Miaoli County’s Jhuolan Township (卓蘭) has been a primary source of poinsettia for holiday decorations, but this year it added a new variety of the popular Christmas plant to the market, called “Surprise.”
Jhuolan agricultural and floral products sales and marketing association director Lin Hung-chih (林鴻志) said the name was chosen because the new variety has all the special features from other poinsettia varieties.
“The bracts [special leaves] of the Surprise variety features a wide variety of colors. Some of them are both pink and red, while others have irregular white patterns like snowflakes,” Lin said.
Photo: CNA
Lin said unlike the more traditional poinsettia varieties, such as the red “X-mas” and the light yellow “Candlelight,” the Surprise is also more festive.
Lin said the association only supplied 3,000 plants of the Surprise variety this year and would consider whether to purchase more next year depending on market reception to the blooms.
Association employees have been working day and night for the past two weeks to carefully wrap the pots of poinsettia.
Employees said they ship out an average of 20,000 pots of poinsettia per day in the run up to Christmas and their hands are sore from non-stop wrapping.
Although Jhuolan has been nicknamed “kingdom of fruits” due to the wide variety of fruit grown there, the township is also a major poinsettia plantation area in the nation. It is expected to produce 500,000 pots of poinsettia this year alone, accounting for approximately 39 percent of the total production nationwide.
“Because of the large temperature difference between night and day in Jhuolan, the flowers grown in the township are naturally more beautiful than those seen in other parts of the country,” Lin said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift