Two rare historical postage stamps carrying the name "The Taiwan Republic" in Chinese issued in the late Qing Dynasty were recently unearthed in Italy and have been obtained by a Taiwanese official posted in Rome, philatelic sources said yesterday.
The "Sole Tiger, Taiwan Republic" stamps, believed to have been issued in 1895 by a then-nascent republic government in Taiwan led by self-styled militia leader Liu Yung-fu (劉永福) in Tainan, are said to have appeared in a stamp-collecting exchange market in Rome several weeks ago.
The stamps are almost legendary, so seldom are they seen.
The pair of stamps, each bearing a picture of a tiger and the name of the Taiwan Republic in blue-green and light pink, respectively, lay in the Rome market for weeks without arousing attention from collectors as none of them knew Chinese, until a Taiwanese official came across the stamps and snapped them up on the spot.
According to the Taiwanese, surnamed Lin, the two stamps have greater value to the people of Taiwan in terms of the nation's contemporary history than the stamps' market value.
The two stamps can serve as a mirror on history through which the people can look back at what happened on the island more than 100 years ago and how the Han people, Hakka, Japanese and other foreigners fought among themselves for Taiwan.
According to historical archives, Liu Yung-fu (1837 to 1917) , originally an opium trader between the highlands on the border of Vietnam and Canton, molded his followers into a well-disciplined band skilled in martial arts and ruled an effectively independent fiefdom on the Sino-French border in the 1860s and beyond.
Although initially regarded as a rebel leader by the Qing court, Liu parlayed his way into favor by fighting for the tribute kingdom of Vietnam against the assertive French from 1873 and 1884. After returning to Canton in 1885, Liu and his Black Flag militia proved a problem for the Qing Court, which welcomed the opportunity to dispatch Liu to Taiwan in 1895 with the lure of creating his own tribute state there.
Liu and his famed Black Flag troops arrived in southern Taiwan in early 1895, only months before the Qing Court was forced to cede Taiwan to Japan upon the signing of the Shimonoseki Treaty April 17, 1895, which ended the Sino-Japanese War.
Liu established the Taiwan Republic in Tainan on July 31, 1895, shortly before the Japanese invasion. The Taiwan Post Office was also established during that period, although it lasted for only 80 days.
The "Sole Tiger" stamps are believed to have been issued during that time.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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