The Tainan Cultural Affairs Bureau is mulling filing a bulk application with the Ministry of Culture for all seven wall and gate segments that used to form the walls surrounding old Tainan city to be considered national heritage sites, in preparation for the 300th anniversary of the city’s founding.
The bureau said it would apply through the Tainan City Heritage Association for a review, followed by an application to the ministry if the review is passed.
It has become increasingly common worldwide for cities to make a comprehensive assessment of old city walls, the bureau said, adding that, despite Tainan being Taiwan’s earliest city, only one gate is considered a national heritage site, compared with Kaohsiung’s old Fengshan city (鳳山) and old Taipei, which are both national heritage sites.
Photo: Liu Wan-chun, Taipei Times
The city government said that it last year completed investigations of all wall and gate segments in the city.
Division of Cultural Assets Director Lin Chiao-in (林喬彬) said that it is easy for old city walls to disappear as cities develop and that efforts must be made to preserve such sites, which contain rich history and culture.
Streets and alleys that used to lie behind the walls form not only the residential areas and places of activity for modern-day Tainan residents, but also draw tourists, both foreign and domestic, to visit the municipality, Lin said.
“We hope that by designating these wall and gate segments as national heritage sites, we might bring the people of Tainan and its visitors closer to the history of the city,” Lin said.
Meanwhile, the bureau said that aside from visible sections, there were other sections of walls buried underground, adding that the bureau still hopes to one day reconnect the segments.
The city government is to begin general planning after its application is accepted by the ministry, the bureau said.
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