CULTURE
Vampire exhibit to open
An exhibition featuring artifacts associated with vampire legends is to open tomorrow in Taipei to help the public gain a deeper understanding of the mythical beings. The “Dracula: History and Art of Vampires” exhibition will showcase more than 80 items associated with vampires, including Dracula, the central figure in Bram Stoker’s eponymous 1897 Gothic novel, National Museum of History director Chang Yui-tan (張譽騰) said yesterday. Among the highlighted items are a 16th century portrait of Vlad III Dracula, Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s demonic prints featuring bat-like creatures and Oscar-winning costumes from the 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The original manuscript and first edition of the novel Dracula will also be displayed at the exhibition, according to the museum. The museum has cooperated with an Italian designer to create Dracula’s “home,” Chang said.
SOCIETY
Immigrants bike for children
A group of immigrants and their children will set off tomorrow on a bike ride that will take them on a nearly 1,000km tour around the nation to raise awareness for children suffering from abuse and neglect. The eight immigrants from China, Vietnam and Indonesia will take nine children on the 12-day journey starting from the National Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei, the trip’s organizer, Good Shepherd Social Welfare Services, said yesterday. The group will pedal counter-clockwise around the nation, making stops at four Good Shepherd service centers in Greater Tainan and Taitung and Hualien to visit children there. Supplies ferried by care will also be donated to those centers as part of the event.
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
US President Donald Trump said "it’s up to" Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be "very unhappy" with a change in the "status quo," the New York Times said in an interview published yesterday. Xi "considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing," Trump told the newspaper on Wednesday. "But I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that," he added. "I hope he doesn’t do that." Trump made the comments in
Tourism in Kenting fell to a historic low for the second consecutive year last year, impacting hotels and other local businesses that rely on a steady stream of domestic tourists, the latest data showed. A total of 2.139 million tourists visited Kenting last year, down slightly from 2.14 million in 2024, the data showed. The number of tourists who visited the national park on the Hengchun Peninsula peaked in 2015 at 8.37 million people. That number has been below 2.2 million for two years, although there was a spike in October last year due to multiple long weekends. The occupancy rate for hotels
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