There are many popular tourism locations in northern Taiwan apart from the National Palace Museum (NPM), some of which are more popular, Tourism Bureau Planning Division section chief Wu Chieh-ping (吳潔萍) said on Monday.
According to museum documents unveiled by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Ko Chih-en (柯志恩) at a legislative hearing on Monday, the museum’s main building in Taipei is scheduled to be closed in 2020, with renovation work to take place in 2022 and 2023, prompting fears that the nation’s tourism industry might be negatively affected.
The Executive Yuan yesterday said it would prefer if the Taipei branch remained open during renovations.
Photo: Lu Chun-wei, Taipei Times
Museum Director Chen Chi-nan (陳其南) said that the museum would try to keep the branch open during renovations, because it attracts nearly 5 million visitors a year — 75 percent of whom are from overseas.
In 2015, Chinese comprised 40.08 percent of all foreign tourists, but the figure dropped to 25.44 percent last year, bureau statistics showed.
The drop has been reflected in the number of foreign visitors to the museum’s Taipei branch, as 48 in every 100 foreign visitors in 2015 were Chinese, but dropped to 42 in 2016 and 35 last year, Wu said.
However, tourists from countries targeted by the government’s New Southbound Policy jumped from 14.87 percent in 2015 to 21.27 percent last year, bureau statistics showed.
For the past three years, foreign visitor numbers have surpassed 10 million and keep growing, with 10.43 million foreign visitors arriving in 2015, 10.69 million visiting in 2016 and 10.74 million arriving last year.
Due to the shift in tourist origins, night markets are the most popular, followed by the Taipei 101 skyscraper and the town of Jiufen (九份) in New Taipei City, which has since last year surpassed the museum’s Taipei branch in popularity, Wu said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,