Started in 2002 with a budget of only NT$2 million (US$65,760), the Hakka Tung Blossom Festival has become the nation’s biggest festivity, with more than 6 million visitors and bringing more than NT$23 billion in revenue, Council for Hakka Affairs (CHA) Minister Huang Yu-chen (黃玉振) said yesterday.
“I was not very confident when I expressed my hope that the Hakka Tung Blossom Festival would attract more than 1 million people and create more than NT$6 billion in economic benefits,” Huang said. “But I was totally shocked when I saw the survey results.”
According to the results of a large-scale survey commissioned by the council and conducted by Gallup Market Research Corp Taiwan from the beginning of April to the end of May, more than 6.4 million people visited the festival, bringing more than NT$23 billion in revenue for businesses taking part in the festival, as well as around event venues.
Besides the number of visitors and the economic impact, the survey also found a 98 percent satisfaction rate from visitors to the festival — and more than half of the visitors were returning visitors.
Encouraged by the numbers, Huang announced an ambitious goal for next year’s Tung Blossom Festival.
“Next year will mark the 10th anniversary of the Tung Blossom Festival, the 10th anniversary of CHA and the 100th anniversary of the Republic of China,” Huang said at a press conference. “Well, since we have more than 6 million visitors this year, my objective is to attract 10 million people to the festival next year.”
Although Huang seemed very satisfied with the numbers, the Democratic Progressive Party’s Hakka Affairs Department director Yiong Cong-ziin (楊長鎮), who was the person who proposed organizing the Hakka Tung Blossom Festival when he was CHA chief secretary, expressed concerns about the future of the festival.
“In 2002, we only had a NT$2 million budget, so we couldn’t do much, but our goal was very clear,” Yiong told the Taipei Times in a telephone interview. “We wanted to create a local symbol of Hakka culture through which Taiwanese Hakkas could discover the beauty of their own homeland, while people of other ethnicities could get a chance to learn more about Hakka culture.”
Accordingly, at that time the CHA designated five Tung Blossom trails and recruited guides locally. Yiong said that they wanted locals to find out more about their own villages or cities by training to be local tour guides.
Yiong said that originally, they wanted all souvenirs and merchandise sold at Tung Blossom Festivals to be either local specialties or innovative products inspired by elements of local culture and made locally.
“But now, the Tung Blossom Festival is highly commercialized, with a lot of souvenirs made by large corporations with little connection to Hakka culture in China,” Yiong said.
Asked about Huang’s plan to attract at least 10 million visitors next year, Yiong called it “nonsense.”
“I don’t think the mountains and small villages are capable of handling so many visitors. If more than 10 million people pour into these small Hakka villages in the mountains, it would be an environmental disaster,” he said. “Besides, we’re a country of 23 million people, it’s nearly impossible to have half of the population taking part in an event.”
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