Government offices should be moved out of Taichung Prefectural Hall to allow restoration work to begin, Taichung City Councilor Chiang Chao-kuo (江肇國) said on Sunday.
Built in 1912, the building features a mansard roof with red brick walls, white columns and small roof windows. The former prefectural halls in Taipei, which is now the Control Yuan building, and in Tainan, which is now the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, are in a similar style.
Since its designation as a city monument in 2006, groups have lobbied for the Taichung building’s status to be upgraded to a national monument.
Photo: Huang Chung-shan, Taipei Times
With the exception of the former Kaohsiung prefectural hall, which has been demolished, all of the five other major prefectural halls that were built during the Japanese colonial era have been made national monuments, so there is no reason not to designate the Taichung Prefectural Hall a national monument, Chiang said.
Last year, in response to Chiang’s calls, then-Taichung mayor Lin Chia-lung’s (林佳龍) administration filed an application with the Ministry of Culture for the building to be reviewed and declared a national monument.
The ministry on Feb. 24 approved the reclassification and the new designation is expected to be officially announced at the end of this month or early next month.
The restoration should begin as soon as possible, Chiang said.
The central government would not be bearing all of the project’s costs, as the Taichung City Government has allocated NT$250 million (US$8.11 million) toward it, he said, adding that the city government should lead operations at the building after the restoration is complete.
The building should be turned into a space for collecting and exhibiting local literature, music and film, he said.
To save money on rent, Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) said that the city government offices at the site — which includes offices of the Taichung Urban Development Bureau, the Taichung Environmental Protection Bureau and the Taichung Transportation Bureau — are to be moved to the Taichung City Police Department’s offices after the department relocates to Tanzih District (潭子) next year, Chiang said.
As a result, the restoration could be delayed by more than a year, he said, adding that the city is also considering keeping the building as government offices.
The Environmental Protection Bureau is to move out of its office at the end of June, while the space occupied by divisions of the Urban Development Bureau are to be adjusted to allow restoration work to proceed in stages, the Taichung Cultural Affairs Bureau said, adding that the project would begin this year.
It would listen to the advice of the city council and the public when considering how the building should be used after the restoration, the Cultural Affairs Bureau said.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching