The Longci Light Festival attracted 190,000 visitors over its seven-week run, the Tainan City Government said yesterday.
The festival, which ended yesterday, was praised online, with a post on its Facebook page calling it “the most beautiful outdoor light festival nationwide.”
Organizers said that they were surprised by the public’s interest in the festival, which was held for the first time.
Photo: Wu Chun-feng, Taipei Times
The event in the small mountain town of Longci attracted more than 18 times the number of local residents, they added.
The festival, which opened on Dec. 21, was originally scheduled to end on Sunday last week, but the city government extended it by a week to accommodate its unexpected popularity, it said.
Tainan Mayor Huang Wei-che (黃偉哲) encouraged the extension and said that the city would hold the festival again at the end of this year.
Visitors over the past week reached about 50,000 people, the city government said.
Local enterprises, including food vendors and the Longci Farmers’ Association’s bamboo charcoal store and workshop, saw their business improve during the festival, it said.
The event, which cost the special municipality NT$7 million (US$232,357), was aimed at boosting tourism in the region between Longci and Yanshuei (鹽水) townships over the Lunar New Year and Lantern Festival periods, the city said.
To avoid light pollution in the city, organizers held the festival in Husingshan Park in Longci, and invited artists to build installations using aluminum wiring and fluorescent lights.
Separately, a flower festival organized by the Changhua County Government attracted about 860,000 people over 16 days, which was about the same as last year, the county said.
The number was still impressive given the effects of the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak, which has caused people to avoid crowds, it said.
Visitors to the festival, which also ended yesterday, took in the sight of colorful flower displays during the day and viewed a light festival in the evenings, it added.
A memorial for people who have died in the outbreak was also on display, which proved popular with visitors, the county government 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