Yen Ching-piao

As a child, Yen Ching-piao earned the nickname "winter melon-piao" from his grandfather for his short stature and stocky build.[1][2] Yen married at age 17,[1][2] and had children, including son Yen Kuan-heng and daughter Yen Li-ming.[3][4] Yen was linked to organized crime in 1986 and imprisoned on Green Island for over three years.[1][2] Upon his release, Yen was elected a borough leader, and, in 1994, was elected to the Taiwan Provincial Assembly, becoming the body's youngest member.[1][2] He later served on the Taichung County Council, including a stint as speaker.[5] Yen was expelled from the Kuomintang in April 2000, after having publicly backed James Soong's presidential campaign the previous month.[1][6]

Yen assumed the chairmanship of the Dajia Jenn Lann Temple in January 1999,[1][2] and used his position to push for direct travel from Taiwan to mainland China.[7][8][9] He has become known for leading the Dajia Matsu pilgrimage, a temple event often attended by politicians.[10][11][12] Yen has also served as honorary chairman of the Taiwan Mazu Fellowship.[13]

Yen was detained on 28 February 2001,[14] while still serving as the speaker of the Taichung County Council.[15] He was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment on 31 August 2001.[16] Yen won a Taichung County legislative seat while serving a prison sentence for corruption, attempted murder, and firearms possession.[2] While serving the sentence, Yen was also barred from leaving Taiwan, a restriction the Taiwan High Court refused to lift, even after Yen had been named to a delegation that was to visit Central America and the United States in April 2002.[17] During his 2004 reelection campaign, Yen and other candidates filed an unsuccessful petition to change the election date from 11 December to 4 December.[18] That year, Yen joined a formal political party for the first time after his expulsion from the Kuomintang, co-founding the Non-Partisan Solidarity Union and running as an NPSU candidate.[19][20] In December, Yen's assistant Liu Sung-wu was taken in for questioning over electoral fraud, a charge Yen himself denied.[21] Soon after winning reelection, Yen was named party caucus whip.[22] His 2008 campaign, which featured heavy use of self-caricature, saw Yen win reelection against educator Lee Shun-liang.[23][24] In his third term in the legislature, Yen opposed a proposal to specially designate Taoyuan International Airport as a separately administered entity unless Kaohsiung International Airport and Ching Chuan Kang Airport in his own constituency also received the designation.[25] On 10 August 2008, Yen's office was the site of a shooting which injured two people.[26]

The Taiwan High Court ruled in September 2011 that Yen was guilty of misusing public funds during his tenure on the Taichung County Council.[27] He appealed to the Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court ruling in November 2012.[28][29] Yen then spent most of January 2013 on the campaign trail, as his son had declared his candidacy to succeed the elder Yen to the Legislative Yuan.[30] This arrangement attracted criticism,[31] and following his son's electoral victory, Yen began serving a prison sentence of 42 months in February 2013.[32] In June 2013 an amendment to the Accounting Act originally considered in 2012 was brought forward for further discussion.[33] The amendment would have ended financial impropriety investigations into city and county council members, potentially shortening Yen Ching-piao's imprisonment because the offense he was jailed for occurred between 1998 and 2000, when he was a member of the Taichung County Council.[34] The initiative failed unanimously, with three abstentions.[35] Legislator Liao Cheng-ching proposed a bill that would not have applied to the terms of Yen's sentence in December 2013,[36] but instead Yen applied for parole in June 2014, which was granted in four days.[37]

He publicly supported Hau Lung-bin in the 2017 Kuomintang chairmanship election.[38]