A group of young bikers from National Taiwan Normal University this month embarked upon a journey mentioned in the travel journal of a Qing Dynasty official and managed to complete their trip in 20 days.
Yu Yonghe (郁永河) was ordered by the Qing government to explore sulphur mines in Taiwan in 1697. He took a boat from Xiamen and arrived in Luermen (鹿耳門) in Tainan via Kinmen and Penghu. Yu then traveled up the west coast to Tamsui (淡水) and Beitou (北投).
Yu recorded his experiences in his journal, which was later published as the Bihai Travel Journal (裨海紀遊), one of the oldest travel guides for Taiwan.
Milly Lin (林于喬) was the captain of the biking team. She said she came across Yu’s journal when she was a student teacher.
“I taught history and was very interested in the history of Taiwan’s Aborigines,” she said in an interview with Taipei Times. “While I knew a lot about the Aborigines living in the mountains, I knew very little about the Pingpu tribes living on the plains. I later found that the journal actually said quite a lot about the Pingpu tribes.”
When the National Youth Commission said earlier this year it would subsidize young travelers who came up with creative ways to tour the country this summer, Lin pitched her idea and it was accepted.
The group first flew to Kinmen and biked around the island. Then they flew to Kaohsiung and took a ferry to Penghu because there are no flights between Kinmen and Penghu. After a bike tour there, they took a ferry to Kaohsiung and rode to Luermen, seeking the locations mentioned in Yu’s journal.
Lin also used articles by author Chiang Hsun (蔣勳) and former Control Yuan member Ma Yi-kung (馬以工), who made the same trip 30 years ago, to help her sketch out a more concrete travel route.
“We wanted to stick to provincial highways as much as possible, but unfortunately a lot of names mentioned in the journal were pretty far from the provincial highways and we ended up spending a lot of time on the county roads,” she said.
The five-member team began their adventure on July 5 and finished the trip last Friday, although Yu’s journey took several months in 1697.
“I can’t imagine how Yu and Qing officials were able to do this all on ox carriages,” Lin said.
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