A fire broke out at dictator Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) former official residence in Taipei’s Shilin District (士林) late on Monday night, damaging furniture and exhibits but leaving the main building intact, the Presidential Office said yesterday.
Presidential Office Spokesman Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) said the fire was caused by a short circuit at 10:17pm in a corridor in the west wing of the main building.
Security personnel arrived at the scene at 10:36pm and reported the fire to the Taipei Fire Department.
PHOTO: LO PEI-DER, TAIPEI TIMES
The preliminary investigation found the short circuit was the cause of the fire and that flames then spread across the carpet, Wang said.
The area was being used to store collection items temporarily moved out of the living room of the main building.
Wang said the area scorched by the fire was about 8 ping (26m²). The fire damaged or destroyed sofas, coffee tables, display shelves and other items. Fortunately, it was put out before it spread to the rest of the building, he said.
Wang said the contractor had been asked to suspend ongoing renovations until the power supply has been examined.
The insurance company has been informed and will examine the losses, he said.
The insurance company and the designer and contractor of the renovation project, together with antique experts, will put together a list of the damaged items, which will then be repaired or replicated.
The building was once a seat of power. Chiang and his wife Soong Mayling (宋美齡) resided there for 26 years until Chiang’s death in 1975.
The outer and middle gardens in front of the building were opened to the public in 1996. The main building opened to the public in 2000.
In April 2000, Taipei City’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs (文化局) designated the compound — formally called The Former Official Residence of Chiang Kai-shek and Madam Chiang — as the city’s 93rd municipal heritage site and decided to turn it into a resource center for academics studying the lives and times of the Chiangs.
The compound includes the main building, a guesthouse, a church, a pagoda and a garden.
Built in 1950, the two-story main building was the couple’s second official residence.
While the front of the building is built in a Japanese style, the rest is Western in style. The wings are the living rooms and offices for military aides and secretaries in residence.
Among the prestigious guests who visited the residence were US presidents Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower.
Decorations in the house’s ballroom include furniture from the Qing and Ming Dynasties, western sofas with silk covers and the family’s collection of antiques and valuables, including framed family photos, crystal ash trays, vases, antique lanterns, Soong’s hand-drawn paintings and the delicately carved wooden screens that were part of her dowry.
In April 2007, a fire partially destroyed Grass Mountain Chateau, a summer retreat used by Chiang, with arson suspected in the blaze.
Reconstruction began in March and the chateau is scheduled to reopen to the public next year.
The blaze caused an estimated NT$36 million (US$1 million) in damage.
The main exhibition hall and its exhibits were destroyed. The destroyed items — including clothes, pictures and documents belonging to Chiang and Soong — are being reproduced.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not