Minister of Education Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝) seems to have unwittingly educated Hong Kong's glitterati on personal hygiene and public etiquette. The Apple Daily earlier this week published images of Hong Kong diva and actress Coco Chiang (蔣怡) with her finger up her nose having a good rout at a shopping mall.
Pop Stop readers will recall Tu kicked up a stink when he was "caught" picking his nose and sleeping during a legislative session. Government Information Office (GIO) Minister Shieh Jhy-wey (謝志偉) later claimed Tu's nasal fingering was a protest to poor behavior in the legislature. Hmmm.
At least Chiang wasn't sleeping on the job.
In other Hong Kong showbiz news, Maggie Cheung (張曼玉) reportedly can't get enough of European men. The Cannes Film Festival award-winning actress, who was once married to French director Olivier Assayas, spent five days shacked up in a hotel with a German mystery man. Calling their relationship "love at first sight," the actress seems to have moved on from her other failed love affairs.
Meanwhile, at home, before Taiwanese bombshell Lin Chih-ling (林志玲) came along, there was Stephanie Hsiao (蕭薔). Once described as the prettiest "artist" - whatever that means - in Taiwan, Hsiao has struggled to get back on top of the celebrity pedestal, though she still has considerable drawing power for gossip hounds.
A Chinese blog last week showed images of Hsiao being "forced" to drink at a KTV in China. The shots momentarily shattered the philanthropic image that Hisao had cultivated with stunts such as selling 100 autographed pictures of herself to raise money for wigs to give to chemotherapy patients. The model maintained her good-girl image by telling the media that she couldn't have been forced to drink because children were present.
Suzanne Hsiao (蕭淑慎) is back on the celebrity circuit. Well, sort of. Having recently left a rehabilitation center after testing positive last year for ketamine and cocaine, which she claimed originated from augmentation surgery, the singer's attempted comeback - this time on the big screen - isn't making much headway.
Apple reports that Hsiao agreed to star in a movie in which she removed her clothes for a cool NT$800,000. At the time the straight-to-DVD director Wong Jing (王晶) said the shamed starlet's talent could make her Taiwan's next sex queen. Offers for more movies have dried up, however, as the burgeoning actress' bedroom performance has been likened to that of a dead fish (死魚).
In 2020, a labor attache from the Philippines in Taipei sent a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding that a Filipina worker accused of “cyber-libel” against then-president Rodrigo Duterte be deported. A press release from the Philippines office from the attache accused the woman of “using several social media accounts” to “discredit and malign the President and destabilize the government.” The attache also claimed that the woman had broken Taiwan’s laws. The government responded that she had broken no laws, and that all foreign workers were treated the same as Taiwan citizens and that “their rights are protected,
A white horse stark against a black beach. A family pushes a car through floodwaters in Chiayi County. People play on a beach in Pingtung County, as a nuclear power plant looms in the background. These are just some of the powerful images on display as part of Shen Chao-liang’s (沈昭良) Drifting (Overture) exhibition, currently on display at AKI Gallery in Taipei. For the first time in Shen’s decorated career, his photography seeks to speak to broader, multi-layered issues within the fabric of Taiwanese society. The photographs look towards history, national identity, ecological changes and more to create a collection of images
The recent decline in average room rates is undoubtedly bad news for Taiwan’s hoteliers and homestay operators, but this downturn shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. According to statistics published by the Tourism Administration (TA) on March 3, the average cost of a one-night stay in a hotel last year was NT$2,960, down 1.17 percent compared to 2023. (At more than three quarters of Taiwan’s hotels, the average room rate is even lower, because high-end properties charging NT$10,000-plus skew the data.) Homestay guests paid an average of NT$2,405, a 4.15-percent drop year on year. The countrywide hotel occupancy rate fell from
March 16 to March 22 In just a year, Liu Ching-hsiang (劉清香) went from Taiwanese opera performer to arguably Taiwan’s first pop superstar, pumping out hits that captivated the Japanese colony under the moniker Chun-chun (純純). Last week’s Taiwan in Time explored how the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) theme song for the Chinese silent movie The Peach Girl (桃花泣血記) unexpectedly became the first smash hit after the film’s Taipei premiere in March 1932, in part due to aggressive promotion on the streets. Seeing an opportunity, Columbia Records’ (affiliated with the US entity) Taiwan director Shojiro Kashino asked Liu, who had
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