The Taichung Bureau of Cultural Affairs on Sunday said it would request that the government grant national heritage status to Taichung City Hall, which was built during the Japanese colonial era as the seat of government of Taichu Prefecture.
The decision was made after Taichung City Councilor Wang Li-jen (王立任) of the Democratic Progressive Party said the city government was remiss in its duty to preserve cultural heritage sites.
Taichung City Hall was built as one of five prefectural government complexes that the Japanese built in today’s Taipei, Hsinchu, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung, Wang said.
While the prefectural government building in Kaohsiung was demolished in 1987, the remaining four have survived to become cultural heritage sites, he said.
However, of the four surviving buildings, only the one in Taichung has not been granted national cultural heritage status, he said, adding that it is only designated as a municipal heritage site and an upgrade is long overdue.
The prefectural government buildings in Taipei, Hsinchu and Tainan now house the Control Yuan, Hsinchu City Hall and National Museum of Taiwan Literature, he said.
The city government should consider asking the cultural affairs bureau to develop a way of utilizing the building that shows respect for its cultural and historic value, Wang said.
The bureau said the colonial-era structure is included in a Ministry of Culture program to restore historical sites and work is expected to be finished in 2020.
The city is paying NT$86 million (US$2.85 million) of the total construction costs of NT$215 million, the bureau said, adding that it would request that the central government confer national heritage status on the old city hall as soon as renovations are completed.
Any structure that meets the criteria stipulated by the government’s guidelines for national heritage sites should be considered as qualifying for the designation, the bureau said.
Those criteria are historical, artistic or scientific significance; being representative of an artistic style or architectural technique of a historical period; and being rare or difficult to recreate, the bureau said.
Taichung City Hall easily fulfills the criteria of historical and artistic significance, the bureau said.
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,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods