Residents of Taitung County yesterday vowed to take to the streets of Taipei to protest delays in returning cultural artefacts that had been excavated from the Peinan geological site in eastern Taitung County.
They accused the Ministry of Education of "conniving" with National Taiwan University (NTU) to "commandeer" the historic artefacts.
Chanting "returning remains, developing tourism" and "Taida [abbreviation for NTU in Mandarin] bully, Taitung angry," three members of the Taitung Roaring Alliance of Reclaiming Peinan Remains (台東討壺怒吼聯盟), accompanied by lawmakers, yesterday held a press conference in the legislative complex to ask NTU to return the remains to the National Museum of Prehistory in Taitung.
"In addition to mobilizing people from Taitung living in Taipei, we have chartered two airplanes and rented buses to bring in more people from home for the protest," said Lin Yen-hung (林炎煌), convenor of the alliance. "We are mobilizing our people to chastise NTU, not to beg them."
Before they came to Taipei yesterday, alliance members invited six Aboriginal chiefs to preside over a protest meeting and ancestor-worship ceremony in Taitung on Monday to bestow good luck on them for their trip to Taipei.
Chan Cher (
"While the NTU is returning the first batch of remains today [Tuesday,] it should not be too difficult for them to return the rest," Chan said. "However, NTU said that they cannot return everything until 2008 and in four shipments. I find this arrangement unacceptable."
Echoing Chan's opinion, the alliance's deputy chief commander Ho Shew-song (
"Professor Lien Chao-mei (
Lien is an NTU anthropology professor who was in charge of the excavation and has studied the remains since they were discovered in 1980 when the Southern Cross-Island Highway was being built.
Although Lien has said that studying the remains is a time-consuming task, Ho challenged her to present a report of her findings as proof.
Ho Shen-wu (
He said the details of when and how the remains will be returned are negotiable, as long as the anthropology department and the museum can reach an agreement on the matter.
Ho Shen-wu also explained why the remains are being returned in four shipments.
"It is a professional decision made by the department and the museum, taking into account the fact that it takes time, money, manpower and, most important of all, digitization to document and study the remains," he said.
In addition to emphasizing that NTU takes great pains to safeguard cultural assets, Ho Shen-wu called on the alliance to cancel today's protest.
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
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
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