An exhibition on the nation’s architectural history featuring 60 drawings by Yu Chih-chung (游志忠) is showing at the Taiwan Army Club in Taipei until Oct. 15.
Nearly half of the drawings in the “Back to 1919” exhibition are of historical buildings that have since been demolished, including the former Taiwan Railway Hotel (臺灣鐵道飯店) across Taipei Railway Station and the original structure of Fort Zeelandia — now known as Anping Fort (安平古堡)— in Tainan.
There are few systematic records of historical buildings from the period of Dutch and Spanish rule, and the Japanese colonial era, said the organizers of the exhibition, Lealea Group Foundation.
Photo: Hsiao Ting-fang, Taipei Times
Most of the records are in the form of photographs, so Lealea Group founder Kuo Mu-sheng (郭木生) and Yu, who passed away early this year, came up with the idea to restore Taiwan’s historical buildings through drawings, they said.
Yu visited the historical buildings one by one, and used photographs for reference for those that had already been demolished, they said.
The site of the exhibition is itself loaded with history.
Formerly the residence of General Sun Li-jen (孫立人), the Taiwan Army Club is a city-designated historic site that is more than a century old.
Completed in 1909, the building was designed by Japanese architect Matsunosuke Moriyama.
It is a mixture of Japanese and Western architectural styles, and the second-largest official residence in the nation after the Taipei Guest House (臺北賓館) on Ketagalan Boulevard.
During the Japanese colonial era, it also served as the official residence of the director of waterworks at the Taiwan Governor-General Office’s Civil Engineering Bureau.
The two-building structure became the Taiwan Army Club in 1955.
The space was converted into a restaurant last year and hosts exhibitions throughout the year.
The traveling exhibition, which was launched last year, has already made stops at the Taipei Story House (台北故事館) and the Tainan District Court, Lealea Group Foundation consultant Tsai Pai-lu (蔡佰祿) said.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
RSS