ball King, there are four other pool halls located adjacent to an endless row of KTVs, red-envelope cabarets and saunas. Pool-playing as a popular trend in Taiwan has flowed out of such seedy, seemingly cultureless areas.
As Chang talked, world-ranked No.1 male player Chao Fong-pang (
Five years ago the Videoland Sports Channel began looking for the two sports most popular among Taiwanese to produce a regular sports program. "They chose billiards and bowling and began cooperating with the ROC Billiards Association" Chang said.
According to Alen Lee, director of the ROC Billiard Association's professional player committee, in the year following the broadcast of daily pool games, the number of pool houses in Taiwan rose from 1,000 to about 3,000.
Pool playing reached a frenzy after the 1998 Asian games, when the Chinese Taipei team won three gold medals, two silvers and a bronze. By 1999, the number of halls increased to around 5,000.
"We've also packaged top players for stardom," Chang said. For example, Chao has been given the monicker "Cold Face Killer" (
"It has also helped to change the general image of pool-playing. The pool hall is not the gangster place it once was and many parents have fewer worries about their pool-loving kids," Chang said. For girls, the flashy performance of Liu Hsin-mei and Jennifer Chen in international games has made pool-playing extremely popular, said sports journalist Hsu Ming-li (
"Women are no longer just marking the scores for players. They've become the focus of spotlight," Hsu said. The first Amway Cup International Women's Billiard Tournament was held in 2000, helping stoke the game's popularity. The big prizes attracted top international players like Alison Fisher, Jeanette Lee, Gerda Hofstatter to compete in the tournament. The Amway Cup has since become one of Taiwan's highest-profile competitions.
Now the number of women in local pool halls has grown from its previous 1 percent to some 15 percent," Chang said, adding that the ROC Billiard Association's next project will be to get their sport accepted as an official event in the Olympic Games.
What was the population of Taiwan when the first Negritos arrived? In 500BC? The 1st century? The 18th? These questions are important, because they can contextualize the number of babies born last month, 6,523, to all the people on Taiwan, indigenous and colonial alike. That figure represents a year on year drop of 3,884 babies, prefiguring total births under 90,000 for the year. It also represents the 26th straight month of deaths exceeding births. Why isn’t this a bigger crisis? Because we don’t experience it. Instead, what we experience is a growing and more diverse population. POPULATION What is Taiwan’s actual population?
After Jurassic Park premiered in 1993, people began to ask if scientists could really bring long-lost species back from extinction, just like in the hit movie. The idea has triggered “de-extinction” debates in several countries, including Taiwan, where the focus has been on the Formosan clouded leopard (designated after 1917 as Neofelis nebulosa brachyura). National Taiwan Museum’s (NTM) Web site describes the Formosan clouded leopard as “a subspecies endemic to Taiwan…it reaches a body length of 0.6m to 1.2m and tail length of 0.7m to 0.9m and weighs between 15kg and 30kg. It is entirely covered with beautiful cloud-like spots
For the past five years, Sammy Jou (周祥敏) has climbed Kinmen’s highest peak, Taiwu Mountain (太武山) at 6am before heading to work. In the winter, it’s dark when he sets out but even at this hour, other climbers are already coming down the mountain. All of this is a big change from Jou’s childhood during the Martial Law period, when the military requisitioned the mountain for strategic purposes and most of it was off-limits. Back then, only two mountain trails were open, and they were open only during special occasions, such as for prayers to one’s ancestors during Lunar New Year.
A key feature of Taiwan’s environmental impact assessments (EIA) is that they seldom stop projects, especially once the project has passed its second stage EIA review (the original Suhua Highway proposal, killed after passing the second stage review, seems to be the lone exception). Mingjian Township (名間鄉) in Nantou County has been the site of rising public anger over the proposed construction of a waste incinerator in an important agricultural area. The township is a key producer of tea (over 40 percent of the island’s production), ginger and turmeric. The incinerator project is currently in its second stage EIA. The incinerator
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