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Hakka and ‘green’ activists oppose Taipei culture park

Hakka activists, environmentalists and Taipei residents yesterday voiced their opposition to a NT$600 million (US$18 million) plan by the city’s Hakka Affairs Commission to remove more than 150 trees from the former site of a museum to make room for a Hakka cultural park featuring terraced rice and tea fields.

After the Taipei Children’s Traffic Museum closed last year, the commission proposed turning the museum and attached park into a Hakka cultural park with an exhibit on Hakka culture and scenes from rural Hakka communities such as terraced rice and tea fields, persimmon orchards and vegetable patches.

It also plans to build a bike lane around the park and an overpass to allow cyclists to enter the park by crossing over the riverside expressway.

“It doesn’t make any sense to spend so much taxpayer money on building a Hakka cultural park that has no connection whatsoever with local Hakka culture,” said Taiwan Environmental Protection Union president Wang Chin-shou (王俊秀), who lives near the site. “After all, how many Hakka in Taipei have worked on terraced fields?”

“The city government should find out what Hakka in Taipei do and [learn about] their culture before building a Hakka cultural park in the city,” he said.

Chern Ban (陳板), who has long campaigned for preserving Hakka culture, and former Green Party Taiwan secretary-general Calvin Wen (溫炳原) — both of whom are Hakka — blasted the plan to remove the trees.

“The Hakka are a people who have much respect for nature That’s why big trees are worshipped in many Hakka villages as guardian gods of the land,” Wen said. “The plan to remove trees and artificially construct terraced fields shows no respect for nature.”

Hakka Affairs Commission chief Liu Chih-hsiung (劉智雄) said the park would “become a very good educational site.”

“Children growing up in the city will be able to see real farm work. Visitors will also see how persimmons are picked, sun-dried and made into persimmon cakes, a Hakka specialty, by real persimmon farmers from Hsinchu County,” he said.

The terraced fields will be built by taking advantage of the slope that leads up to the overpass, he said.

“I think certain people are attacking the plan because they don’t want to see such a great park completed by [Taipei Mayor] Hau Lung-bin [郝龍斌],” he said. “It’s all politics.”
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