Asia plastics boss dies at 95
CHIMEI Museum has become the largest private museum in Taiwan and home to the world’s biggest and most comprehensive violin collection.
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CHIMEI Museum has become the largest private museum in Taiwan and home to the world’s biggest and most comprehensive violin collection.
Shi Wen-long, founder of one of Asia's largest plastics businesses and a dedicated collector of musical instruments, passed away at the age of 95 in Taiwan on 18 November.
According to Forbes, Shi was born poor during the period of Japanese rule and started a rubber and plastics business with the equivalent of $700 and four employees in 1953.
In 1960, he established CHIMEI Corp., which, by 1994, had become the world's largest producer of ABS resin, a plastic often used in dashboards and door panels.
Shi ranked among Forbes' world's richest people and dubbed as the "father of acrylic" for driving the development of the plastics industry in Taiwan.
Nonetheless, he and the CHIMEI Group have become well-known not just because the group is an industry leader, but because of Shi's dedication to culture and arts and public welfare.
In Taiwan, almost everybody knows the CHIMEI Museum and CHIMEI Hospital.
CHIMEI Hospital is in Tainan, a city on Taiwan's southwest coast. Compared to Taipei City, the capital in Northern Taiwan, healthcare resources are relatively scarce in southern Taiwan.
In 1987, Shi felt the lack of medical resources in the region and decided to set up a hospital providing high-quality and affordable healthcare to his hometown folks who earn much less than urbanites, and incurred the NT$0.7 billion (P1.2 billion) liabilities of then Father Fox memorial Hospital, which was on the verge of bankruptcy.
By implementing reforms, such as reducing costs paid by patients and hiring medical experts to provide high-quality health services, CHIMEI Hospital has become the largest integrated healthcare system in south-central Taiwan.
At the same time, since Shi Wen-long visited then Tainan State Education Museum when he was eight, Shi has been dreaming of the creation of his own museum and opening it to the public.
Shi also fell in love with violin when he first heard the musical piece "Traumerei" by Schumann with his elder sister at the movies at the age of five. Out of love with the violin, Shi bought his first violin using the money he earned from part-time job in 1945 when Japan lost in World War II and some Japanese were selling their instruments to raise money to return home.
Today, CHIMEI Museum has become the largest private museum in Taiwan and home to the world's biggest and most comprehensive violin collection.
In CHIMEI Museum, visitors can find the violins made in 1705 by Bartolomeo Cristofori, Italian maker of musical instruments famous for inventing the piano, and Charles IX by Andrea Amati, considered to be the oldest surviving violin in the world.
According to CNN, the museum exhibits about 4,000 works of Western Arts, music instruments, armory, taxidermy and fossils, only one-third of the museum's entire collection.
The museum charges NT$200 to enter but it is free for Tainan residents and students so "the farmers working in the fields nearby can visit it all the time" to fulfill Shi's mission to offer a museum for all.
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