Sitting on a hillside in Taipei’s Bei-tou (北投), a century-old district home to the nation’s oldest hot springs community, a two-story, wooden Japanese-style building has been a permanent feature as long as anyone can remember.
The Beitou Museum is set to celebrate its 100th anniversary next year, and museum director Saalih Lee (李莎莉) has said that she hopes to breathe new life into the old building.
Built in 1921, the structure was initially the Kazen Hotel, colonial Taiwan’s most luxurious hot springs resort, Lee said.
Photo: CNA
“This building celebrates the wabi-sabi aesthetic,” Lee said, referring to a traditional Japanese worldview centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection.
Whether an unequal leaf door decorated with cloudy glass, a deserted bathhouse covered in green tiles, or a hidden Zen garden in the building’s central yard, she hopes that visitors would appreciate the museum building for its original style, Lee said.
In its early years, the building was often used by the Japanese military, and at one point, it was a guesthouse for kamikaze pilots, said Lee, who has been museum director for 16 years.
The building changed hands after 1945, became a private museum in 1984 and was designated an historic site by the Taipei City Government in 1998, she said.
Despite its age, the 2,500m2 structure remains full of vitality and offers a combination of cultural exhibitions, dining events and recreational activities, such as fashion shows, Lee said.
Having won the inaugural prize for preserving cultural heritage from the city government last month, the museum is a centerpiece of Taipei’s efforts to promote the idea of museums without walls, Taipei Deputy Mayor Tsai Ping-kun (蔡炳坤) said.
“Taipei is not only a bustling city, but also a city that breathes,” Tsai said.
Through places such as the Beitou Museum, which is largely based on local participation and aims to enhance the welfare and development of local communities, the city has many stories to tell about its history, he said, adding that the museum helps raise public awareness about the importance of Taipei’s cultural heritage.
Beitou is the perfect place for the museum to thrive thanks to its relatively early development in the nation’s history, owing to the hot springs, according to the city government Web site.
The area is also home to historic sites such as the Beitou Hot Spring Museum, Plum Garden, Grass Mountain Chateau and Taipei Beitou Public Assembly Hall, Lee said.
With the cultural sites increasingly offering educational resources and promoting their activities better, Lee said that she hopes that the number of visitors to the museum, currently 50,000 each year, would increase in coming years.
A magnitude 4.9 earthquake struck off Tainan at 11:47am today, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The hypocenter was 32.3km northeast of Tainan City Hall at a depth of 7.3km, CWA data showed. The intensity of the quake, which gauges the actual effect of a seismic event, measured 4 in Tainan and Chiayi County on Taiwan's seven-tier intensity scale, the data showed. The quake had an intensity of 3 in Chiayi City and County, and Yunlin County, while it was measured as 2 in Kaohsiung, Nantou County, Changhua County, Taitung County and offshore Penghu County, the data showed. There were no immediate reports of
Weather conditions across Taiwan are expected to remain stable today, but cloudy to rainy skies are expected from tomorrow onward due to increasing moisture in the atmosphere, according to the Central Weather Administration (CWA). Daytime highs today are expected to hit 25-27°C in western Taiwan and 22-24°C in the eastern counties of Yilan, Hualien, and Taitung, data on the CWA website indicated. After sunset, temperatures could drop to 16-17°C in most parts of Taiwan. For tomorrow, precipitation is likely in northern Taiwan as a cloud system moves in from China. Daytime temperatures are expected to hover around 25°C, the CWA said. Starting Monday, areas
Taiwan has recorded its first fatal case of Coxsackie B5 enterovirus in 10 years after a one-year-old boy from southern Taiwan died from complications early last month, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. CDC spokesman Lo Yi-chun (羅一鈞) told a news conference that the child initially developed a fever and respiratory symptoms before experiencing seizures and loss of consciousness. The boy was diagnosed with acute encephalitis and admitted to intensive care, but his condition deteriorated rapidly, and he passed away on the sixth day of illness, Lo said. This also marks Taiwan’s third enterovirus-related death this year and the first severe
A Taiwanese software developer has created a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model to help people use AI without exposing sensitive data, project head Huang Chung-hsiao (黃崇校) said yesterday. Huang, a 55-year-old coder leading a US-based team, said that concerns over data privacy and security in popular generative AIs such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek motivated him to develop a personal AI assistant named “Mei.” One of the biggest security flaws with cloud-based algorithms is that users are required to hand over personal information to access the service, giving developers the opportunity to mine user data, he said. For this reason, many government agencies and