Three Taiwanese climbers who scaled Mount Everest last week returned home from Bangkok yesterday, with all three ready for their next challenge.
Chiang Hsiu-chen (江秀真) and her fellow mountaineers received a hero’s welcome at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport. Their success made Chiang the first Taiwanese woman to conquer the highest peaks on seven continents. It also marked the first time in 13 years that Taiwanese alpinists made it to the top of the 8,848m Mt Everest, said the Atunas Group, which organized the latest expedition.
Chiang, 39, has scaled the highest mountain in the world from both the north side and the south side of the peak, after completing the assault on Mt Everest’s summit last week from the south side, the more conventional route. She climbed the more treacherous north side 14 years ago.
PHOTO: CHU PEI-HSIUNG, TAIPEI TIMES
MISSION
Chiang, a mountain ranger at Yushan National Park, and the two male climbers — Wu Yu-lung (伍玉龍), a 49-year-old Bunun tribesman who is the leader of a rescue team, and 33-year-old Huang Chih-hao (黃致豪), who is doing postdoctorate research in electronic engineering at Colorado State University — reached the top of Mt Everest at 12:52pm on May 19.
In a brief interview with the Central News Agency at the airport, Chiang said she was looking forward to her next mission — developing a system to teach mountain climbing in Taiwan.
“Teaching and training [people] about mountain climbing is even more challenging than scaling Mt Everest,” she said. “I will try my best in the next 20 years to contribute to mountain-climbing in Taiwan, an island that boasts a number of high peaks.”
Wu said he would work two or three more years to save enough money to challenge the world’s third-highest peak in India.
Huang said his next challenge would be climbing one of the world’s highest mountains without the aid of bottled oxygen and Sherpa guides, and making a documentary about it.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS