A flag raising ceremony known across Taiwan
A flag raising ceremony known across Taiwan
One man's story in creating an icon.
A few weeks ago was the Republic of China’s national holiday, the day that celebrated the beginning of the Xinhai revolution of 1911, which would result in the Qing dynasty nominally headed by the last child emperor Puyi, to abdicate his position and thus ushering in the creation of the new republic.
In Taiwan, this day have obviously, like most national days, been celebrated with many government public events, however, the one I will talk about today is not one of those, even though it has increasingly garnered a lot of government recognition and support
This event is paid for by a single individual, over the last 30 years, and has become so well known that pretty much everyone knows about this as the most famous flag raising ceremony on double tenth.
Mr. Zhang Lao Wang is the sponsor of this event, every year he spends a decent chunk of change (this year it was around 20K usd) to buy all the flags for this event, he has refused donations all this time for this event.
So what’s the story with Mr. Zhang? it is quite a tale.
Mr. Zhang’s day job is opening a small restaurant nearby (not too far from where I live), a lot of time this place is now reservation only as his fame as grown, he sells tradition Yunnan style cuisine (which is sort of like Thai food, they share a lot of dishes.) .
He was born in Yunnan, but basically grew up in the golden triangle, as one of the relatively untold story of the Chinese civil war was that there was a rather significant army with very significant civilian following that moved into South East Asia in the aftermath of the war, still loyal to and supported by the KMT in Taiwan.
Eventually this became an international incident, as obviously all these newly independent states in SEA suddenly had a huge roaming army inside their border with civilians and all, many tragedies and conflict arosed from this and to this day that region is still of course, notorious of being one of the most dangerous in the world. By the later 50s, the KMT eventually ferried most of them to Taiwan.
Mr. Zhang was one of those that was born into the military families within that army, his early memory was basically nothing but war, with the army often fighting with both the PLA and local SEA forces, they were routinely displaced.
His story was that his mother had always given his father a hand sewed flag, noting that if he falls it would be a way to identify him. Luckily they managed to never put that to use and relocated to Taiwan safely, however when his father passed away in the late 80s, this story resurfaced as he found said flags among his father’s possessions.
This drove him to since then, run this private flag raising ceremony around his community every double tenth day, as the area is largely inhabited by many other military families it has unsurprisingly supported by most of this neighbors and community.
By now, it has overtaken pretty much even the public ceremony (where many people are obligated to show up due to being public workers.) the mayor of Taoyuan and many legislator / councilmen also show up.
Mr. Zhang is quite old now obviously, but it seems unlikely that the event would die with him, as it has now become basically an iconic event of the area.