Singer-songwriter Jay Chou’s (周杰倫) wedding early this year has increased interest in a historic English estate and could help with its preservation, a British daily reported yesterday.
Chou married model Hannah Quinlivan (昆凌) on Jan. 17 in Yorkshire, England, creating a media frenzy in Taiwan.
The wedding was held in a small medieval church in the town of Selby and a day-long reception was held at nearby Castle Howard.
The wedding and its media coverage has sparked a flurry of interest from Asia-based tour groups wanting to visit the area in the north of Yorkshire.
The 300-year-old Howard estate has reported a surge in the number of tourists and its Web site has recorded more than 5 million visits since the wedding — a 400 percent increase, the Telegraph newspaper said.
There has also been an influx of Chinese traveling to see the estate’s European and Western antiquities, the Telegraph said on its Web site.
Castle Howard’s management has made several Asia-friendly changes upon noticing the significant increase in tourists from the East, the Telegraph said.
Not only have maps and brochures been made available in Chinese, the estate has begun to accept China’s UnionPay credit cards.
Castle Howard has also been given its own Chinese name (蓬萊瓊宇) meaning “Magnificent Asgard.”
Yesterday, the estate’s owners planned to auction nine family treasures and pieces of art at London-based auction house Sotheby’s.
The aim of the auction is to raise as much as £10 million (US$14.88 million) for maintenance and renovation of the estate, the owners said.
Castle Howard, a country estate built in the 17th century, has been the setting for several TV shows and movies over the years, including Granada Television’s 1981 series Brideshead Revisited, based on the Evelyn Waugh novel of the same name.
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