The church was founded and designed by Xiamen-born tea tycoon Li Chunsheng, a shrewd businessman and Christian philanthropist who in the early 20th century helped turn Dadaocheng into one of the most prosperous trading ports in Taiwan. Since the building bears witness to the modern history of Taipei as well as Mr Li's role in its development, Ms Lung felt it should be a part of the city's cultural heritage.

Her declaration was fiercely resented by church officials, who accused her of interfering with the church's development plan, but she insisted it was a necessary and urgent step to take.

'Otherwise I'll be sending a message that it is okay to do something like this,' she said.

This was not the first time she had demonstrated a steely determination to protect the city's heritage. When an 81-year-old Japanese-style wooden dance studio was mysteriously burned down in 1999, just days after it was declared a historic relic, Ms Lung ordered it reconstructed. It had once belonged to Tsai Ji-yueh, one of Taiwan's modern dance legends and Ms Lung said she wanted to send a clear message to the entire city of Taipei: 'The message is, don't do this to me.'

Sipping coffee in her spartan new office at the City University in Kowloon Tong, where she took up professorship at the Comparative Literature and Translation Department two months ago, the casually dressed 52-year-old professor talked quietly and thoughtfully, pausing occasionally to think.

Ms Lung explained why cities should pay as much attention to cultural heritage as they do to other matters. Heritage doesn't only give a place its sense of identity, it also gives its citizens a sense of roots and belonging, she said. 'The original appearance [of these objects] is a channel that links people to their feelings,' she said. 'Humans are not robots, they put their feelings into a lot of things, and these are connected with their deepest identity.'

Historic buildings invoke people's deepest feelings for the cities they're living in, she said, citing Han Shan temple in Suzhou as an example. The temple dates back to the 6th century and is featured in a famous Tang dynasty poem, 'You wouldn't want to burn it down,' she said.

'Spiritually, [these are] our villages, our parents,' she said. 'If you can say no to all these, I guess you can do away with these old houses.'

Long before Ms Lung took up the Taipei culture minister post, she had made her name as a writer, and an outspoken one at that. In a series of essays that were later compiled into her first book - Wild Fire, published in 1985 - Ms Lung took Taiwan by storm. In it, she questioned things that most Taiwanese people had taken for granted and never challenged, including what she saw as the island's noisy and filthy living environment and a lack of channels for citizens to vent their grievances. She pointed out how authorities habitually ignored the plight of common folk and the failure of the education system to produce students who can think critically and independently.

In Chinese People, Why Aren't You Angry?, an essay published in the China Times newspaper in 1984, she was aghast to see how timid and docile Taiwanese people were in their everyday lives, how they dared not complain, for instance, when street food vendors left smelly scraps at their front doors.

'Why don't you get angry, why don't you tell him to get lost?' Ms Lung asked in the essay. 'Because you don't speak up, you don't criticise and you don't express your opinion, your beloved child is eating, drinking, breathing toxic chemicals every day and you're still looking forward to the day when he graduates?'

In the mid-1980s to the late-90s, when she was living in Europe with her husband and two sons, Ms Lung continued to publish her critical essays in Taiwan, China and Hong Kong as well as in the Chinese language media in Singapore and Malaysia.

Born in Taiwan to mainland parents who escaped to Taiwan as refugees in 1949, she spent nine years in America, where she obtained a doctorate in English literature.

She returned to Taiwan to teach at the National Central University for three years before leaving for Switzerland and subsequently Germany, where she lectured at the Sinologisches Institut at the University of Heidelberg.

Ms Lung attributes her strong convictions on cultural and social issues to her early Confucian education, which taught her about each person's responsibility to society. But she said her passion for social justice came from her experience under the dictatorship of the Kuomintang government, which ruled Taiwan from 1949 until its defeat in the 1999 election. Having experienced the rule of an autocratic and unaccountable regime for half a century, she was determined that future governments and leaders should be democratic.

Her opinions impressed Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou so much that he invited her to return from Germany to be the first head of the city's Cultural Affairs Bureau in 1999. Her beliefs became the basis of her policymaking and translated into a series of conservation programmes and a reconsideration of the city's cultural identity amid economic development and globalisation.

She said, for instance, that China should think about questions such as how much of its traditional culture it wishes to keep, what it wants its cities to look like, how Chinese people want to position their cultural identity amid changes brought by an economic boom and the recent increase in western commercial influence. In its quest for faster development, does it want to replace traditional courtyard houses with skyscrapers?

She said she worries particularly about the ruthless demolition that is 'modernising' Beijing.

As a city built in the 13th century, Beijing has a much richer historical past than many other Chinese cities and should be particularly careful about how it deals with its cultural relics. Regard for the wishes of even those outside China must be shown, for 'their heritage belongs to the whole of the human race', she said.

Noting that China is making great economic progress, Ms Lung nonetheless warned that people should be careful not to allow its unique cultural riches to be destroyed. The city's unique cultural identity should be cherished, and its inhabitants not just focus on the immediate financial rewards.

'To progress you need economic development, but when it becomes just like any other western city, it's not unique anymore,' Ms Lung said. Beijing's main shopping street, Wangfujing, now looks Parisian after a recent makeover, but she questioned whether it is the original Beijing that people want to see. 'The leaders should have a very clear mind about what they want a place to be,' she said. 'Any city's administration is only temporarily in charge of the place. You don't have the right to change its appearance.'

Ms Lung put her ideas across bluntly in her essay, Whose City, Whose Home?, published in several Chinese newspapers in the mainland and Taiwan in May. 'What should be knocked down, what should be built - every decision is a cultural decision that manifests our knowledge of the past and our imagination for the future,' she wrote.

Not surprisingly, her insistence and strong conviction antagonised many people during her tenure in Taipei. While many accuse her of snobbishness and attempting to foster a culture that is too biased towards the old Chinese elite, others accuse her of being out of touch with Taiwan's contemporary and grassroots culture.

'Lung has a selective memory: she doesn't like the unrefined, popular mass culture so she would overlook [certain parts] of the history of the place,' said Chi-sheng Shi, sociologist at the Soochow University in Taipei.

'Her ideology is biased towards the Chinese culture' and she does not attach much importance to the native culture that existed in Taiwan before the Kuomintang arrived in 1949, he said.

Inevitably, there was criticism that she was a 'mainlander' who has limited knowledge of the indigenous language and culture of Taiwan and is insensitive to the wishes of native Taiwanese. How could she, an 'outsider', not least one that had spent a considerable part of her life in America and Europe, possibly know what they want and be given responsibility for Taipei's cultural policy?

'Her main problem is her lack of understanding of Taiwan. She has an exotic perspective of Taiwan and looks at Taiwan from a European standpoint,' said Kuo Li-hsin, lecturer at the college of communication at the National Chengchi University.

But Ms Lung said Taiwanese should recognise that their culture is a confluence of several groups: indigenous, Japanese and Chinese. Culture should be eclectic and non-exclusive, she said.

Ms Lung acknowledged that her identification with the Chinese culture has led to some hostile reaction and to opponents labelling her pro-China and pro-unification. Ironically, she was seen as pro-independence during the Kuomintang era - as she was well-known for her dislike of what she called the 'half-baked dictatorship' of the former government. 'I don't seem to be able to please either side,' she said with a sigh.

Does Ms Lung consider herself Chinese or Taiwanese or both? 'As a writer, I have only one identity, that is I'm a Chinese language writer,' she said. 'My cultural identity is the Chinese language. As a citizen I'm 100 per cent Taiwanese, that's my legal status. My political affiliation is 100 per cent Taiwanese. I can only accept democracy, there is no doubt about it.'

'My feelings for China are towards the people and the history that has been accumulated over thousands of years.'

To Ms Lung political sovereignty only represents temporary management, and not the culture itself. 'The ruling of the Communist Party isn't equated to the Chinese culture,' she said. 'A government is only the temporary person in charge of a land.'

Ms Lung said a government needs a special body to promote cultural protection and to influence the government's policy making. In her three years as culture chief in the Taiwanese capital, she felt she was not only able to save many old buildings and trees but, more importantly, instil the concept of heritage preservation in people's minds.

Asked why she left her post in Taipei to come to Hong Kong, Ms Lung said she was tired of working 16 hours a day and needed to have time to think and regain perspective. She wanted to be a writer and intellectual again and plans to write a book about city development and cultural policy and to articles for newspapers. 'The needs of the writer in me have exceeded my sense of responsibility to the city,' she said.