The Taipei Zoo celebrated its 99th anniversary yesterday and presented an honorary citizen’s card to the zoo’s star animal — baby panda Yuan Zai (圓仔).
Yuan Zai, the first cub of the giant panda couple Tuan Tuan (團團) and Yuan Yuan (圓圓), is 112 days old and has yet to appear in public.
Taipei Zoo spokesman Chang Chi-hua (張志華) said the zoo will launch a real-time online streaming service by the end of this month for the public to view the cub before her public appearance in January.
The zoo also concluded a naming activity for the baby panda and announced that the nickname given by the zoo, Yuan Zai, would be her official name, as 60 percent of the 75,000 people who voted chose that name.
In presenting the citizen card to a Yuan Zai doll at the celebration ceremony, Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) said he hoped the popularity of the panda cub would raise public awareness about wildlife preservation.
“Yuan Zai is under great care by zookeepers, and she will meet her fans soon. In the meantime, we hope her popularity will make more people aware about animal protection and preservation,” he said.
Separately, former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) said that the birth of the panda cub in Taipei was an achievement in cross-strait relations.
Wu, who was attending an annual KMT forum with the Chinese Communist Party, invited Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits Chairman Chen Deming (陳德銘) to visit Yuan Zai in Taipei.
Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan were selected from 23 panda cubs early in 2006 by China as a “gift” to Taiwan following the meeting between former KMT chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and then-Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) in 2005. The pair arrived at the Taipei Zoo in 2008.
The zoo will be able to keep Yuan Zai in Taipei because Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan were a gift from China.
A crowd of over 200 people gathered outside the Taipei District Court as two sisters indicted for abusing a 1-year-old boy to death attended a preliminary hearing in the case yesterday afternoon. The crowd held up signs and chanted slogans calling for aggravated penalties in child abuse cases and asking for no bail and “capital punishment.” They also held white flowers in memory of the boy, nicknamed Kai Kai (剴剴), who was allegedly tortured to death by the sisters in December 2023. The boy died four months after being placed in full-time foster care with the
A Taiwanese woman on Sunday was injured by a small piece of masonry that fell from the dome of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican during a visit to the church. The tourist, identified as Hsu Yun-chen (許芸禎), was struck on the forehead while she and her tour group were near Michelangelo’s sculpture Pieta. Hsu was rushed to a hospital, the group’s guide to the church, Fu Jing, said yesterday. Hsu was found not to have serious injuries and was able to continue her tour as scheduled, Fu added. Mathew Lee (李世明), Taiwan’s recently retired ambassador to the Holy See, said he met
The Shanlan Express (山嵐號), or “Mountain Mist Express,” is scheduled to launch on April 19 as part of the centennial celebration of the inauguration of the Taitung Line. The tourism express train was renovated from the Taiwan Railway Corp’s EMU500 commuter trains. It has four carriages and a seating capacity of 60 passengers. Lion Travel is arranging railway tours for the express service. Several news outlets were invited to experience the pilot tour on the new express train service, which is to operate between Hualien Railway Station and Chihshang (池上) Railway Station in Taitung County. It would also be the first tourism service
A BETRAYAL? It is none of the ministry’s business if those entertainers love China, but ‘you cannot agree to wipe out your own country,’ the MAC minister said Taiwanese entertainers in China would have their Taiwanese citizenship revoked if they are holding Chinese citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said. Several Taiwanese entertainers, including Patty Hou (侯佩岑) and Ouyang Nana (歐陽娜娜), earlier this month on their Weibo (微博) accounts shared a picture saying that Taiwan would be “returned” to China, with tags such as “Taiwan, Province of China” or “Adhere to the ‘one China’ principle.” The MAC would investigate whether those Taiwanese entertainers have Chinese IDs and added that it would revoke their Taiwanese citizenship if they did, Chiu told the Chinese-language Liberty Times (sister paper
RSS