Taiwan: Satellite imagery of Taiwan’s past and present terrains will be turned into a calendar, developed by National Central University (NCU) and Academia Sinica team. “This is the first time we have blended technology and history to revisualise the past,” NCU associate professor Chang Chung-pai said.
“The calendar is part reality, part imagination, but has enormous value because it charts Taiwan’s geological changes over the centuries,” Chang added.
According to Chang, the calendar features images captured in 2009 by SPOT-5—an earth observation satellite operated by Toulouse-based Spot Image Corp. These were reformatted to incorporate the landmarks and geographical features noted in a 1697 Taiwan travelogue by Yu Yonghe, a Fujian province official during the Ching dynasty.
Yu recorded his account while in Taiwan on a nine-month sulphur buying assignment. One of his most remarkable observations describes today’s densely populated Taipei Basin as the site of a huge lake caused by an earthquake in 1694.
Source: Taiwan Today
