Taipei 101 will ring in the New Year with a six-minute fireworks display, the longest in the history of the annual event, as part of a show that will also include simulated animation, organizers said yesterday.
The theme for the event will be “Happy Together,” with the fireworks show, which starts at 11:59pm, using a T-Pad display of about 140,000 light-emitting diodes that covers the 35th to 90th floors on the north side of the building, the organizers added.
Due to recent concerns over air pollution, the fireworks display has been cut from 30,000 to 16,000 rounds, said Chen Shih-ming (陳世明), president of Taipei Financial Center, which operates the landmark building.
Photo courtesy of Taipei 101
The use of LED displays and multimedia special visual effects will make it possible to celebrate the New Year in a more environmentally friendly manner, Chen said.
Taipei Financial Center spokesman Michael Liu (劉家豪) said that Taipei 101 has followed Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) proposal that the New Year’s Eve celebration should be spread out over a longer period than just one day.
Taipei 101 has set up a Facebook fan page — 2018 Happy Together — in which people can submit New Year’s greetings and good wishes up to a maximum of 16 Chinese characters for posting on the T-Pad display from Dec. 2 to Dec. 21.
Taipei 101 selects 272 winners every day and displays the messages between 6pm and 10pm.
On Dec. 22, Taipei 101 will put on a special show of all the selected greetings from the past three weeks.
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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