A 19-year-old recently placed an orange-and-white traffic cone on the equestrian statue of Zheng Chenggong outside the Yanping Junwang Shrine in Tainan — and the photograph, once it circulated on social media, sent viewers' minds 9,000 kilometers west, to Scotland.
How Glasgow Spent Four Decades Learning to Love a Cone
Sometime in the 1980s, someone climbed the plinth of the Duke of Wellington's equestrian bronze at Royal Exchange Square in Glasgow, balanced a traffic cone on the general's head, and walked away. The city removed it. Someone replaced it. The exchange repeated through one decade and into the next, until the cone on Wellington's head became as familiar as the statue beneath it.
In 2013, Glasgow City Council proposed raising the statue's pedestal to make future cone placement physically impossible. Within days, more than 10,000 residents had signed a petition opposing the plan. The cone, they argued, was no longer a prank — it had become part of the city. The council abandoned the proposal. The cone remained.
Today, the coned Wellington is one of Glasgow's most photographed landmarks: an emblem of the city's working-class wit, its irreverence toward military grandeur, and its deep instinct to puncture pomposity with the nearest available object.
Tainan's Heritage Rules Left No Room for Ambiguity
In Tainan, the story moved faster. The Yanping Junwang Shrine is a nationally designated historic site, and Zheng Chenggong — the 17th-century Ming loyalist who expelled Dutch colonizers from Taiwan — is not simply a subject of public art. He is a figure embedded in local religious practice, historical education, and civic memory. The shrine is, in a specific and consequential sense, sacred ground.
The culture bureau removed the cone within hours. Police reviewed surveillance footage, identified the young man responsible, and issued a NT$6,000 fine under Taiwan's Social Order Maintenance Act. The statue was undamaged. The case was closed.
That response reflects a coherent logic: when a monument occupies a heritage site rather than a city square, the rules governing it are correspondingly different. Glasgow's Wellington stands in a commercial plaza. Tainan's Zheng Chenggong stands at one of the island's most significant historical landmarks. The traffic cone may have looked the same in both photographs, but the context surrounding each statue was not.
At Jianguo, a Seasonal Tradition Outlasted Every Graduating Class
Between Glasgow's decades-long civic negotiation and Tainan's swift institutional response, there is a third model: Jianguo Senior High School in Taipei, where the bronze statue of Chiang Kai-shek has long functioned as a rotating canvas.
For years, students have dressed the statue for the season — Santa hats at Christmas, costumes at Halloween, props for graduation ceremonies, accessories for school anniversaries. The modifications are temporary; the statue returns to its original state when the event concludes. No fines have been issued. No official policy governs the practice. It simply persisted, quietly, until it became tradition.
What Jianguo's statue accumulated, over time, is something neither of the other two achieved: a layered record of student life, where each graduating class adds its own version to a story that began before they arrived. The statue did not become a city icon, as in Glasgow, or a subject of heritage controversy, as in Tainan. It became a school's shared language — renewed semester by semester by the people who live alongside it.
A Statue's Second Life Belongs to the City Around It
Public monuments rarely stay fixed in meaning. Chicago's Cloud Gate, the mirrored steel sculpture installed in Millennium Park, was nicknamed "The Bean" by residents almost from the start — a term the artist reportedly disliked but could not displace. Copenhagen's Little Mermaid has been decapitated, repainted, and turned into a platform for protest over the past century, yet it endures as one of Denmark's most visited landmarks, partly because the interference made it a living object rather than a static one.
The Zheng Chenggong cone spent perhaps a few hours in place before the culture bureau arrived. Glasgow's cone has persisted for more than four decades. Jianguo's seasonal decorations return each semester. Each city — or school — arrived at a different answer, but all three are engaged in the same underlying question: once a statue is installed, who does it actually belong to?
The sculptor's work ends at the unveiling. Everything after that is written by the people who walk past it, photograph it, argue about it, and occasionally put a traffic cone on its head. Tainan chose to preserve. Glasgow chose to accept. Jianguo chose to play. All three choices are, in their own way, a form of civic conversation with the past.
Original Article In Chinese （Related： 1% Profile | Takahide Komatsu Paints Butterflies Against Time ｜ Latest ）
