Visitors to Control Yuan member Chen Shih-meng’s (陳師孟) office are greeted by a plethora of pig-themed items, ranging from clocks to mugs and trash cans.
While yesterday marked the start of the Year of the Pig, Chen said he began his hog collection decades ago when he was teaching at National Taiwan University’s economics department.
The first item he collected was a bronze paperweight in the form of a pig, which the then-Bills Finance Association of Taipei gave him for his research work. That year happened to be the Year of the Pig.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
Chen said he was inspired at the time by a passage from a biography on former British prime minister Winston Churchill, in which he is reported to have said: “I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”
From that first paperweight he received when he was 38, Chen, now 71, amassed a collection of more than 5,000 pig-themed items, of which he donated 1,400 items to Taiwan Sugar’s Ciaotou (橋頭) branch in 2012 to start a piggy museum.
Since economics is his specialty, many of the donated items included pig-themed coins minted in the US, Somalia, Kenya and Denmark, as well as hog-inspired bills issued in Germany and Vietnam, he said.
Chen said he had lived at the Ciaotou branch when he was small as his father was the branch’s director at the time.
Tawan Sugar launched a husbandry division in 1953 and is well known for raising quality pigs, Chen said, adding jokingly that the company, like him, reared many pigs.
Chen said he had also joined the US-based Happy Pig Collector’s Club and had visited the US to purchase or bid for pig-themed items.
He occasionally also bids for some items on the Internet.
Despite the size of his collection, Chen estimated that he had not spent more than NT$600,000 to procure them, adding that the most expensive part of his collection is a Koji-pottery pig, which he won at a fundraising dinner.
Chen said that his biggest regret was failing to win an Internet bid for a tie with seven little pigs.
The failure “haunted” him for decades, he said.
When in casual wear, Chen always wears a necklace with a pig’s head. He calls it his “lucky pig that could save my heart and life” as it contains medications for his heart condition.
Citing the same passage from Churchill’s biography, Chen said that one should be like a pig and treat people equally, instead of pandering to some or making enemies of others.
He urged judges and prosecutors to get down from their ivory towers to meet the public’s expectations.
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