Taipei, Nov. 5 (CNA) A television program to be broadcast Nov. 14 will introduce lesser-known aspects of Taiwan's past, from the Japanese colonial period up to the end of World War II, and the Cold War, to allow Asian audiences to learn more about the country's rich history.
"Hidden Cities: Taiwan, " a collaboration between the cable and satellite History Channel and the Council of Cultural Affairs, features visits to places around the country that might be less familiar to people overseas, including a nuclear fallout shelter, a World War II prisoner of war (POW) camp, the last frontline of the Chinese civil war and a Japanese immigrant village.
The show's presenter, Anthony Morse, who visited Taiwan for the first time to shoot the film, said he was surprised by the country's rich history and received the warmest reception from the Taiwanese people among the other places he visited -- Beijing, Malaysia and Indonesia -- where different episodes of the program were filmed.
The two-week film schedule started in Cihu, Taoyuan County, where the late Republic of China President Chiang Kai-shek is interred and which is the location of a nuclear fallout shelter he had built to serve as a command post in the event of an invasion by China.
The crew then traveled to Kinmen Island, a Taiwanese outpost and one-time battleground within sight of the Chinese coast, where they explored the remains of a subterranean hospital and a network of tunnels beneath the island's Chunglin Village.
In Hualien on Taiwan's east coast, they turned their attention on Jian, an immigrant village during the Japanese colonial period where elements of Japanese culture have survived to this day, along with Lin Tien Shan, a logging station that was known as Morisaga during Japanese rule.
The last segment filmed was in the southern county of Pingtung, where Morse and his crew visited the site of the Heito POW camp, one of the worst of its kind in Taiwan, where the Japanese forced thousands of Allied servicemen captured in WWII to work in the sugarcane industry. (By Chris Wang) ENDITEM/J