Housed in a timeworn building in downtown Hsinchu, Kendama Studio (見域工作室) seeks to enrich the city’s cultural fabric by rediscovering local historical assets.
Founded by students at National Tsinghua University, the new cultural organization wants to spread knowledge of the city’s history through a bimonthly magazine launched last month — Meatball Soup (貢丸湯) — and other projects.
The group was named after the Japanese toy kendama, since the Mandarin Chinese word for kendama, jian-yu (劍玉), is pronounced the same as “seeing the realm” (見域), symbolizing the group’s efforts to promote local culture.
The group held an inaugural event at the Kendama Arcades (見域亭仔角), a multipurpose events venue located amid century-old shops on Beimen Street, on Saturday last week.
The venue will be a visitors’ center and might also house a cafe, Kendama Studio founder Wu Chun-wei (吳君薇) said.
“We hope the venue can become a creative space where residents and visitors can exchange stories about Hsinchu,” Wu said.
Originally from Kaohsiung, Wu said she began to learn more about Hsinchu after starting her studies in business management at Tsinghua University about five years ago.
Although Hsinchu has a rich history, not enough effort has been placed on promoting its historical assets, with many residents unaware of the city’s heritage, she said.
The inaugural issue of Meatball Soup — named after a famed local dish — contains an outline of Hsinchu’s history with colorful diagrams and character profiles, as well as an interview with Hsinchu Mayor Lin Chih-chien (林智堅).
The issue also discusses the evolution of Hsinchu’s historic downtown district, with a map marking the city’s expanding boundaries, dating back to its earliest bamboo fences at the beginning of the 18th century.
There are also articles on examples of unique architecture in the city and interviews with shop and restaurant owners.
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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