The Tainan City Government recently unveiled plans to spend an additional NT$13 million (US$402,714) to build a cultural park to house the replica of a Ming Dynasty junk that it had built five years ago.
The boat was built based on a drawing of Ming-era ships in the Matsura Historical Museum in Nagasaki, Japan, and was intended to follow the route of Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功) to Taiwan, Tainan Bureau of Cultural Affairs director Yeh Tse-shan (葉澤山) said.
Cheng, more commonly known to Westerners as Koxinga, expelled Dutch colonists from Taiwan in 1662.
Photo: Hung Jui-chin, Taipei Times
Construction of the boat received a great deal of attention both in Taiwan and abroad, including by National Geographic, but the vessel’s main mast broke during a sailing trial in 2010. As a result, the city government sued the designers, sailors and boat building company, asking for NT$7.6 million in reparations.
The Tainan District Court in February ruled in favor of the city government, ordering the defendants to pay NT$3.7 million, but the defendants have appealed the ruling.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Tainan City Councilor Lu Kun-fu (盧崑福) said the lawsuit was a waste of taxpayers’ money.
Yeh said that due to standing regulations — the port authorities cited the Yachting Act (遊艇法) in the absence of rules regulating the sailing of wooden ships — the city government’s original plan to sail around the harbor was not financially viable.
The Yachting Act stipulates that wooden ships can only carry eight people at any given time, and the skeleton crew for the sailing of the boat accounted for six of those.
High maintenance costs were also a concern and the city government decided that it would use the ship as an exhibition center, which it hoped to be both educational and recreational, it said, adding that the space around the ship could be used as grounds for live theater.
The bureau said it has invested NT$3 million in repairs, which are expected to be finished in July, adding that it has committed an additional NT$13 million to build a Taiwanese Ships Cultural Park next year.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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