Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) formally announced on Saturday that the Ilan Sports Park in Ilan City would be the site of next year’s Taiwan Lantern Festival. He made the comment during a visit to the county to inspect local building projects.
“Ilan County has been working hard to promote tourism, has beautiful scenery and people and has passed the relevant government agency assessments so we have decided that Ilan will host next year’s festival,” Liu said.
On Friday night Yiu Wen-hsiang (游文祥), head of the county government’s Department of Business and Tourism, said that the Tourism Bureau had chosen the location as the site of next February’s festival.
The bureau launched the Taiwan Lantern Festival in 1990 to foster local culture and promote the traditions of Taiwan on the international stage.
Since its launch, the festival has grown to become one of the nation’s largest and most internationally well-known tourism events.
Yiu said that Ilan Commissioner Lu Kuo-hua (呂國華) had worked hard since early this year for the county to win the right to hold the festival.
Lu sent a group of county officials to this year’s festival — held in Tainan County’s Southern Taiwan Science Park — to learn more about hosting such an event, Yiu said.
The commissioner also recently led a delegation on a visit to the Tourism Bureau to promote its bid, Yiu said, adding that Ilan was able to beat out bids by four other counties: Hsinchu, Taoyuan, Nantou and Changhua.
The Ilan Sports Park was chosen because it met the tourism bureau’s requirements that the site of the festival should have at least 1,500 parking spaces, a road of at least 400m in length and 15m in width for the event’s parade of floats, enough hotel accommodation for visitors and adequate shuttle bus services, Yiu said. Ilan City has more than 8,000 hotel rooms available, Yiu said.
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