Demand to open the main room of Soong Mayling's (
Members of the Association of Promoting Cultural Preservation (原貌文化協會) gathered yesterday at the Shihlin Official Residence, the former home of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Soong, who is also known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, to ask Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to open up the Chiangs' main room.
A small group of protesters waved placards and shouted slogans before fighting with police. The protesters were later expelled from the residence's grounds.
The association took their fight to the city's Bureau of Cultural Affairs on Tuesday, displaying a petition bearing nearly 40,000 signatures on the square outside city hall.
Association chairman Lin Chi-sheng (
"Tourists were disappointed not being able to see the room that Madame Chiang had lived in," Lin said, adding that the room was not supposed to be regarded as a "forbidden place" because Martial Law had been lifted.
Ma yesterday promised to process the arrangements and procedures to open up the room as soon as possible.
But Ma said that three prerequisites needed to be settled before the public would be allowed in.
"The city government has to finish repair work on the official residence and make a complete inventory of the items of cultural significance in the room. Most importantly, we have to receive the renovation plan submitted by the Presidential Office, which is in charge of the maintenance of the mansion," Ma said.
Built in 1950, the two-story mansion in the Shihlin Official Residence was the second official residence for the Chiangs -- after they retreated to Taiwan from China in 1949 with the Chinese Nationalist Party's armed forces following their loss to the communists in the civil war.
The Chiangs lived there for 26 years before Chiang's death in 1975.
The Chiangs' residence, including the outer and middle gardens in front of the building but excluding the main room, was eventually unveiled to the public in 1996 when President Chen Shui-bian (
On April 2000, the Cultural Affairs Bureau designated the mansion as the city's 93rd municipal heritage site.
According to Cultural Affairs Bureau Director Liao Hsien-hao (
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: