Fifty pole dancers clad in black bikinis gave one politician a raucous final send-off in an eyebrow-raising funeral parade that jammed traffic and drew crowds of onlookers.
It was not a quiet, dignified exit for former Chiayi County Council speaker Tung Hsiang (董象), whose funeral cortege saw the women dancing and singing on top of multicolored jeeps as a band played and performers dressed as deities joined in.
Footage of the funeral on Tuesday showed the vibrant procession of 200 vehicles stretching for several kilometers.
Photo: AFP
Onlookers snapped photos and some motorcyclists even chased after the cortege to watch the pole dancers, Chinese Television System (CTS) news channel reported.
Tung, who died of an illness last month at 76 years old, was a well-known figure in Chiayi, where he was active in the local political scene for decades in various posts.
Tung’s family said that he liked fun and socializing so they wanted to see him off in a flamboyant, memorable way.
“He told us he wanted this through a dream two days before the funeral,” his brother, Tung Mao-hsiung (董茂雄), told CTS.
While it may contrast with some traditional notions of funeral etiquette, it is not uncommon for Taiwanese send-offs to be risque affairs. Showgirls are not only hired to perform pole dancing, but even go as far as striptease at religious festivals and funerals.
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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