The Tainan City Government will build an "exact replica" of a Ming dynasty armed commercial vessel, known by Westerners as a sailing junk.
Officials at the city's Cultural Affairs Bureau said on Monday that the plan is part of the city's program to commemorate Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功), who expelled Dutch colonists from Taiwan in 1662 after moving his troops from China a year earlier.
Cheng is better known to Westerners as Koxinga, a title meaning "Bearer of the Imperial Surname," bestowed on him by the last emperor of the Ming dynasty.
The boat, expected to be completed in a year, is also intended to boost tourism, the officials said.
They said that Yang Ming Marine Transport Corp has agreed to cover the cost of building the boat, estimated at NT$100 million (US$3 million).
Officials said the boat will be 33m long and 8.9m wide.
The United Ship Design and Development Center was to begin examining the details of the blueprint for the boat yesterday. Construction will begin as soon as the center gives approval to the design, the officials said.
The Tainan City Government has taken other steps to honor Koxinga, including establishing a monument on a historical battlefield in Tainan to commemorate the nine-month war he fought to end 38 years of Dutch rule.
Tainan Mayor Hsu Tain-tsair (許添財) will inaugurate the monument next May in memory of the first major war in Taiwan 's history.
There are several temples in Anping and Tainan dedicated to Koxinga and his mother. People admire him as a national hero as well as for the loyalty he demonstrated to his emperor after the Ming dynasty collapsed.
Taipei on Thursday held urban resilience air raid drills, with residents in one of the exercises’ three “key verification zones” reporting little to no difference compared with previous years, despite government pledges of stricter enforcement. Formerly known as the Wanan exercise, the air raid drills, which concluded yesterday, are now part of the “Urban Resilience Exercise,” which also incorporates the Minan disaster prevention and rescue exercise. In Taipei, the designated key verification zones — where the government said more stringent measures would be enforced — were Songshan (松山), Zhongshan (中山) and Zhongzheng (中正) districts. Air raid sirens sounded at 1:30pm, signaling the
Environmental groups yesterday filed an appeal with the Executive Yuan, seeking to revoke the environmental impact assessment (EIA) conditionally approved in February for the Hsieh-ho Power Plant’s planned fourth liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving station off the coast of Keelung. The appeal was filed jointly by the Protect Waimushan Seashore Action Group, the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association and the Keelung City Taiwan Head Cultural Association, which together held a news conference outside the Executive Yuan in Taipei. Explaining the reasons for the appeal, Wang Hsing-chih (王醒之) of the Protect Waimushan Seashore Action Group said that the EIA failed to address
The number of people who reported a same-sex spouse on their income tax increased 1.5-fold from 2020 to 2023, while the overall proportion of taxpayers reporting a spouse decreased by 4.4 percent from 2014 to 2023, Ministry of Finance data showed yesterday. The number of people reporting a spouse on their income tax trended upward from 2014 to 2019, the Department of Statistics said. However, the number decreased in 2020 and 2021, likely due to a drop in marriages during the COVID-19 pandemic and the income of some households falling below the taxable threshold, it said. The number of spousal tax filings rebounded
A saleswoman, surnamed Chen (陳), earlier this month was handed an 18-month prison term for embezzling more than 2,000 pairs of shoes while working at a department store in Tainan. The Tainan District Court convicted Chen of embezzlement in a ruling on July 7, sentencing her to prison for illegally profiting NT$7.32 million (US$248,929) at the expense of her employer. Chen was also given the opportunity to reach a financial settlement, but she declined. Chen was responsible for the sales counter of Nike shoes at Tainan’s Shinkong Mitsukoshi Zhongshan branch, where she had been employed since October 2019. She had previously worked
RSS