Tourists coming to Taiwan soon will find plenty of rooms at some of the 28 hotels to be completed in the next three years.
The Tourism Bureau of the Communications Ministry said more than 9,900 rooms will be added at 17 hotels in Taipei (6,693 rooms), two in Taipei county (1,180 rooms), one in Taoyuan county (387 rooms), three in Taichung (802 rooms), one in Changhua City (187 rooms) and four in Kaohsiung (1,144 rooms).
Taiwan already has 105 tourist hotels, most of them in Taipei, with 10,305 rooms.
In the last three years, no hotels have been built. Hotels were listed as "special businesses" subject to unscheduled and unannounced police checks until recently.
Additionally, a zoning law barred hotels from residential areas and the tax incentive was not attractive. These obstacles have been eliminated.
Tourists exceeded 1.1 million last year and are expected to top 1.6 million this year.
Construction of a hotel with 1,025 rooms will begin shortly. Approval of the US$36 million project on Chengteh Road in Taipei was given by the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
The investor is Yuan Wen-tung, a Chinese businessman in Canada and husband of former kung fu actress Cheng Pei-pei. Yuan is said to be supported by an American consortium.
Government sources said Yuan pledged to put up US$15 million in cash. The remaining US$21 million will be in the form of imported building materials.
This hotel will be Taiwan's second largest. The biggest is the Asia International Plaza with 1,200 to 1,500 rooms and already under construction at Tunghua North Road and Nanking East Road in Taipei.
54 aged 11 to 81 cited for good deeds
Fifty-four persons ranging in age from 11 to 81 were cited for good deeds.
Yang Liang-kung, president of the Examination Yuan, presided.
In a written message, President C. K. Yen praised the 54 and more good deeds to make the world a better place.
The eldest, Chuang Yu-chiu, 81, of Pingtung, has spent many years taking care of sick people in his neighborhood. Eleven-year old Hu Pi-lan of Toulu, Yunlin county, used her earnings from part-time jobs to help classmates pay tuition.
There were three foreigners: O.E. Webster, Pacific region 4th district president of the American Legion, Father C.M. Nardon and Maria M. Bido.
Webster was commended for his contributions to the blood bank at the Veterans General Hospital during the last 10 years. He led Legion members in donating 387,500 cc of blood. Webster himself gave 23,000 cc.
Father Nardon, 75, from Italy, has helped the handicapped in mainland China and Taiwan for many years. He helped raise money to build a girls' dormitory at the Chung Yuan Christian College of Science and Engineering.
The 72-year-old Maria Bido from West Germany has helped deaf and mute children in Taiwan for more than a decade. She came to China in 1934 and took care of orphans in Kunming, Yunnan, during the Japanese war.
Children of well-off excel in college exam
Children from well-off, well-educated urban families have the best chance to pass the joint college entrance examination, according to a survey of 1976 participants.
The survey, commissioned by the Education Ministry and conducted by National Taiwan Normal University's Institute of Education, concluded that the entrance examination is essentially fair. But it came up with these other findings:
- Children of well-educated parents tended to score high. Those with fathers who were graduated from senior high school showed a 57.4 per cent college admission rate compared with 42 per cent for those whose fathers did not attend senior high school.
- Children of fathers with high-ranking managerial jobs made up 26.08 per cent of those taking the examination but 30.9 per cent of them passed. Children of technicians and skilled laborers made up 25.9 per cent of examinees but only 21.41 per cent passed. Figures for children of non-skilled laborers were 19.14 per cent and 17.52 per cent.
- Members of families with monthly incomes between NT$5,000 and NT$100,000 made up 45.96 per cent of examinees and 45.4 per cent of those who passed. Students whose families had average monthly income above NT$10,000 comprised 41.75 per cent of those receiving passing grades, although they made up only 35.62 per cent of participants. Participants from families with an average monthly income below NT$5,000 made up 18.4 per cent of examinees but only 12.83 per cent of them passed.
- Students from the city did much better than those from rural areas in meeting the exam challenge.
- Children from small families excelled those from large ones.
- Family involvement in cultural activities, long considered an advantage, appeared to have little effect on a student's chances of passing the examination.
Most junior high graduates find jobs
The employment rate of last year's junior middle school graduates who wanted jobs reached 95.86 per cent.
This represented 55,567 graduates out of the total of 57,900 looking for jobs after graduation. A spokesman for the Department of Social Affairs of the Taiwan Provincial Government said more than 36,800 graduates obtained jobs through job placement centers and 18,759 sought their own.
Job opportunities totaled 77,404, but only 23,900 were for males and 53,400 for females. Only 27,584 female graduates were looking for jobs.
One baby boom leads to another
The failure of the family planning program in 1976 can be traced to the baby boom in the 1950s, said Lin Chow-ching, deputy director of the National Health Administration.
The natural increase rate for 1976 climbed from the 1.8 per cent of 1975 to 2.1 per cent, the same as in 1974. The 423,356 babies born represented a 55,400 increase over the previous year.
Lin said the birth rate of 1949-59 averaged 4 per cent and led to the "baby boom" of the 1970s.
Teen-age pregnancy is on the increase. "The family planning program has gained ground with the over-25 age group but lost ground with the under-19 group," Lin said.
The fertility rate of girls between 15 and 19 stood at 37.4 per cent in 1959. The figure climbed to 63.9 per cent in 1975. Of the 423,356 babies born in 1976, 9.6 per cent were to mothers under 19 years old.
The superstition that the Dragon Year is lucky also contributed to the 1976 baby boom.
Lin said the Republic of China will have to import more grain to feed new mouths. In 1976, the cost of soybean, corn and wheat imports amounted to an all-time high of US$481,760,000.
Grade schools will need at least 1,000 more classrooms, each seating 60. The cost will be NT$500,000,000. The additional 1,000 teachers will cost NT$1,000,000,000 annually.
The Chinese Family Planning Association has estimated that each family will spend at least NT$210,000 on a baby before it reaches the age of 4. The government will spend NT$42,700 for the first nine years of a child's education.
"If the Republic of China had had a natural increase rate of 1.04 per cent in 1976, the same as Japan's, our per capita income would have risen from US$706 to US$1,035," Lin said.
To most people, living on a mountain would seem like an enchanting experience. But to the three weathermen stationed on Yushan, the highest mountain of Taiwan, it isn't quite that.
The mountain weather station at an altitude of 3,851 meters has been resisting wind and snow for 35 years.
It took aborigines two years to build the 50-ping wooden house as an observatory for the Japanese. It was completed in 1940.
The average annual temperature is about 32 degrees F. Snow is common between October and April.
Before weathermen reach the mountain fastness, they have to hike 4.5 kilometers. This can take 10 hours in bad weather. Only those under 46 years old are given assignments.
Supplies are brought in from Alishan every 10 days.
Weathermen devote their leisure to listening to the radio or watching TV.
Breakfast tea does well all day
Some years ago, a Hongkong yam cha (breakfast tea) restaurant opened a branch in Taipei.
Since then, more than 25 others have been established.
The principal attraction of the yam cha restaurants is the dim sum (food) that is served.
Waiters and waitresses circulate with carts and trays laden with small dishes.
Despite the name "breakfast tea," the yam cha restaurants are open from breakfast time to midnight.
Legend has it that tea was first grown in China about the same time rice cultivation began. In the beginning, tea was used more as a medicine than a beverage.
In 350 B.C. - more than 1,000 years before Westerners had their first cup of coffee - the Chinese began to drink tea. By the 4th and 5th centuries, it had become the favorite beverage of the in habitants of the Yangtse River Valley.
The ancients insisted that only when people were in a good mood, in a congenial company and were served perfectly prepared tea could they fully enjoy the color, fragrance and flavor. They could never have imagined that in the 20th century, the Chinese could enjoy tea in noisy yam cha surroundings.
In Taipei, the average cost of tea is NT$4 (11½ U.S. cents) per person. A dish of food is NT$14.
Among the more popular dim sum dishes are shrimp puffs, barbecued pork dumplings, crisp spring rolls, steamed rice rolls, fish balls, turnip paste, beef balls and sweets.
All the world says: Let's learn Chinese
The worldwide publicity given to acupuncture and kung fu has inspired a growing number of foreigners to learn the Chinese language.
Although Chinese is one of the five languages simultaneously translated at meetings of the United Nations and is spoken by hundreds of millions of people, it had not previously stimulated worldwide interest.
The Taipei Language Institute, at which about 40,000 foreigners and overseas Chinese have studied Chinese, says its original enrollment was some 50 students, all American missionaries.
The institute now has five centers in Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung with more than 6,000 students in the recently completed semester. Students include businessmen, diplomatic personnel and dependents, and graduate students from all over the world.
The institute cooperates with universities at home and abroad in carrying out language and other cultural programs. Among these are Thnghai University in Taichung; Oberlin College at Oberlin, Ohio; University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia, Pa.; University of Hawaii at Honolulu; University of Maryland at College Park, Md.; Fairleigh Dickenson University at Rutherford, N.J.; Pomona College at Claremont, Cal.; University of Delhi in India; and Chuo University in Japan.
Similar language centers have been set up at some of the leading universities in Taiwan: National Taiwan University, National Taiwan Normal University, Fujen Catholic University and Soochow University .
The Mandarin Daily News Language Center, affiliated with the Mandarin Daily News (Kuoyu Jyhpaw) of Taipei, is popular with foreigners and overseas Chinese language students.
Since it was set up in March, 1973, it has trained 1,800 students from 39 countries and areas, the majority of them Americans and Japanese.
Most American language students are college graduates majoring in political science with a special interest in East Asian affairs.
To read a simple Chinese novel, one must learn about 3,500 characters. Some foreign students can read classical Chinese literature requiring a vocabulary of some 10,000 words.
A teacher of the Taipei language Institute said many students are interested only in learning to speak. Many American and European businessmen in Taiwan are studying at language centers because they want to surmount the language barrier.
Japanese students of acupuncture have come to Taiwan to learn to read Chinese because they want to study old Chinese medical books.
Tea leaf cigarettes safe but not so good
Used tea leaves may be used as a tobacco substitute. That's the conclusion of an old man in Keelung after 13 years of search for a safe smoke.
The 67-year-old man, a retired sculptor, is known among his neighbors as "Old Huang."
Huang began his long search for a tobacco substitute after his chain-smoking wife died of cancer. He never smoked.
He has studied hundreds of plants, comparing the leaves of these plants with tobacco before and after drying.
He examined the texture, tasted the leaves with his tongue and smelled them. When the leaves were dry, he burned them and smelled the smoke.
In the process of tasting, Huang was poisoned on several occasions.
His preliminary findings are not encouraging. "No other plant leaves smell as good as tobacco," he conceded.
Only five or six plan t leaves smell like tobacco, he added.
Huang believes used tea leaves could be used as a tobacco substitute but is still searching for the perfect tobacco substitute.
Yangming Park area to be doubled
Yangming Park in northern Taipei will be expanded this year to almost twice its present size.
The expansion is scheduled to start in July and will be completed within a year.
The cost of adding 4.1 hectares is estimated at NT$40,000,000.
The parking lot in the inner section of the park (called Hoshan Park) will be turned into lawns and gardens. An area below the gate entrance will become a new parking lot.
A secondary lot will be built at Miao Pu some distance from the park. A walk will lead from there to the center of Hoshan Park.
The front section of Chien-shan Park with basketball courts, skating rink and swimming pool will remain unchanged.
The department has started land purchase negotiations with owners of orange groves in the proposed expansion area.
To conserve the natural beauty of Yangmingshan, few artificial facilities will be added.
Yangming Park has 34.3 hectares of land and attracts a total of 1,600,000 visitors each year.
From February to early April is cherry blossom and azalea season.
Ancient history is hard to prove
The Taipei District Procuratory rejected a forgery charge against Han Ssu-tao, who claims to be the 39th lineal descendant of Han Yu, the famed T'ang dynasty writer.
The prosecution reached the decision on the ground that the charge could not be substantiated.
The accusation against Han was raised by Huang Cheng-mou, a resident of Kaohsiung.
Han's claim is based on an entry on the last page of the Han clan genealogy. That page was added by Han himself, Huang said.
Huang claimed the Han family record has a long blank period stretching from the 4th to the 23rd generation. Therefore, he argued, Han's claim to be a lineal descendant of Han Yu is extremely doubtful.
Procurator Wang Ting-mao conceded that Huang's statement is logical. However, he added, the Han clan genealogical record from the 24th to the 38th generation was compiled before Han Ssu-tao's time.
Since Han Ssu-tao's father is recorded in the record as the 38th lineal descendant of Han Yu, it is only natural that Han Ssu-tao should consider himself the 39th lineal descendant. The charge of forgery therefore does not stand, Procurator Wang said.
Han sued magazine publisher Kuo Shou-hua for libeling Han Yu. Kuo asserted that the ancient writer died after he took the wrong medicine to cure veneral disease.
Kuo was convicted in the Taipei District Court and fined NT$900. The sentence was upheld by the Taiwan High Court.
The case kicked off a heated controversy.
Myopia attacks children via TV
Myopia is no longer a privilege of students and adults. It has reached 33 per cent of children under 5 through television, according to the Nursing Department of the National Defense Medical College.
The department recently conducted a survey of 1,000 kindergarteners. A third turned out to be nearsighted.
Instead of having myopia, children under 6 should be a little farsighted, the department said.
Professor Yin Tso-ehien interviewed parents and concluded overexposure to television was at fault.
Yin said parents, unaware of the danger, allow youngsters to sit close to the tube for long periods of time. Some parents turn off lights during viewing, adding to the burden of already tired eyes.