<strong>March 28 to April 3</strong>
The Taipei City Government was in a panic. There were only six days left until the March 29, 1994 grand opening of Daan Forest Park and officials had yet to resolve an intense dispute one that had gone on for two years over whether to keep a large Guanyin statue on the park’s northwest corner.
Buddhist Master Shih Chao-hwei (釋昭慧) and independent legislator Lin Cheng-chieh (林正杰) were on day five of their hunger strike to save the statue, vowing to “defend the statue to the death”
<strong>March 21 to March 27</strong>
“I’d rather jump into the Tamsui River!” was once a common saying for Taipei residents. By 1987, however, nothing was worth plunging into its putrid, garbage-strewn waters.
Although large-scale human activity and settlement had been taking a toll on the river for over a century, Taiwan’s rapid industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s hastened its decline. And it wasn’t just factories. The river essentially became a public garbage dump as the Taipei area’s population exploded, and only in 1974 did the government introduce a limited and questionably enforced Water Pollution Control Act (水污染防治法).
A Taiwan Today article from
<strong>March 13 to March 19</strong>
Wang Chun-liang (汪俊良) hit just two home runs over a five-year career, but his first one is enshrined in local baseball lore. On March 17, 1990, Wang’s feat extended the lead the Uni President Lions had over the Brother Elephants in Taiwan’s first professional baseball match, sealing a historic win.
During a pre-game guessing contest, the majority of fans thought that the day’s hero would be the Elephants’ “Mr Baseball” Lee Chu-ming (李居明).
“I was a dark horse, nobody guessed it would be me,” Wang recalls 18 years later in a Liberty Times (Taipei Times’ sister paper)
<strong>Aug. 30 to Sept. 5</strong>
Michael Jackson dominated the Liberty Times (Taipei Times’ sister paper) front page for the second day in a row on Sept. 5, 1993, the photo showing him grabbing the crotch of his gold leotards at Taipei Municipal Stadium.
“Michael! Michael! Michael!” the headline screamed, while the caption explained that his penchant for touching his private area is his “signature move.”
The late superstar was pretty much all the news during his whirlwind first visit to Taiwan for his Dangerous World Tour. Fans lost their minds when he waved at them from his 19th floor window at