The New Taipei City Government was recently found to have portrayed the scenery of Green Island as its own north coast in a promotional tourist ad, prompting criticism of the city government for using taxpayers’ money to deceive the public.
An experienced diver surnamed Chen (陳) made the discovery. Chen, a resident of New Taipei City’s (新北市) Zhonghe District (中和), said many images in the television advertisement in question were incorrect, noting that the footage of a clown fish swimming in seaweed in the clear blue ocean was not a sight that could be seen along the city’s north coast.
Another image showing a diver with a longfin batfish came directly from Green Island, he added.
Photo: Tang Chia-ling, Taipei Times
Jeng Ming-shiou (鄭明修), a researcher at the Biodiversity Research Center Academia Sinica, agreed with Chen and said he was also able to quickly recognize that the footage with the longfin batfish had been shot near an artificial reef 500m from Green Island’s Mati Bridge.
According to Jeng, the location, a well-known feeding area where tourists can feed the batfish, was marked with a diver’s rope so ships can orientate themselves and let divers down. It is the only location where people can get so close to longfin batfish as they are shy and tend to travel in schools, he added.
Jeng also agreed with Chen that the footage of a clown fish swimming in the clear blue sea was not an image common to the north coast, saying that the color of the sea along the northern coast is slightly greyish, while in the south it is bluer.
Only Green Island has such scenery, Jeng said, adding that even in Penghu people would have to leave the main island to see such blue water.
Jeng pointed out more footage of a school of Pomadasys quadrilineatus, commonly known as yellow-lined grunters, that are not native to the north coast. His initial judgement was that the footage was probably shot near Pingtung County’s Kenting Tiaoshih Recreational Seashore (墾丁跳石) and not along New Taipei City’s north coast.
According to Jeng, the differences between the south and north of Taiwan are not limited to cityscapes and topography, but that variation can also be found in the biological environment and the coral reefs.
With one third of the 400,000 Taiwanese who have diving permits living in the north of the country, Jeng said that if the New Taipei City Government was willing to provide them with better equipment and surroundings by making more conscientious efforts to protect the north’s coastal environment, there would be no need to fake beautiful scenery in its ad.
In response, New Taipei City Tourism Bureau director Chen Kuao-jun (陳國君) said the ads were part of a NT$3 million (US$104,100) campaign to promote the city, with the first series focusing on its coast.
Chen said the city government had agreed with the company that filmed the ad that the footage must be from within the city’s jurisdiction and if this agreement has been violated, it reserves the right to re-shoot the ad and deduct fees from the company, he said.
The director of the company which filmed the ad, Lee Ming-tsung (李明宗), admitted that there were “a few images” that were taken from other areas and were “mistakenly” put into the film.
Translated by Jake Chung, Staff Writer
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:
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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