From tomorrow through Feb. 28, the long disused Jiali Sugar Factory in Tainan County will be transformed into a sugarcoated melting pot of sweet fun and games at the inaugural Candy World festival
For a month and half visitors to the factory, which has been used as an art space since 2002, will be able to explore and enjoy everything from cuddly Japanese cartoon characters, Belgian chocolates and candies from the African state of Burkina Faso to the history of Taiwan's once thriving sugar industry.
PHOTO COURTESY OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS BUREAU OF TAINAN COUNTY
Organized by the Cultural Affairs Bureau of Tainan County
PHOTO COURTESY OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS BUREAU OF TAINAN COUNTY
The International Candy Exhibition Hall will feature the products of candy manufactures from 25 countries. Some, such as companies from France, the US and Japan, are well known, while others like those from Turkey, Oman and Tunisia will be on hand to give visitors the opportunity to sample something different.
For the more mature sweet-toothed visitor, the Taiwanese Candy Cultural Showroom will give adults the chance to relive their childhood through an assortment of interactive games and multimedia presentations that showcase the history of Taiwan's sugar and candy-making industries.
The most popular feature of Candy World 2005 will, no doubt, be the International Chocolate Exhibition Hall where products from renowned chocolate manufacturing nations such as Belgium as well as lesser-known chocolate-making countries like Honduras will be displayed.
The exhibit will give visitors a glimpse at the history and the making of chocolate through the ages and will allow them to get down and dirty at a special DIY chocolate-making sessions. A special exhibition of unusual chocolate sculpture will also be on display and will include everything from chocolate castles to chocolate underwear.
Along with sweets, the festival also boasts a few more savory items. There will be a Yami Cultural Gallery in recognition of the East Coast aboriginal peoples, a literature museum dedicated to the history of Taiwanese literature and to cap it all off, Japan's most famous cartoon character, Hello Kitty, will have her own exhibition hall.
Fun, games and oddities it may be, but then Candy World is basically yet another of the seemingly never-ending line of slapdash festivals organized by central and local governments in an attempt to generate tourism. Exactly how a festival located in the bowls of Tainan County will achieve this is anybody's guess, however.
There is an English language hotline (06 623-6373), but those who answer the phones don't speak a lick of the language and the site itself is in a pretty out-of-the-way locale.
The festival site is 18km north of Tainan City, and unless you have your own form of transportation, getting there is problematic. The only way to reach the site is to take a train to the town of Hsinying (新營) then transfer to one of the special buses for the final 26km journey. If you're coming from Taipei, the trip could take up to five hours. Yum, yum!
Event information:
What: Candy World 2005
(世界糖果文化節)
Where: Jiali Sugar Factory,
No 130, Liou-an Village, Jiali Township, Tainan County (台南縣佳里鎮六安里130號 -- 佳里糖廠)
When: Jan. 15 through Feb. 28.The festival will closed on Feb. 5, the eve of the Lunar New Year holiday.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby