A popular exhibit at the Chimei Museum in Tainan featuring a hologram of Queen Elizabeth II has been well received by visitors, and drew even larger crowds following her passing on Thursday, the museum said on Friday.
The exhibit, which features Equanimity — the first holographic portrait of the queen, commissioned to Canadian artist Chris Levine in 2004 by the Jersey Heritage Trust — is on loan from the UK’s National Portrait Gallery, and is on display in Taiwan for the first time.
The hologram was made by having a camera move along a track while taking a series of 200 stills of the queen.
Photo: Wu Chun-feng, Taipei Times
The portrait is on a worldwide tour, with the last stop being Taiwan, where large crowds have appeared daily to see the work since it arrived for a two-week loan, the museum said.
In the portrait, the queen is seen wearing the George IV State Diadem — a diamond crown made for King George IV in 1820 — as well as the dress she wore for her coronation in 1953.
Chimei said it had planned the exhibit to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne.
Meanwhile, a private collector is displaying 13 commemorative coins issued by British authorities on the queen’s 80th birthday in 2006.
Wang Kao-jung (王高榮), owner of Tainan-based antiques dealer Soapberry, said he bought the coins from another private collector several years ago.
“The coins are very rare in Taiwan, so I wanted to give people the chance to see them” given the current interest in the queen, he said.
Wang — who said he enjoys collecting ancient cultural relics, cars, professional baseball cards, dolls, and various commemorative coins — has put the Queen Elizabeth II coins on display at Soapberry.
The coins were issued with a booklet, which is also being shown, he said.
Also on display are silver coins featuring the queen minted by the Bank of Taiwan from 2009 to 2014 under commission by the government of Tuvalu, he said.
“The Tuvaluan coins feature the queen because the country was administered by the British as part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony from 1916 to 1975,” he said.
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,
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
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