Wang Wen-ching (王文清), an 83-year-old former political prisoner, sighed as he recalled the years he spent in the Green Island prison after being convicted for no reason in the 1950s.
He said the one thing that made him proud was the violin he pieced together from whatever materials he could get hold of, and that kept him company during his 15 years behind bars.
Wang was born under Japanese rule and worked for the post office. When the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) took over Taiwan in 1945, the Japanese language was banned, and people had to attend classes in Mandarin Chinese. When Wang was 23, his Mandarin teacher was accused of being a communist spy. All 34 students in Wang’s class were found guilty by association and sentenced to 15 years in Green Island Prison without even being questioned.
PHOTO: CNA
One of Wang’s fellow prisoners had a violin that started to rot in the damp conditions. The moldy fiddle seemed symbolic of the prisoners’ own sorry condition, and Wang decided to give it a new life. Wang, who knew nothing about music, said he borrowed the old violin and examined its structure. Then, through the prison shop, he had some juniper wood, bowstring and a wooden hoe handle brought over from Taiwan proper. Wang said it took him a whole month to fashion the hoe handle into a bow.
Lacking tools, Wang gathered washed-up glass from the beach to make implements for sawing, gouging and sanding. To give the wooden parts the required curves and contours, he got access to the kitchen and heated them over a stove.
It took him six months to finish the instrument, Wang said, adding that then he got hold of a Japanese violin music book and went to practice in the pigsty, where his amateurish playing would not disturb the other inmates.
At the end of his sentence, Wang took his precious violin home, where it gathered dust for more than 40 years before he took it out of its case two years ago and restored it to its original condition.
A strong continental cold air mass and abundant moisture bringing snow to mountains 3,000m and higher over the past few days are a reminder that more than 60 years ago Taiwan had an outdoor ski resort that gradually disappeared in part due to climate change. On Oct. 24, 2021, the National Development Council posted a series of photographs on Facebook recounting the days when Taiwan had a ski resort on Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County. More than 60 years ago, when developing a branch of the Central Cross-Island Highway, the government discovered that Hehuanshan, with an elevation of more than 3,100m,
Death row inmate Huang Lin-kai (黃麟凱), who was convicted for the double murder of his former girlfriend and her mother, is to be executed at the Taipei Detention Center tonight, the Ministry of Justice announced. Huang, who was a military conscript at the time, was convicted for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend, surnamed Wang (王), and the murder of her mother, after breaking into their home on Oct. 1, 2013. Prosecutors cited anger over the breakup and a dispute about money as the motives behind the double homicide. This is the first time that Minister of Justice Cheng Ming-chien (鄭銘謙) has
SECURITY: To protect the nation’s Internet cables, the navy should use buoys marking waters within 50m of them as a restricted zone, a former navy squadron commander said A Chinese cargo ship repeatedly intruded into Taiwan’s contiguous and sovereign waters for three months before allegedly damaging an undersea Internet cable off Kaohsiung, a Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) investigation revealed. Using publicly available information, the Liberty Times was able to reconstruct the Shunxing-39’s movements near Taiwan since Double Ten National Day last year. Taiwanese officials did not respond to the freighter’s intrusions until Friday last week, when the ship, registered in Cameroon and Tanzania, turned off its automatic identification system shortly before damage was inflicted to a key cable linking Taiwan to the rest of
TRANSPORT CONVENIENCE: The new ticket gates would accept a variety of mobile payment methods, and buses would be installed with QR code readers for ease of use New ticketing gates for the Taipei metro system are expected to begin service in October, allowing users to swipe with cellphones and select credit cards partnered with Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC), the company said on Tuesday. TRTC said its gates in use are experiencing difficulty due to their age, as they were first installed in 2007. Maintenance is increasingly expensive and challenging as the manufacturing of components is halted or becoming harder to find, the company said. Currently, the gates only accept EasyCard, iPass and electronic icash tickets, or one-time-use tickets purchased at kiosks, the company said. Since 2023, the company said it
RSS