Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) yesterday acknowledged the inappropriateness of painting the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) emblem on national monuments that are being repaired and promised to discuss the issue with the Council for Cultural Affairs (CCA).
The Taipei City’s Department of Cultural Affairs budgeted NT$7 million (US$215,000) to restore the city’s four historical gates earlier this year — the East Gate (also known as Jinfu Men), the South Gate, the Little South Gate and the North Gate.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City councilors said that the department, taking advantage of the restoration work, painted the KMT emblem on the East Gate and planned to paint the party’s emblem on the three other gates.
DPP Taipei City Councilor Huang Hsiang-chun (黃向群) criticized the city government yesterday, saying that the move was part of a plan to restore dictatorship and party-state rule.
Hau, a member of the KMT, said the four gates were national monuments and that the city government was authorized by the CCA to maintain the gates.
“It is inappropriate to paint the KMT emblems on the four gates if the patterns were not there originally,” he said.
Department of Cultural Affairs Commissioner Lee Yong-ping (李永萍) said the KMT emblems were first painted in 1966 when the KMT modified gates left over from the Qing Dynasty.
The four gates were designated as national monuments in 1998. The Culture Heritage Preservation Act (文化資產保存法) stipulates that restoration work on national monuments can not modify the monuments, she said.
“We are simply restoring the four gates and making the monuments the way they were in 1966. The KMT emblems were on the gates, and so it is natural for us to repaint them,” said Lee, who is also a KMT member.
Lee said having KMT emblems on historical monuments could be controversial in modern times and that the department would follow the law and hold public hearings to seek a consensus before changing monuments.
The city government will gather opinions at public hearings and present them to the CCA, which will make a final decision on the issue, she said.
A tropical depression east of the Philippines became a tropical storm early yesterday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, less than a week after a typhoon barreled across the nation. The agency issued an advisory at 3:30am stating that the 22nd tropical storm, named Yinxing, of the Pacific typhoon season formed at 2am. As of 8am, the storm was 1,730km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan’s southernmost point, with a 100km radius. It was moving west-northwest at 32kph, with maximum sustained winds of 83kph and gusts of up to 108kph. Based on its current path, the storm is not expected to hit Taiwan, CWA
Residents have called on the Taipei City Government to reconsider its plan to demolish a four-decades-old pedestrian overpass near Daan Forest Park. The 42-year-old concrete and steel structure that serves as an elevated walkway over the intersection of Heping and Xinsheng roads is to be closed on Tuesday in preparation for demolition slated for completion by the end of the month. However, in recent days some local residents have been protesting the planned destruction of the intersection overpass that is rendered more poetically as “sky bridge” in Chinese. “This bridge carries the community’s collective memory,” said a man surnamed Chuang
FATALITIES: The storm claimed at least two lives — a female passenger in a truck that was struck by a falling tree and a man who was hit by a utility pole Workers cleared fallen trees and shop owners swept up debris yesterday after one of the biggest typhoons to hit the nation in decades claimed at least two lives. Typhoon Kong-rey was packing winds of 184kph when it slammed into eastern Taiwan on Thursday, uprooting trees, triggering floods and landslides, and knocking out power as it swept across the nation. A 56-year-old female foreign national died from her injuries after the small truck she was in was struck by a falling tree on Provincial Highway 14A early on Thursday. The second death was reported at 8pm in Taipei on Thursday after a 48-year-old man
A tropical depression east of the Philippines became a tropical storm earlier today, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The 22nd tropical storm, named Yinxing, in this year's Pacific typhoon season formed at 2am, the CWA said. As of 8am, the storm was 1,730km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻) with a 100km radius, it said. It was moving west-northwest at 32kph, with maximum sustained winds of 83kph and gusts of up to 108kph. Based on its current path, the storm is not expected to hit Taiwan, CWA meteorologist Huang En-hung (黃恩宏) said. However, a more accurate forecast would be made on Wednesday, when Yinxing is
RSS