Though the misprinted passports were distributed to travelers last week, the mishap wasn't flagged by officials until netizens on the social media platform Weibo highlighted the error Monday, Fox News reported.
The following day, Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs addressed the mistake, issuing a recall and destroying the ones already printed. The contract printer for the passport will have to shell out roughly $2.7 million to pay for the correction, according to the Washington Post.
"I apologize to the public for the major oversight and will take full administrative responsibility for the incident," Chen said in a statement. Kung Chung-chen, the representative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Canada, also lost his post over the debacle.
But the firings aren't over just yet, says Focus Taiwan, a state-run media outlet.
"The Foreign Ministry is still trying to determine who else should be held responsible for the passport design error, and other heads could roll," the publication noted.
A statement from the ministry later chalked up the snafu to the designer accidentally copying an online picture of the Virginia airport, believing it was Taoyuan's Terminal One, AFP reported.
This is the image that was copied:
And this is what Taiwan's airport actually looks like:
In the meantime, travelers will be given e-passports, which Taiwan first rolled out in 2008. Officials expect to issue the updated passports by the end of January 2018, the Post reported.
![Courtesy of KCS [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Exterior_of_Terminal_1.jpg){kind=link}