For thousands of years, farmers in East Asia have relied on solar terms, or the 24 points in the traditional solar calendar, to determine when to plant and harvest their crops. Solar terms also dictate many major religious festivals and important dates such as Tomb Sweeping Day.
South Village (南村落), an arts and culture center near Shida, will be marking the next four solar terms in March and April, which herald the coming of spring, with events featuring a mouth-watering selection of traditional snacks made from seasonal ingredients. The treats include fresh mantou sweetened with brown sugar and red beans, and pastries flavored with green tea, taro, yam and plum.
The first event is Thursday, which falls on the day before the two-week solar term known as “the awakening of the insects” (驚蟄). The spring equinox (春分) will be celebrated on March 20, Tomb Sweeping Day (清明節) on April 2, and the arrival of the “grain rain” (鼓雨) which helps crops grow, on April 20.
While South Village’s events are aimed at gourmets, the activities are intended to go beyond food tastings. The center, which regularly hosts dinners and cooking demonstrations in its combined gallery and kitchen space, hopes that highlighting the importance of the solar calendar will raise awareness about global warming.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
RSS