Taiwan News
By William A. Stanton, Ph.D.
Taiwan News, Contributing Writer

The Taipei Dome — in Chinese 臺北大巨蛋 or “Taipei’s Big Giant Egg” — will have the honor of

William A. Stanton, Ph.D., the Director of the Asia Policy Center at National Tsing Hua University. (The photo courtesy of William A. Stanton)

serving as a key venue of the 2017 World University Games or Universiade, second only to the Olympics as the world’s most important international sporting competition. Unfortunately, the name “Giant Egg” is all too ironically appropriate in English because from an aesthetic, historical, functional, and city planning point of view, Taipei really has “laid a giant egg.” As English speakers know, the key meaning of the idiomatic expression “to lay an egg” is to do something badly, to perform poorly in public, or to fail miserably and in a humiliating fashion in front of others.

From my apartment, I have been able to watch the problem-plagued Giant Egg rise higher and higher, looming over the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall, the now rather small and getting-smaller tribute to the founding father of the Republic of China. Knowing at the start of construction very little about the history of the Giant Egg, I have been frankly astonished, and then increasingly felt ashamed, that city planners would have decided to position Sun Yat Sen’s Memorial in the shadow of a sports arena, shopping mall, and two associated skyscrapers.     [FULL  STORY]