Sitting on a hillside in Taipei’s Bei-tou (北投), a century-old district home to the nation’s oldest hot springs community, a two-story, wooden Japanese-style building has been a permanent feature as long as anyone can remember.
The Beitou Museum is set to celebrate its 100th anniversary next year, and museum director Saalih Lee (李莎莉) has said that she hopes to breathe new life into the old building.
Built in 1921, the structure was initially the Kazen Hotel, colonial Taiwan’s most luxurious hot springs resort, Lee said.
Photo: CNA
“This building celebrates the wabi-sabi aesthetic,” Lee said, referring to a traditional Japanese worldview centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection.
Whether an unequal leaf door decorated with cloudy glass, a deserted bathhouse covered in green tiles, or a hidden Zen garden in the building’s central yard, she hopes that visitors would appreciate the museum building for its original style, Lee said.
In its early years, the building was often used by the Japanese military, and at one point, it was a guesthouse for kamikaze pilots, said Lee, who has been museum director for 16 years.
The building changed hands after 1945, became a private museum in 1984 and was designated an historic site by the Taipei City Government in 1998, she said.
Despite its age, the 2,500m2 structure remains full of vitality and offers a combination of cultural exhibitions, dining events and recreational activities, such as fashion shows, Lee said.
Having won the inaugural prize for preserving cultural heritage from the city government last month, the museum is a centerpiece of Taipei’s efforts to promote the idea of museums without walls, Taipei Deputy Mayor Tsai Ping-kun (蔡炳坤) said.
“Taipei is not only a bustling city, but also a city that breathes,” Tsai said.
Through places such as the Beitou Museum, which is largely based on local participation and aims to enhance the welfare and development of local communities, the city has many stories to tell about its history, he said, adding that the museum helps raise public awareness about the importance of Taipei’s cultural heritage.
Beitou is the perfect place for the museum to thrive thanks to its relatively early development in the nation’s history, owing to the hot springs, according to the city government Web site.
The area is also home to historic sites such as the Beitou Hot Spring Museum, Plum Garden, Grass Mountain Chateau and Taipei Beitou Public Assembly Hall, Lee said.
With the cultural sites increasingly offering educational resources and promoting their activities better, Lee said that she hopes that the number of visitors to the museum, currently 50,000 each year, would increase in coming years.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is pushing for residents of Kinmen and Lienchiang counties to acquire Chinese ID cards in a bid to “blur national identities,” a source said. The efforts are part of China’s promotion of a “Kinmen-Xiamen twin-city living sphere, including a cross-strait integration pilot zone in China’s Fujian Province,” the source said. “The CCP is already treating residents of these outlying islands as Chinese citizens. It has also intensified its ‘united front’ efforts and infiltration of those islands,” the source said. “There is increasing evidence of espionage in Kinmen, particularly of Taiwanese military personnel being recruited by the
ENTERTAINERS IN CHINA: Taiwanese generally back the government being firm on infiltration and ‘united front’ work,’ the Asia-Pacific Elite Interchange Association said Most people support the government probing Taiwanese entertainers for allegedly “amplifying” the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda, a survey conducted by the Asia-Pacific Elite Interchange Association showed on Friday. Public support stood at 56.4 percent for action by the Mainland Affairs Council and the Ministry of Culture to enhance scrutiny on Taiwanese performers and artists who have developed careers in China while allegedly adhering to the narrative of Beijing’s propaganda that denigrates or harms Taiwanese sovereignty, the poll showed. Thirty-three percent did not support the action, it showed. The poll showed that 51.5 percent of respondents supported the government’s investigation into Taiwanese who have
Left-Handed Girl (左撇子女孩), a film by Taiwanese director Tsou Shih-ching (鄒時擎) and cowritten by Oscar-winning director Sean Baker, won the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution at the Cannes Critics’ Week on Wednesday. The award, which includes a 20,000 euro (US$22,656) prize, is intended to support the French release of a first or second feature film by a new director. According to Critics’ Week, the prize would go to the film’s French distributor, Le Pacte. "A melodrama full of twists and turns, Left-Handed Girl retraces the daily life of a single mother and her two daughters in Taipei, combining the irresistible charm of
South Korean K-pop girl group Blackpink are to make Kaohsiung the first stop on their Asia tour when they perform at Kaohsiung National Stadium on Oct. 18 and 19, the event organizer said yesterday. The upcoming performances will also make Blackpink the first girl group ever to perform twice at the stadium. It will be the group’s third visit to Taiwan to stage a concert. The last time Blackpink held a concert in the city was in March 2023. Their first concert in Taiwan was on March 3, 2019, at NTSU Arena (Linkou Arena). The group’s 2022-2023 “Born Pink” tour set a
RSS