As part of the two-month long Hakka Tung Blossom Festival, a flagship store for Hakka speciality merchandise opened yesterday in Taipei.
The Tung Blossom Festival is an annual festival held in many areas inhabited by Hakka people around the nation. The festival features performing arts such as Hakka opera and music, exhibitions of Hakka handicrafts, Hakka cuisine and other cultural activities.
The festival is named after a type of plant that can often be seen in Hakka towns around the nation.
Unlike other local-oriented speciality stores, the flagship store that opened yesterday was the first to have a collection of merchandise from different Hakka areas in the country.
"We work with Hakka specialty stores around the nation ? it [the flagship store] is the only one to carry a complete collection of Hakka speciality items," said Yang Yu-kun (
The store has 373 different products, ranging from traditional Hakka pastries, T-shirts, cloth lanterns, hand-made potteries and other handicrafts, Yang added.
Although the store is only a temporary one, council Chairman Lee Yung-teh (李永得) hoped that it would be the first of many other similar stores in the future.
"I hope to push for similar stores all around the country, so that our fellow Hakkas will have more opportunities for employment and to share the culture," he said.
The store is located at 1 Xuzhou Rd., Zhongzheng District, Taipei (台北市中正區徐州路一號), and will be open until May 31 when the Tung Blossom Festival ends.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
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,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods