On February 18^th, NTHU celebrated the Chinese New Year in the Auditorium with attendance of hundreds of staff and retirees. The celebration started with the host wishing everyone a happy new year, and an exciting drumming performance by The Taingu Club.

Following was the greeting from President Lih J. Chen wishing everyone a prosperous new year and hoping we all have pleasant family reunions over the break and plenty of rest to get ready to the challenges in the future. He also stated that the year of 2013 is the year of harvest according to Chinese classical literature, so he hopes all the hard work from last year is coming to fruition this year for everyone to enjoy the nectar of success.

Moreover, President Chen thanked all the students, faculty and staff members for their great contributions in many important activities last year: several memorial events for President Mei Yi-chi, presentations of six Nobel award laureates, four publications in Science and Nature (out of seven from Taiwan institutional academicians). In addition, so far this year, the researches done by Prof. Sue-Lein Wang of the Department of the Chemistry and Prof. Yi-Wei Liu of the Department of Physics have successfully published in Science. Additionally, ten NTHU instructors received 2012 Annual National Science Center Outstanding Research Award, which brings NTHU to the second place of domestic institutions with most winning awards with the highest ratio of award winning faculty. President Chen concluded "NTHU's faculty and research potential is beyond what we can imaging and it is something worth looking forward to."

Furthermore, President Chen also took and podium to express commendation to Mr. Yu Lo, a student of the Institute of Biotechnology, for publishing his book "Meet Taiwan at the Worlds End." The book documents Mr. Lo's experiences while he was an exchange student in Linköping University, Switzerland, and his journey on bicycle on finding spiritual growth and self-improvement, as well as the tales of struggles of the older oversea Chinese. Luo Yu stated that he wishes to share his magnificent and special experience with everyone.

Next on the schedule were the Middle Eastern belly dance performance, which the dancers sway their figures with the beat of the music and brought the audience beautiful exotic dance moves; acapella performance from Seagull-K Vocal Band; staff of NTHU brought nice ukulele melody to the celebration; and the student of hip pop dance club. Following was the choir performance from the executives of NTHU, under the leadership of President Chen they sang "Ta Xue Xun Mei" to add in the spirit to the New Year. Last but not the least, was the outstanding magic performance brought by Senior Vice President Ming-Chuen Yip and Prof. Kok-Hwa Tan, they drew a perfect closure for the Chinese New Year celebration.