Late architect and academic Han Pao-teh (漢寶德); writer and translator Chi Pang-yuan (齊邦媛); and poet and writer Yu Kwang-chung (余光中) have won the nation’s highest cultural award, the Executive Yuan Culture Award, the Ministry of Culture said on Monday. The award honors their lifetime achievement in their respective disciplines, it added.
Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) is to present the awards — along with certificates and cash prizes of NT$1 million (US$32,350) — in a ceremony set for Feb. 9 next year.
Describing the trio as being highly regarded in their fields, Minister of Culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) said they have made great contributions to national culture.
Their works and influence have reached far and wide, while their discourse and thoughts have encouraged young people to follow in their footsteps, she said.
Lung said that Han, who died on Thursday last week, explored the philosophy of architecture through the perspectives of history, aesthetics and environmental ethics.
He helped found the National Museum of Natural Science in Greater Taichung, Tainan National University of the Arts and the nation’s first museum studies graduate school.
Chi, who has taught in universities, has systematically promoted translating modern Taiwanese literature into English, the minister said.
Her masterpiece, the River of Big Torrents (巨流河), chronicles her family’s experience amid the turbulence of China in the first half of the 20th century and in Taiwan after 1949. The book also examines the plight of women during these transitional periods.
Yu has worked in creative literature for more than half a century and is well-known in the Chinese-language world. The literary world has lauded him for attaining “unrivaled achievements, while writing poems with his right hand and prose with his left hand.”
Taiwanese scientists have engineered plants that can capture about 50 percent more carbon dioxide and produce more than twice as many seeds as unmodified plants, a breakthrough they hope could one day help mitigate global warming and grow more food staples such as rice. If applied to major food crops, the new system could cut carbon emissions and raise yields “without additional equipment or labor costs,” Academia Sinica researcher and lead author the study Lu Kuan-jen (呂冠箴) said. Academia Sinica president James Liao (廖俊智) said that as humans emit 9.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide compared with the 220 billion tonnes absorbed
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