Next Sunday, Taiwan’s oldest museum hopes to lure a more diverse crowd through its front door.
The National Taiwan Museum (NTM, 國立台灣博物館) is holding an “open museum day,” offering free admission for migrant workers and foreign spouses to all exhibits on Sunday, Sept. 14.
There’s the Exhibition of Islamic Life and Culture (伊斯蘭：文化與生活特展), which will be on view for its final day.
Photo Courtesy of National Taiwan Museum
By popular demand, Exhibition of Islamic Life and Culture has been extended from its original closing date of June 22 to next Sunday.
This special exhibition presents religious artifacts, manuscripts, musical instruments and other objects that survey Islamic civilization and daily life.
NTM, located at the 228 Peace Memorial Park in downtown Taipei, opened its doors in 1908. It is the only museum established during the Japanese colonial era that is still in operation at its original site.
On Sundays and holidays, the 228 Peace Memorial Park is full of migrant workers, new immigrants and foreign spouses meeting friends on their day off.
Workers seldom enter the museum for a visit, according to museum staff.
“I asked our staff to speak to them and to find out why. Most of them preferred to stay at a distance because they didn’t think the museum was for foreigners and blue-collar workers,” said NTM deputy director Lin Hwa-ching (林華慶).
Lin said NTM wants to connect with migrant workers and new immigrants, particularly to invite them into the Exhibition of Islamic Life and Culture.
“Quite a number of migrant workers and foreign spouses are from Indonesia and are Muslims. So this exhibit can promote multicultural dialogue and mutual exchange,” he said.
Lin said that the exhibit may also be able to help the children of international marriages explore the cultural traditions of their parent’s home country.
Next Sunday, visitors can also view NTM’s other exhibits: Mysterious Pescadores, about the biodiversity and marine geomorphology of southern Penghu County’s four islands; Taiwan Black Jade, about unique Taiwanese gems from the metamorphic rocks of the east coast; and an exhibition on the Hokutolite (北投石), a radium-containing rare mineral from Beitou’s hot springs which was discovered in 1905 by the renowned Japanese mineralogist Okamoto Yohachiro.
Many people noticed the flood of pro-China propaganda across a number of venues in recent weeks that looks like a coordinated assault on US Taiwan policy. It does look like an effort intended to influence the US before the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) over the weekend. Jennifer Kavanagh’s piece in the New York Times in September appears to be the opening strike of the current campaign. She followed up last week in the Lowy Interpreter, blaming the US for causing the PRC to escalate in the Philippines and Taiwan, saying that as
US President Donald Trump may have hoped for an impromptu talk with his old friend Kim Jong-un during a recent trip to Asia, but analysts say the increasingly emboldened North Korean despot had few good reasons to join the photo-op. Trump sent repeated overtures to Kim during his barnstorming tour of Asia, saying he was “100 percent” open to a meeting and even bucking decades of US policy by conceding that North Korea was “sort of a nuclear power.” But Pyongyang kept mum on the invitation, instead firing off missiles and sending its foreign minister to Russia and Belarus, with whom it
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a dystopian, radical and dangerous conception of itself. Few are aware of this very fundamental difference between how they view power and how the rest of the world does. Even those of us who have lived in China sometimes fall back into the trap of viewing it through the lens of the power relationships common throughout the rest of the world, instead of understanding the CCP as it conceives of itself. Broadly speaking, the concepts of the people, race, culture, civilization, nation, government and religion are separate, though often overlapping and intertwined. A government
Nov. 3 to Nov. 9 In 1925, 18-year-old Huang Chin-chuan (黃金川) penned the following words: “When will the day of women’s equal rights arrive, so that my talents won’t drift away in the eastern stream?” These were the closing lines to her poem “Female Student” (女學生), which expressed her unwillingness to be confined to traditional female roles and her desire to study and explore the world. Born to a wealthy family on Nov. 5, 1907, Huang was able to study in Japan — a rare privilege for women in her time — and even made a name for herself in the
RSS