The design of the main lantern for the official Taiwan Lantern Festival, the traditional extravaganza that follows the Lunar New Year holiday, was unveiled yesterday, featuring a Formosan hare sitting on its hind legs holding a gold ingot.
The lantern, which is 20.5m tall and weighs 30 tonnes, is a symbol of the accumulation of fortune and prosperity for the country and its people, Tourism Bureau director-general Janice Lai (賴瑟珍) said during a ceremony in Taipei to unveil a scale model of the lantern.
The official Taiwan Lantern Festival of the Year of Rabbit — the fourth sign in the Chinese zodiac — will take place this year in Miaoli County.
PHOTO: CNA
Lai said that unlike the main lanterns showcased in the past, this year’s lantern, called “Rabbit Presenting Luck,” will be illuminated by 200,000 LEDs.
It features the concept of environmental protection, she said.
The bureau also introduced a much smaller paper lantern with a flying rabbit design, which will be presented as a gift to visitors to the Miaoli festival.
PHOTO: LU CHUN-WEI, TAIPEI TIMES
The Taiwan Lantern Festival will be held at the county’s Jhunan and Toufen sports parks, which have a total of 25 hectares of open space. In addition to the lantern show, the festival will also include booths featuring local cuisine and agricultural products, Miaoli County Commissioner Liu Cheng-hung’s (劉政鴻) said.
The festival will be opened on a trial basis for county residents from Feb. 10 to Feb. 13, followed by a trial opening for the general public from Feb. 14 to Feb. 16, before the official grand opening on Feb. l7. The festival will end on Feb. 28.
The Tourism Bureau has -estimated that the Miaoli festival, which is also part of the celebrations for the Republic of China’s centennial this year, will attract about 6 million local and foreign visitors.
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:
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