The German Institute Taipei yesterday unveiled a memorial plaque on the former site of the Imperial German Consulate in Taiwan in Taipei’s Dadaocheng (大稻埕) area, as it celebrated more than 100 years of ties between the two nations.
The plaque was installed on the wall surrounding Taipei Municipal Zhongxiao Junior High School and features a brief introduction to the consulate’s history in German, Chinese and English.
It also depicts a hand-drawn sketch by a Taiwanese designer of what the consulate looked like in the 19th century.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
Due to increasing trade activities between Germany and Taiwan in the 1890s, the two-story consulate building was constructed in 1895 on the banks of the Tamsui River (淡水河) by Taiwan-based German businessman Arthur von Butler on behalf of the then-German Foreign Office, the institute said.
Two German consuls and four interim consuls were stationed at the consulate before it was closed and sold to the Japanese colonial administration in 1908 and torn down, the institute said, adding that the official seal of the consulate used “Formosa” rather than “Taiwan” to refer to the island at the time.
“About 120 years ago, what stood in front of the school’s main gate was the Imperial German Consulate. On the right was the then-US embassy and behind the consulate stood the then-Dutch embassy,” school principal Chen Tse-min (陳澤民) said.
After the institute posted a message on Facebook in October 2016 inquiring about the exact location of the consulate, a few of the school’s history teachers used a digital historical map to try to locate it, only to realize it was located where the faculty office is today, he said.
The discovery motivated the school’s teachers to design a series of teaching materials that seek to take students back to 1895 through a historical tour of Dadaocheng that begins at the site of the former consulate, he added.
Several students have expressed interest in studying in Germany due to the school’s connection with the nation, Chen said.
Institute Director-General Thomas Prinz said that his office started studying the history behind the former consulate as early as 2015.
“Thanks to information provided by the German Federal Foreign Office and the help of many Taiwanese friends, we were able to find the old site of what was known at the time as the ‘most beautiful and magnificent building along the Tamsui River,’” Prinz said.
The school is the “most ideal successor” to the former consulate, he said, expressing the hope that the school and the institute could cooperate to jointly hold events.
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has
Taiwan’s average wealth per household was NT$16.38 million (US$503,102) at the end of 2021, with about 71 percent of households coming in below the average, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. Median wealth per household was NT$8.94 million, said the agency, which released the data for the first time in 30 years. The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households — a measure of inequality where zero indicates complete equality of wealth and one indicates complete inequality — was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the