No trip to Chiayi County is complete without an afternoon tour of the campus of National Chung Cheng University, considered to be one of the most beautiful schools nationwide and one of the most sought-after locations for an engagement photo shoot.
Located in the county’s Minsyong Township (民雄), the university was converted from a sugarcane farm in 1987 after the Ministry of Education gave the green light for its establishment.
The school was designed by Taiwanese architect Lee Tsu-yuan (李祖原), also the designer of the Taipei 101 skyscraper, and was modeled on the University of Cambridge in England.
It was chosen as the most beautiful college in the nation in an online poll conducted by search engine Yahoo in 2012.
National Chung Cheng University became a tourist hot spot after it was featured in the popular Taiwanese soap opera Meteor Garden (流星花園), which was based on the Japanese comic book of the same name and was first aired by Taiwan’s Chinese Television System in 2001.
Meteor Garden centers on the romance between a poor girl and a member of a group of four snobbish rich men at an elite high school.
The university made it onto the big screen recently after Taiwanese director Umin Boya (馬志翔) filmed his latest movie, Kano, at the school’s baseball field.
Kano features the story of a high-school baseball team composed of Taiwanese, Japanese and Aboriginal boys in Chiayi in 1929.
After Boya wrapped up filming for the movie, the school subsequently constructed an exhibition hall, named the Sport Story Museum (運動故事館), to preserve some of the movie sets and open them up to the public.
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