Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Wu Yi-chen (吳宜臻), along with several Hakka activists, yesterday urged the Miaoli County Government to halt a project to build a tourist information center outside the planned high-speed rail station in Houlong Township (後龍), saying that its chosen architectural style has no cultural connection to Hakkas living in Miaoli.
In order to leave an impression of Hakka culture on travelers arriving at the station, the county government plans to build a tourist information center in front of the station in the tulou style (土樓) — a traditional fortress-like communal residence found in mountainous regions in the southern parts of China’s Fujian Province.
While tulou architecture is not uniquely Hakka, the architectural style is considered Hakka by many, since most remaining tulou are found in Hakka villages.
Photo courtesy of Chien Hung-wei
However, for Hakkas in Taiwan, the architectural style is as foreign as it is to many non-Hakkas.
“Chinese tulou have no cultural or historical connection to Taiwanese Hakkas, [a tulou in Miaoli] is like something that fell from the sky — it doesn’t belong to Taiwan or Miaoli,” Ceng Nian-you [曾年有], a Miaoli-based Hakka culture and history researcher, told a press conference at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei yesterday. “We have our own culture in Miaoli, why is the county government not using local cultural elements for the tourist information center?”
He said that for local Hakkas, the traditional residential building is a huofang (夥房) — literally “communal house” in Hakka — which has a square layout, with a courtyard in the middle for agricultural activities such as sun-drying rice or vegetables, or for banquets, and a hall for religious use.
“I don’t understand why the county government had to tear down century-old kilns that once stood on the site of the high-speed rail development, and replace them with something that has no local connection,” Ceng added.
Chern Ban (陳板), a visiting professor at National Taiwan University of Arts and a Hakka from Miaoli, said that there are no tulou buildings in Taiwan due to its unique society and culture, and there is no need to build one now.
“Tulou in Fujian were built for security reasons, and when Hakkas moved to Taiwan, they didn’t feel the need to build any, because, on one hand, they didn’t feel threatened, and on the other hand, the humid climate and frequent earthquakes do not suit earth buildings,” Chern said.
Ayu Huang (黃連煜), a Hakka musician from Miaoli, said that while all Hakkas may share something in common, each Hakka community has unique elements.
“Hakkas in Fujian build tulou, but most of the Hakkas in Miaoli trace their ancestry to China’s Guangdong Province, so tulou are not only unfamiliar to us, but also would have been to our ancestors,” he said. “As a musician, I would be concerned if the Miaoli County Government imported traditional Hakka music from China and called it local music.”
Wu added that if Miaoli County Commissioner Liu Cheng-hung (劉政鴻), who has come under severe criticism over his handling of controversial demolitions in Dapu Borough (大埔) last week, cares enough about Hakka culture, he should read research by the Hakka Affairs Council. This found that there are no tulou in Taiwan, and confirmed that the most representative Hakka architecture in Taiwan is the huofang.
“If he doesn’t know what a huofang looks like, he should go to Hakka villages in the county and he would easily spot some,” Wu said.
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting information from staff, a European security source said on Friday. The operation, allegedly orchestrated by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, targeted dozens of employees at the military alliance or EU organizations through fictitious accounts, the source said, confirming reports in French and Belgian media. Posing as recruiters on the online professional networking platform, Chinese spies would initially request paid reports before later soliciting non-public or even classified information. One particularly active fake profile used the name “Kevin Zhang,” claiming to be the head
RSS