TAIPEI ¨C In a dimly lit red-brick house in central Taiwan, film hunter Wang Wei and his team haul out aging film reels, salvaging the fragile remnants of a cinema boom that nearly vanished from history.
Rare Taiwanese-language films ¡ª known locally as ¡°taiyupian¡± ¡ª flourished briefly from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s under the Kuomintang (KMT) government, which fled to Taiwan following its defeat by the Chinese Communist Party.
Until it lifted martial law in the late 1980s, the KMT promoted Mandarin as the official language of Taiwan and sidelined Taiwanese Hokkien, but independent and private producers still made the widely watched black-and-white movies.
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