Taipei, Aug. 23 (CNA) The winners of this year's Tang Prize will have an opportunity to sample Taiwanese cuisine at a dinner that will be held in their honor when they visit Taiwan in September for the award ceremony and other events, the organizers said Tuesday.
The dishes served at the banquet will feature meats and other products from Taiwan's 17 cities and counties, offering "a taste of Taiwan," said Chern Jenn-chuan (陳振川), CEO of the foundation, at a news conference.
In addition, there will be live entertainment at the banquet at the Grand Hotel in Taipei, headlined by the world-renowned U-Theatre drummers of Taiwan, Chern said.
The banquet will begin with Aiyu jelly, yam and taro balls, sakura shrimp, cuttlefish sausage and roasted mullet roe as starters, the foundation said.
The other courses will include chicken soup, deep-fried shrimp with salted duck eggs, steamed giant grouper, and mutton stew with fish noodles, it added.
Some of the featured ingredients will be taro and mutton from Kaohsiung; sakura shrimp and mullet roe from Pingtung; roasted duck from Yilan; giant grouper from Penghu; and shrimp from Chiayi, according to Kuo Hung-che (郭宏徹) of the New Taipei-based Chinese Gourmet Association, which promotes Taiwanese dishes.
Kuo was invited to work with Grand Hotel chefs to create the dishes for the banquet.
"The ingredients will come from around Taiwan, from north to south," all in-season products of high quality, Kuo said.
The dishes will be named based on poetry from China's Tang Dynasty (618-907), from which the prize takes its name, according to Chern.
Given that the banquet will held in September when Taiwan celebrates the Moon Festival, the foundation has chosen a moon-related theme and many of the dishes will be named based on Tang Dynasty poems about the moon.
The second Tang Prizes were awarded in June to six exceptional individuals who have made major contributions in sustainable development, biopharmaceutical science, sinology and rule of law.
American physicist Arthur H. Rosenfeld, hailed as "The Godfather of Energy Efficiency," won the prize in sustainable development; and French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier, American geneticist Jennifer Doudna and Chinese-American synthetic biologist Feng Zhang (張鋒) shared the prize in biopharmaceutical science.
American scholar William Theodore de Bary won the prize in sinology; and Louise Arbour, a Canadian lawyer and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, was named the winner of the prize in rule of law.
Except for de Bary and Rosenfeld, all the other laureates will attend the award ceremony in Taipei on Sept. 25 and the banquet that night, the foundation said. Although de Bary and Rosenfeld will not be there in person, they will be represented at the events, the foundation said.
During Tang Prize Week from Sept. 22-28, the laureates will give lectures across Taiwan about their life's work, the foundation said.
