The Tourism Bureau yesterday unveiled the main lantern that will be displayed at the Taiwan Lantern Festival in Changhua County’s Lugang Township (鹿港) in February.
Next year is the Year of the Dragon according to the Chinese zodiac and the main lantern features a silver dragon perched on a cloud holding an orb in its hand.
Tourism Bureau Director-General Janice Lai (賴瑟珍) said the lantern is 20m long and weighs 40 tonnes, making it the largest in the history of the nation’s lantern festival, adding that it is equipped with more than 200,000 LEDs and 2,500 electrical circuits.
Photo: CNA
The festival runs from Feb. 6 until Feb. 19.
Changhua County Commissioner Chuo Po-yuan (卓伯源) said the entire town of Lugang would be beaming during the festival.
In addition to the Lugang Sports Stadium, where the main lantern will be located, the main street in Lugang and other tourist attractions will be lit with lanterns.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times
Since Changhua is famous for its flower production, Lai added that visitors could enjoy the flowers and other scenic spots in Changhua during the day, before attending the lantern festival at night.
Lai said representatives of the Tokyo Disney Resort were so impressed with this year’s Miaoli Lantern Festival that they have decided to dispatch performance groups to the Changhua festival.
The bureau yesterday also introduced small paper lanterns that will be freely distributed to festival attendees.
Hung Hsin-fu (洪新富), who designed the mini-lanterns, said it was called the Spirited Dragon, adding that it has hang-gliding wings, wears a backpack and rides on a rainbow-colored cloud.
Hung also cut out the No. 101 on the chest of the Spirited Dragon. He said people will be able to see the shape of a heart when a light inside the lantern shines through the 0.
“I wanted to create something that parents can do with their children,” Hung said. “The lantern has the characteristics of an Eastern dragon — deer horns, fish scales, horse ears and the whiskers of a catfish. You can also move the dragon’s hands.”
To get to the festival, visitors are advised to take advantage of the shuttle buses arranged by the Changhua County Festival, which are available at the high-speed rail station in Greater Taichung, as well as the Taiwan Railway Administration stations in Changhua City and Yuanlin (員林).
The bureau estimated that the festival in Lugang would draw 6 million visitors. The Changhua County Government has provided a total of 27,000 parking spaces outside the town, as cars will be banned from the downtown area during the festival.
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