Preservation activists yesterday called on the Ministry of Culture to intervene to save two 82-year-old warehouses in the Port of Keelung, which have witnessed much of Taiwan’s migration history, but are threatened by development projects.
In the past week, preservationists, including residents, artists, writers and historians, have been protesting against a project drafted by the Keelung City Government to tear down the two warehouses on the port’s west pier. They are the only two remaining buildings of a group of eight warehouses built in 1932 that once stood in the area.
“It was really shocking when I heard Keelung city officials saying that a warehouse is a warehouse, not a historic building — this shows that our history education is a total failure,” Chang Tien-wan (張典婉), a writer and historian, told a press conference held at the Legislative Yuan yesterday.
Photo: Chen Chih-chu, Taipei Times
Chang said that during the Japanese colonial period, many Japanese entered Taiwan through the warehouses — which also served as terminal buildings for ferry lines — and they also left through the buildings when they were reptriated after World War II.
“Between 1945 and 1949, at the port’s peak, more than 50 ferry boats docked at Keelung every day from Guangzhou, Xiamen, Wenzhou, Shanghai and other Chinese cities,” she said. “So this is also where many Chinese — including civilians and Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] troops — first set foot on Taiwanese soil when they fled [here from China].”
Therefore, Chang said, buildings with such historic significance should not be torn down, as they are not mere warehouses.
Neil Peng (馮光遠), a writer, compared the two warehouses to Ellis Island in New York City.
“The West 2 and West 3 warehouses are like Ellis Island in New York — they are the entrance to the nation, where many immigrants arrived through the two buildings,” he said. “In 1954, Ellis Island was turned into an immigration museum and descendants of European immigrants can check their ancestry at the museum. That is what we should turn the two warehouses into.”
Peng said that history is important to a country and he is often saddened to see buildings with historical significance torn down to make way for modern towers.
“We have enough high-rise apartment complexes and commercial towers, but we need more historical buildings to be preserved,” Peng said, urging Minister of Culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台), who is also an author and has written about the preservation of historical buildings, to intervene.
Wang Chieh (王傑), a preservation activist who grew up in Keelung, said he was amazed to see pictures of Keelung during the 1930s and 1940s.
“According to the documents I’ve found, it took the Japanese 45 years to plan and build the city. It was once a city full of European buildings, museums and a canal with beautiful bridges over it,” Wang said. “Sadly, none of what appeared in the pictures still existed when I was born.”
“Keelung as I know it is a devastated city, it is a city that people around the nation make fun of. We should do something about it. We should do something for ourselves and the generations to come,” he added.
The city government originally planned to flatten both West 2 and West 3 warehouses on Monday, but the demolition was halted due to strong opposition.
Lung visited the buildings earlier in the week and said that the two buildings have the potential to be designated as historical buildings, but instead of organizing a meeting to evaluate their historical value, the ministry decided to allocate NT$2.5 million (US$82,600) to the Keelung City Government to conduct research on the warehouses.
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