"Taiwan still lacks a means of bringing world music to a larger audience," said Chung She-fong (
There is one radio program that showcases world music, produced and hosted by writer and music critic Ho Yingyi (何穎怡). The show, Taipei Big Ear (台北大耳朵), is aired on Saturdays and Sundays from 1am to 2am on Philharmonic Radio Taipei.
Ho's translated book World Music CD Listeners' Guide (漫遊歌之版圖) is the first such book in Chinese.
Apart from Trees Music & Art, there are two local record labels that specialize in world music. One label, called Wind Music (風潮唱片), has a series called World Music Library, which was produced by Japan's King Production. Its Ethnic Music Hall series is an award-winning ethnomusicology production, incorporating eight albums from Taiwanese Aboriginal tribes, six from Taiwan's Pingpu people, one each from Tibetan and Hakka groups and one of southern Taiwan folk songs. The music was collected and produced by the late music scholar Hsu Chang-hui (許常惠) and ethnomusicologist Wu Rung-shun (吳榮順).
Sunrise Records (上揚唱片) has two world music series, the Taiwan Native Folk Songs and the World Music Series.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
Perched on Thailand’s border with Myanmar, Arunothai is a dusty crossroads town, a nowheresville that could be the setting of some Southeast Asian spaghetti Western. Its main street is the final, dead-end section of the two-lane highway from Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second largest city 120kms south, and the heart of the kingdom’s mountainous north. At the town boundary, a Chinese-style arch capped with dragons also bears Thai script declaring fealty to Bangkok’s royal family: “Long live the King!” Further on, Chinese lanterns line the main street, and on the hillsides, courtyard homes sit among warrens of narrow, winding alleyways and
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