Participants at next month’s Ghost Festival, during which revelers burn joss paper, should follow environmentally friendly practices, Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) Minister Lee Ying-yuan (李應元) said yesterday.
The festival is part of the Taoist tradition and falls on the 15th day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, or Sept. 5 this year.
It is one of the most important days of the month — known as the Ghost Month — which starts today.
Many households and businesses prepare a variety of offerings and burn ghost money to worship their ancestors and honor the dead, while many temples hold a series of ceremonies during the festival.
Lee and several business representatives yesterday visited Fengtien Temple (奉天宮) in Taipei’s Songshan District (松山) and burned incense.
The EPA has been promoting reducing the amount of incense and joss paper burned to improve air quality, but some temples considered it a ban, which led to about 100 religious groups staging what they called a religious carnival in Taipei on July 23.
Lee yesterday reiterated that the EPA aims to “reduce the burning of joss paper, fireworks and incense,” which is not different from the “one stick of incense per one burner” stance adopted by participants at the carnival.
Asked if “no burning” in religious practices is still the EPA’s ultimate goal, Lee said he will “respect the autonomy of temples.”
“Our temple members scarcely burn incense, but we do not stop visitors from doing so,” Fengtien Temple chairman Chen Po-chen (陳博貞) said, adding that the temple has set up a center for environmental protection.
The temple will hold a ceremony on Sept. 19, or the 29th of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, and expects more than 4,000 people to attend, Chen said.
“The sale of joss paper has been declining in the past few years, especially in urban areas,” RT-Mart International Ltd’s public relations official Tom Kuo (郭建志) said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift