As dull as it may sound, marriage is the keyword in this week’s gossip rags, as a bevy of female stars are rumored to be either getting engaged or are ready to enter a state of matrimony. The one that sounds most genuine involves celebrity sweetheart Patty Hou (侯佩岑), who has not been coy about gossip journos’ inquiries about her engagement party last Friday.
The paparazzi from Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) and Apple Daily quickly published reports profiling Hou’s fiance; on Wednesday. His name is Ken Huang (黃伯俊). He is 35 years old, resembles Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒) slightly and makes an annual income of more than NT$12 million at Citigroup Global Markets Inc. However, the two rival newspapers have yet to agree on whether or not the man in question is an heir to family assets worth tens of billions of NT dollars. A positive answer will definitely make the modern-day fairy tale more dreamy: A beautiful woman lives happily ever after with her prince charming and his moneybags
Gossip hounds should already know about the three-carat engagement ring that Huang gave to Hou after they had been seeing each other for just four months, as well as Huang’s rumored romance with actress Ruby Lin (林心如).
Apart from the report of the Huang-Hou pairing, other nuptial news flashes have been rigorously denied by the parties involved. Did Maggie Cheung (張曼玉) become engaged to her German architect boyfriend Ole Scheeren on Christmas Eve? The 45-year-old actress’s agent says no. But gossip insiders assert the couple will get hitched soon.
How about the engagement party celebrating the union of veteran belle Rosamund Kwan (關之琳) of Hong Kong and Taiwan’s IT tycoon Pierre Chen (陳泰銘) held last Saturday? Never happened? And anyway, Chen was still married last time local paparazzi checked. As for Hong Kong’s former diva Cherie Chung (鍾楚紅), the 49-year-old widow personally denied the speculation about her upcoming wedding with a certain wealthy businessman from Singapore.
While Hou has found her Mr Right, Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) is getting cozy with fast-rising model Godfrey Kao (高以翔), whose previous claim to fame was his pair of delectable pinkish nipples, which he flagrantly exposed in his photo book. It’s only a matter of time before intimate comparisons will be made between Kao and Tsai’s old flame Jay Chou (周杰倫).
So what is the Mando-pop king, self-made film director and occasional actor doing with his love life? Not much. Unless you count the banter and teasing exchanges between him and supermodel-turned-actress Lin Chi-ling (林志玲) during the promotions for the fantasy adventure The Treasure Hunter (刺陵).
The way Pop Stop sees it, the real-life flirting between the two is more convincing that the on-screen romance that they share in the movie, which was killed by the embarrassingly coy lines and dumb jokes that filled the clunky script.
Finally, model-turned-housewife Hung Hsiao-lei (洪曉蕾) and her CEO-husband Wang Shih-chun (王世均) offer an example of a dreamy celebrity marriage gone sour. An outburst of violence erupted on Christmas Eve when a young man accidentally bumped into an inebriated Wang at a Cash Box KTV (錢櫃) outlet. According to a witness, Wang then beat the man to the ground with a beer can and kicked one of the man’s female friends in the head while shouting “don’t you know who I am.” Wang apologized afterwards and no charges were brought against him.
One month earlier, a widely circulated rumor claimed that there had been incidents of spousal abuse between the model couple, though both parties have denied the accusation.
In the mainstream view, the Philippines should be worried that a conflict over Taiwan between the superpowers will drag in Manila. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr observed in an interview in The Wall Street Journal last year, “I learned an African saying: When elephants fight, the only one that loses is the grass. We are the grass in this situation. We don’t want to get trampled.” Such sentiments are widespread. Few seem to have imagined the opposite: that a gray zone incursion of People’s Republic of China (PRC) ships into the Philippines’ waters could trigger a conflict that drags in Taiwan. Fewer
March 18 to March 24 Yasushi Noro knew that it was not the right time to scale Hehuan Mountain (合歡). It was March 1913 and the weather was still bitingly cold at high altitudes. But he knew he couldn’t afford to wait, either. Launched in 1910, the Japanese colonial government’s “five year plan to govern the savages” was going well. After numerous bloody battles, they had subdued almost all of the indigenous peoples in northeastern Taiwan, save for the Truku who held strong to their territory around the Liwu River (立霧溪) and Mugua River (木瓜溪) basins in today’s Hualien County (花蓮). The Japanese
Pei-Ru Ko (柯沛如) says her Taipei upbringing was a little different from her peers. “We lived near the National Palace Museum [north of Taipei] and our neighbors had rice paddies. They were growing food right next to us. There was a mountain and a river so people would say, ‘you live in the mountains,’ and my friends wouldn’t want to come and visit.” While her school friends remained a bus ride away, Ko’s semi-rural upbringing schooled her in other things, including where food comes from. “Most people living in Taipei wouldn’t have a neighbor that was growing food,” she says. “So
Whether you’re interested in the history of ceramics, the production process itself, creating your own pottery, shopping for ceramic vessels, or simply admiring beautiful handmade items, the Zhunan Snake Kiln (竹南蛇窯) in Jhunan Township (竹南), Miaoli County, is definitely worth a visit. For centuries, kiln products were an integral part of daily life in Taiwan: bricks for walls, tiles for roofs, pottery for the kitchen, jugs for fermenting alcoholic drinks, as well as decorative elements on temples, all came from kilns, and Miaoli was a major hub for the production of these items. The Zhunan Snake Kiln has a large area dedicated