The Taipei City Government yesterday started a restoration project on a group of Japanese-style houses built on Qidong Street in the 1920s in an effort to preserve the city’s largest group of such buildings.
The narrow street, located at the intersection of Zhongxiao E Road and Jinshan S Road, has a total of 10 houses built for civil servants during the Japanese colonial era. Occupying more than 6,800m², this kind of architecture has become rare even in Japan, Taipei City’s Department of Cultural Affairs said.
“The wooden structures make the preservation of historical Japanese buildings a challenge, and even in Japan, most old buildings were destroyed or dismantled to make way for urban renewal projects,” Teng Wen-tsung (鄧文宗), a division chief in the department, said during a press conference in front of the houses yesterday.
PHOTO: LIN HSIANG-MEI, TAIPEI TIMES
The area originally comprised 17 houses, but seven were torn down by Bank of Taiwan, which owned the land, in 2002.
To preserve the remaining houses, the government revised regulations in the Cultural Assets Preservation Act (文化資產保存法) and protected the houses as “temporary historical sites” before formally listing them as municipal historical sites in 2004.
Although the 10 remaining houses have been abandoned for years, the interior decorations and a total of 12 old trees are well preserved, Teng said.
The buildings show how people lived during the Japanese colonial era, Teng said.
The restoration project will cost NT$22 million (US$650,000) and will be completed next year.
Chu Chen Pao-kuei (褚陳寶貴), a local resident, said the efforts to preserve the houses were initiated by the local community. The community will cooperate with the department and the Council of Cultural Affairs to preserve the buildings, Chu said.
Lee Yong-ping (李永萍), commissioner of the department, said the restored houses would be open to the public.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS