<strong>May 16 to May 22</strong>
Lin Wen-cha (林文察) and his “Taiwanese braves” (台灣勇) arrived in Fujian Province’s Jianyang District (建陽) on May 19, 1859, eager for their first action outside of Taiwan.
The target was local bandit Guo Wanzong (郭萬淙), one of several ruffians who had taken advantage of ongoing Taiping Rebellion to establish strongholds in the area.
A strongman leader of the notable Wufeng Lin Family (霧峰林家), Lin had impressed Qing Dynasty rulers five years earlier by helping expel the remnants of Small Knife Society (小刀會) rebels from Keelung.
Lin’s forces routed Guo’s gang in just 11 days, earning a formal
<strong>May 9 to May 15</strong>
Poisoned dagger in hand, Korean national Cho Myeong-ha pushed aside the cheering schoolchildren and lunged at Prince Kuni Kuniyoshi’s roofless car. He swiped once and missed. As the car sped up, Cho threw the dagger. But its unclear what happened next on the streets of Taichu (Taichung) on May 14, 1928.
According to post-war Korean sources, the dagger grazed the prince and inflicted a minor injury before hitting the driver in the back. The poison soon spread through Kuniyoshi’s body, and he died the following January in Tokyo. Japanese accounts, however, maintain that
Taiwan International Documentary Festival programmer Chen Wan-ling (陳婉伶) says that in this digital age its increasingly important to showcase film that pushes the boundaries of story telling.
“Of course, we still offer a lot of more conventional material, but as someone I really respect once said, ‘A film festival always has to be a step ahead of the audience.’ People can easily access films online these days, so what’s left for us to do is to curate, and hope that our selections and programming provide a new context or perspective for people to examine each topic.”
In her ninth year working
After failing to commit suicide (by attempting to consume fatal amounts of cinnamon, chewing gum and carrots), despondent insurance salesman Liang (Fu Meng-po, 傅孟柏) comes across Yukio Mishima’s 1968 novel Life For Sale.
Written two years before Mishima’s dramatic suicide, the book’s protagonist, Hanio Yamada, sees no future and puts his life up for sale in the classified section of a newspaper, leading to a series of ridiculous events.
Liang’s resolve to emulate Yamada is bolstered when he’s fired from his job after punching a coworker. There are no takers at first, but Liang soon finds that the less he values
<strong>May 2 to May 8</strong>
In 1898, the all-male Tainan Mission Council was upset that female missionaries were carrying out projects without their consent.
The Presbyterian Church of England began sending single professional or semi-professional women abroad in 1878. There were three of them in Tainan: Joan Stuart, Annie Butler and Margaret Barnett, who took turns running the Sinlou Girls’ School (新樓女學校, today’s Chang Jung Girls’ Senior High School). Opened in 1887, it was the first Western-style school for women in southern Taiwan, and the only admission requirement was no foot-binding.
Reverend William Campbell wrote a 11-page letter to the trio on