Common sense has prevailed. Three Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City councilors were found not guilty on Oct. 28 of charges they had defaced an historical landmark by painting over the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) emblem on the East (Jingfu) Gate (景福門).
While the gate, built in 1882, is a Class 1 historical site, the KMT “sun” emblem was only added to it in 1966 when the then-KMT government renovated three out of the four surviving gates from Taipei’s old city wall — and carved and painted its emblem into them. The city’s Department of Cultural Affairs launched another renovation project on the gates in the spring of last year as part of its effort to “transform the sites into landmarks.” Apparently some officials did not realize the gates had already been landmarks for 127 years.
City councilors Chuang Ruei-hsiung (莊瑞雄), Huang Hsiang-chun (黃向群) and Liu Yao-ren (劉耀仁) said they were simply doing their duty by monitoring the city’s maintenance work when they spotted the repainted KMT emblem on the East Gate. Given that this happened just three days after President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and the KMT celebrated his first year in office, it is understandable that the DPP members might have seen this touch-up as a return to the bad old days when the KMT emblem — or Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) likeness — was plastered on just about every building or landmark. The councilors said they decided to rectify the situation by returning the gate to the way it looked during the Qing Dynasty.
While there was much fury from KMT members and Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) after the trio did their bit of painting, even the city’s Cultural Assets Review Committee had to admit that the Council of Cultural Affairs had not mentioned the KMT symbol when it designated the East Gate a national monument in 1998, and that therefore the need to preserve the emblem on the gate was open to question.
Even so, Hau vowed to bring the DPP vandals to justice, although his logic was a tad faulty:
“We must all be humble before national monuments. Even as a mayor, I cannot order the department to make the emblem disappear,” he said.
He appeared to have forgotten how it had managed to “appear” in the first place.
In bringing charges against the DPP councilors, prosecutors said the three had defaced a cultural relic, and were therefore guilty of defacing an historical monument.
However, Taipei District Court Judge Lin Meng-huang (林孟皇) ruled that the emblem was a political insignia representative of the way Taiwan used to be a dictatorship. Although the emblem was protected by the Culture Heritage Preservation Act (文化資產保存法), he said the KMT had put it on the gate as part of its efforts to reinforce its legitimacy and therefore the emblem was an expression of ideology. Painting over the emblem could not be considered “defacing” a historical monument, he ruled.
The East Gate and its three siblings have survived destruction of the wall and the West Gate in 1904 by the Japanese colonial administration, allied bombings during World War II and the upheaval of urban renewal over the past six decades, so it’s hard to see how slapping on some paint to cover up a 42-year-old emblem could be considered worth a court case.
While the Taipei City Government said it would wait to see if the prosecutors want to appeal the ruling, Taipei residents can only hope that cooler — or perhaps more budget-conscious — heads will prevail and not waste more taxpayer money by pursuing the case. After all, the city hasn’t bothered to “repair” the emblem since it was “destroyed.”
Taipei’s city gates are worth preserving. Outdated political ideology is not.
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