The Taiwan Lantern Festival would return to Taipei next year following a 23-year hiatus, the Tourism Bureau said.
It would be the first major event held in the capital after Taiwan on Thursday last week ended mandatory COVID-19 quarantine for international arrivals, the bureau said.
The annual festival is to be held from Feb. 5 to 19.
Photo: Wang Jung-hsiang,Taipei Times
Hopefully, the event will bring tourists to Taiwan, Tourism Bureau Deputy Director-General Trust Lin (林信任) said.
Next year’s iteration is expected to be the biggest in the festival’s more than 30-year history, featuring four exhibition areas, one central installation and six major installations as part of a 300-lantern collection spread across 168 hectares, the Taipei Department of Information and Tourism said in a statement.
The festival’s central exhibition area would be at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and would house the main lantern, as well as three of the major lanterns and a number of theme-based lantern display areas, the department said.
Innovative content combined with traditional lantern art and cross-discipline lighting art is expected to attract works by local and foreign artists, providing visitors with an interactive experience, it said.
The lantern exhibition area would be located in East District (東區), where lanterns would be installed along alleyways in the commercial and business area, using the city as a stage, the department said.
The Songshan Cultural and Creative Park would house the “innovation exhibition area,” featuring a fusion of the old and new so that visitors could experience the diverse cultures of Taipei, it said.
The “future exhibition area” would be in Xinyi District (信義), and would integrate fashionable culture and digital technology to turn buildings into works of art and transport visitors to a luminous Taipei, the festival’s Web site says.
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said the festival was last held in Taipei in 2000 and next year’s version would be different from those held in other places.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching