Efforts to have the Wu family houses listed in the Land Subsidence Cultural Heritage Area were rebuffed by the Pingtung County Government’s cultural division last week on grounds that they were not worth preserving.
Located in the Haipu Village (海埔) area of Chiatung (佳冬), one of the areas with the most severe land subsidence in the nation — with land sinking by as much as 3m — the houses were listed as a tourist spot after the rebuilding of the area after Typhoon Morakot in 2009.
The Wu family houses were flooded almost to their rafters during the typhoon. However, they enjoyed some success from post-disaster tourism, leading Liu Duei Tourism Association director-general Yeh Cheng-hsiang (葉正祥) to apply for them to be listed as part of the Land Subsidence Cultural Heritage Area.
The head of the county government’s cultural heritage assets division, Tseng Lung-yang (曾龍陽), said the division sent personnel and academics to visit the site, but they decided the buildings were not worth preserving for several reasons.
One reason was that the owner of the land had not given proof of agreement for it to be used as part of the heritage site, and there was extensive damage to the interior and exteriors of the buildings, which would be too expensive to repair, the division said. It also said there were no nearby groups that would be able to administer the houses if they were repaired, and they were also not suitable to be used as an environment-themed museum.
Officials said they would not pursue the case until they received the landowner’s permission.
While the descendants of the Wu family have said that they would simply demolish the houses, Yeh said a monetary value cannot be placed on cultural assets.
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