Many of the military experts who spent years clearing tens of thousands of landmines from the island of Kinmen may have left the outlying county, but their contribution will be remembered in a new exhibition center that opened this week.
Located within a military base on Kinmen’s main island, the center was unveiled on Monday to mark the removal of the landmines — sowed decades ago to thwart a potential Chinese invasion — by the army’s demining division in Kinmen.
Now that the military’s largest demining operation has come to a close, the division that established in 2007 was disbanded as of Tuesday, though about two dozen professional deminers remain in Kinmen as part of the new demining platoon to deal with any future discoveries of unexploded ordnance.
To share their important work with the public, they have left behind some of their protective gear, equipment and devices used to detect and remove mines.
Outside the exhibition hall is a mock removal crew — dressed in trademark orange uniform and with protective gear — showing visitors how the delicate procedure of removing mines is carried out.
Mines are a part of Kinmen’s history, considered the front line of defense for Taiwan throughout the second half of the 20th century due to its proximity to China’s Fujian Province.
Kinmen Defense Command said that the newly opened center allows visitors to get a peek into the challenges of removing mines as well as why they were deployed.
However, since the exhibition center is on a military base, only Taiwanese nationals are allowed entry. Anyone wanting to visit must first file an application with the Kinmen County Government one week in advance and be subject to an identity check, a defense official said.
The first group of visitors is expected later this month.
The center’s launch follows the establishment of a similar park located on the islet of Lieyu (烈嶼), known as Little Kinmen.
Managed by the Lieyu Township Office, the park includes a tunnel that features inactive mines and warning signs from different countries, including Cambodia, that have been used to inform visitors of the area’s dangerous past.
There are no restrictions on who can visit.
The military planted extensive minefields along the coast of Kinmen and Matsu in the 1950s and 1960s when tensions with China were at a high point.
As a result about 95,800 landmines and unexploded ordnance have been removed from Kinmen over the past several years.
Known for decades as a heavily fortified anti-communist bastion, Kinmen has succeeded in turning war-torn battlefields into tourist attractions, including several military tunnels and museums in memory of significant battles against China.
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
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
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