Kinmen’s Mofan Street (模範街) has become a new sightseeing spot for tourists from across the Strait after it was decorated with a sea of flags of both the Republic of China (ROC) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Local residents might fly the national flag during Double Ten National Day, but during the New Year holiday the street, which was built in 1924, was lined with national flags on one side and Chinese flags on the other. Many visitors were seen taking pictures and sharing them on social media.
Two Chinese visitors from Xiamen in China’s Fujian Province said it felt good to see their country’s familiar five-star flags.
Photo: Wu Cheng-ting, Taipei Times
The two flags facing one another on the street “symbolize that the two sides of the Strait can coexist and prosper together,” a Taiwanese surnamed Lee (李) said.
Some tourists have compared the street with Panmunjom — the joint security village located between South Korea and North Korea where the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement that ended fighting in the Korean War was signed.
While many residents said they did not know who first put up the Chinese flags, Dongmen Borough (東門里) Warden Tsai Hsiang-kun (蔡祥坤) said the idea was broached by local ceramic artist Wang Ming-tsung (王明宗).
The motive was quite simple at the onset, Tsai said: to boost local economic activity.
Hanging two flags side by side is a form of installation art and a creative idea, Wang said, adding that more Chinese than Taiwanese visit Kinmen nowadays.
The question of whether the flags are symbolic of “one nation on each side [of the Taiwan Strait]” or “one country, two systems” (一國兩制) is on many visitors’ minds, Wang said.
Wang and Tsai said they were delighted to see the street invigorated by tourists and the flags would remain there until the Lunar New Year in February.
However, they called on visitors not to drive cars into the street.
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,
Taiwan’s population last year shrank further and births continued to decline to a yearly low, the Ministry of the Interior announced today. The ministry published the 2024 population demographics statistics, highlighting record lows in births and bringing attention to Taiwan’s aging population. The nation’s population last year stood at 23,400,220, a decrease of 20,222 individuals compared to 2023. Last year, there were 134,856 births, representing a crude birth rate of 5.76 per 1,000 people, a slight decline from 2023’s 135,571 births and 5.81 crude birth rate. This decrease of 715 births resulted in a new record low per the ministry’s data. Since 2016, which saw
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
China’s newest Type-076 amphibious assault ship has two strengths and weaknesses, wrote a Taiwanese defense expert, adding that further observations of its capabilities are warranted. Jiang Hsin-biao (江炘杓), an assistant researcher at the National Defense and Security Research, made the comments in a report recently published by the institute about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) military and political development. China christened its new assault ship Sichuan in a ceremony on Dec. 27 last year at Shanghai’s Hudong Shipyard, China’s Xinhua news agency reported. “The vessel, described as the world’s largest amphibious assault ship by the [US think tank] Center for Strategic and International
RSS