Police officers have been dispatched to direct traffic heading to Yilan City’s Yilan Literature House and “Cafe Story,” which are being overrun with large crowds of visitors visiting the sites of a TV commercial starring popular Taiwanese-Japanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro (金城武).
The building, housing mostly children’s books, and the coffee shop both exude an archaic charm and have become Yilan City’s latest tourist attractions thanks to a three-minute commercial in the form of a “micromovie,” which debuted on Friday.
A woman surnamed Hsieh (謝) said she was impressed with the old-fashioned atmosphere and decorations inside the coffee shop, adding that she and her younger sister took the train to the city during the week to avoid the weekend crowds.
Photo: Chiang Chih-hsiung, Taipei Times
The shop, on Yilan’s busy Zhongshan Road, was renovated from Taiping Hospital, and still retains some of the original hospital rooms.
The building is almost 100 years old and displays old photographs in its interior, inspiring nostalgia in visitors.
The Yilan Literature House was formerly the residence of the Yilan Agriculture and Forestry School (now National Yilan University) principal during the Japanese colonial era.
It features a “literature trail” showcasing works by local poets, which leads to the main building, where visitors can enjoy coffee and tea while reading.
Famous local cuisine can be bought nearby, including lemon aiyu jelly, papaya milk, noodles with chicken stewed together with cucumber, and squid with red yeast rice.
Due to the growing popularity of the sites, the district police said they would dispatch more officers to control the traffic on weekends and direct cars to parking lots nearby.
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:
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