This year's Taipei Lantern Festival opens today, with several locations in Xinyi District having been turned into lantern display areas for the week-long festival.
The festival, which runs through Feb. 24, features various kinds of lanterns designed according to the Year of Rat theme in the Xinyi business district, including the Sun Yat-sen Memorial, Taipei City Hall and several parks and plazas in the area.
Rather than simply having a mascot this year, the department invited architect Liu Kuo-chan (
A five-minute light show featuring the main lantern will be presented every hour from 6pm to 11pm until Tuesday.
In addition to the main lantern display area at the memorial hall, more traditional lanterns and ones with religious themes can be found near Taipei City Hall. International lanterns from Macau, the Philippines, Malaysia and other places are on display at the Xinyi 21 Plaza in front of Taipei 101.
Taipei City's Civil Affairs Department said residents can pick up free mini-lanterns at the Renai Road entrance of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial from Saturday to Thursday, and at the main entrance of Taipei City Hall on Saturday and Sunday. A limited number of free lanterns will be given away at these locations starting at 2pm during the festival.
To ease the heavy traffic expected during the festival, the city's Department of Transportation is providing a lantern bus service between the Zhongxiao-Fuxing and Taipei City Hall MRT stations.
The department encouraged festival participants to take advantage of public transportation, as Renai, Songgao, Shifu and Yixian roads will be partly closed to traffic during the festival.
For more information on this year's Taipei Lantern Festival, visit www.taipei-festival2008.com.
There are 77 incidents of Taiwanese travelers going missing in China between January last year and last month, the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) said. More than 40 remain unreachable, SEF Secretary-General Luo Wen-jia (羅文嘉) said on Friday. Most of the reachable people in the more than 30 other incidents were allegedly involved in fraud, while some had disappeared for personal reasons, Luo said. One of these people is Kuo Yu-hsuan (郭宇軒), a 22-year-old Taiwanese man from Kaohsiung who went missing while visiting China in August. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office last month said in a news statement that he was under investigation
An aviation jacket patch showing a Formosan black bear punching Winnie the Pooh has become popular overseas, including at an aviation festival held by the Japan Air Self-Defense Force at the Ashiya Airbase yesterday. The patch was designed last year by Taiwanese designer Hsu Fu-yu (徐福佑), who said that it was inspired by Taiwan’s countermeasures against frequent Chinese military aircraft incursions. The badge shows a Formosan black bear holding a Republic of China flag as it punches Winnie the Pooh — a reference to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — who is dressed in red and is holding a honey pot with
Celebrations marking Double Ten National Day are to begin in Taipei today before culminating in a fireworks display in Yunlin County on the night of Thursday next week. To start the celebrations, a concert is to be held at the Taipei Dome at 4pm today, featuring a lineup of award-winning singers, including Jody Chiang (江蕙), Samingad (紀曉君) and Huang Fei (黃妃), Taipei tourism bureau official Chueh Yu-ling (闕玉玲) told a news conference yesterday. School choirs, including the Pqwasan na Taoshan Choir and Hngzyang na Matui & Nahuy Children’s Choir, and the Ministry of National Defense Symphony Orchestra, flag presentation unit and choirs,
China is attempting to subsume Taiwanese culture under Chinese culture by promulgating legislation on preserving documents on ties between the Minnan region and Taiwan, a Taiwanese academic said yesterday. China on Tuesday enforced the Fujian Province Minnan and Taiwan Document Protection Act to counter Taiwanese cultural independence with historical evidence that would root out misleading claims, Chinese-language media outlet Straits Today reported yesterday. The act is “China’s first ad hoc local regulations in the cultural field that involve Taiwan and is a concrete step toward implementing the integrated development demonstration zone,” Fujian Provincial Archives deputy director Ma Jun-fan (馬俊凡) said. The documents
RSS