The last century-old ancestral house urgently needs rescuing, to preserve a memory for the city
Neiwei in Kaohsiung, China, has been a farming village developing for a hundred years since the Qing dynasty, and is one of the few areas in the former Kaohsiung City that still retains the old fabric left from the Qing dynasty. Under modern urbanization it has gradually been eroded and broken apart. The Li clan, at the core of the old settlement, whose "Li Family Ancestral House" symbolizes the development of the Neiwei settlement, holds quite high cultural value in historical, humanistic and architectural terms, yet it is about to be demolished because the city government is opening a road, becoming a cultural casualty of the rapid development of the so-called "civilized city."
The rescue campaign was launched in 2009, and three years have passed since then, yet the Li Family Ancestral House in Neiwei is still not free of the threat of demolition because of the road opening. As the times advance, the Kaohsiung City Urban Development Bureau has still made no review of the planned road. Where is the professionalism of the nation's urban planning? The Cultural Affairs Bureau has also made no improvement in administrative procedures, and the preservation of cultural assets has regressed. Is this Taiwan, China, that we call "a nation founded on culture"?
[Vision map for the development of the Neiwei area] (drawn by Zheng Yaoxiang)
Petition platform: http://campaign.tw-npo.org/sign.php?id=2012031200320100
Blog: http://neiweili.blogspot.com/ (more about the Li Family Ancestral House in Neiwei)