This year’s Taiwan Lantern Festival, which is to run from Feb. 11 through Feb. 19 in Yunlin County, is to include five pavilions themed on Vietnamese, Indonesian, Thai, Philippine and Cambodian cultures, the Yunlin County Government said on Sunday.
The pavilions, set up in a special area of the venue, will allow new immigrants from Southeast Asia to make and display lanterns from their respective nations at Taiwan’s biggest lantern festival for the first time, Yunlin County Commissioner Lee Chin-yung (李進勇) said at an event for foreign-born spouses.
According to statistics provided by the Ministry of the Interior, there were 3,986 marriages between Taiwanese and Vietnamese in 2015, a rise of 672 from the previous year. There were 841 marriages between Taiwanese and Indonesians in the same year.
Lee invited new immigrants and foreigners in Taiwan to visit the lantern festival in Yunlin, saying that their participation would help Taiwanese learn more about other nations and promote cultural exchanges.
“New imigrants have become an integral part of Taiwanese society and the public must do its best to welcome them, because love knows no boundaries,” Lee said.
The festival is to feature more than 3,000 lanterns on a site covering more than 50 hectares.
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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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