With the help of the local borough warden, a 70-year-old man is preparing to move into his new shipping container home in Hsinchu County’s Jhudong Township (竹東) next week thanks to donations from 66 strangers on Facebook.
Liu Chun-hsiu (劉春秀) is a borough native, Kehu Borough (柯湖) Warden Lu Chien-hung (呂建宏) said on Friday.
When Liu was 60 years old, he was forced to move out of his home, Lu said.
Photo provided by Lu Chien-hung, Taipei Times
Since his parents had already passed away and all of his relatives lived in other towns, Liu, accustomed to living in Kehu Borough, began living in an abandoned shipping container on the side of a mountain road, Lu said.
He lived there for the next 10 years without running water or electricity, Lu said, adding that Liu had to bathe in a nearby creek and use a flashlight at night if he wanted to look for something.
Liu became used to living alone in the mountains, but the window frame and wooden floor of the container rotted out, he said.
On top of that, there were many cracks in the steel walls, allowing cold air to rush into the container during the winter, he said.
Although Liu, as a low-income household, receives a monthly subsidy, he also collects recyclable materials from garbage to make a living, Lu said.
As Liu was unable to purchase a new shipping container to live in, Lu decided to see if any charity organizations on Facebook would be willing to help, he said.
Surprisingly, many donations poured in and within three days, they had reached their fundraising goal, Lu said.
They received a total of NT$201,000 in donations, he added.
When the business selling the shipping container found out that the container was to be used by Liu, it gave Liu a reduced price of NT$160,000 and paid him NT$5,000 for the old container, Lu said.
The remaining NT$46,000 has been deposited into Liu’s bank account, Lu added.
Liu’s new shipping container home has a steel door, an aluminum window and a bathroom, Lu said, adding that Liu is to move into his new home next week.
Liu said he is grateful to everyone who has helped him to live the rest of his life in a familiar place.
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