Taipei’s Department of Culture yesterday moved to protect trees around the Taipei Dome as it held deliberations on designating the area around the National Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall a protected cultural asset.
Expansion plans for roads bordering the Taipei Dome construction site have been controversial.
Environmental activists from the Songshan Tree Protection Volunteer Union have camped on the site since April to prevent surrounding trees from being uprooted.
Most of the site’s remaining trees are on Zhongxiao E Road next to the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, leading to volunteer union efforts to have the hall and its surroundings designated a protected cultural area to keep the trees from being removed.
“The National Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall was designed by the famous architect Wang Da-hung (王大閎), many of whose buildings have already been designated as protected cultural artifacts by Taipei City,” volunteer union policy group director Yu Yi (游藝) said, adding that the area around the National Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall has already been accorded protection.
During the deliberations, a volunteer union representative emphasized that the trees were a deliberate part of the memorial hall sites design, with each kind of tree holding a different symbolical value according to Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) ideology at the time.
In response, representatives of the National Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall said they had found no documentary evidence of the trees’ deliberate inclusion in the site’s design, and declined to take a position on whether the trees should be protected as part of site preservation plans.
When asked about the conclusion of yesterday’s deliberations, Department of Culture Commissioner Liu Wei-kung (劉維公) said the city’s Cultural Relics Commission has yet to arrive at a consensus over the site’s protection due to controversy over what should be protected, particularly due to concerns over possible influence on traffic.
Liu said a final decision is scheduled to be announced on Friday next week.
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
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
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