Gongguan: Imperial Japan's Laboratory, the Martial-Law Underground Salon, and NTU Students' Fried Chicken Cutlets, Three Centuries within 500 Meters

30-second overview: Gongguan was a “public house” built by immigrants from Anxi, Quanzhou in Quanshanbao during the Qianlong reign of the Qing dynasty, used “to handle trade between Han Chinese and Indigenous people and to collect tenant rents”; the place name has been used for more than two hundred years¹. On March 16, 1928, the Japanese established the empire’s sixth imperial university, “Taihoku Imperial University,” on the southern edge of this land; its president was Shidehara Taira, and the Faculty of Science and Agriculture began classes on April 1². The area north of the university gate around Wenzhou Street, Qingtian Street, and Yongkang Street, called “Shōwa-chō” and “Tomita-chō” under Japanese rule, was planned as an imperial-university professors’ residence district after the 1922 town-name reform³. After the war in 1945, the imperial university was renamed “National Taiwan University,” and the dormitories were taken over for mainlander scholars; Wenzhou Street became a material landscape of postwar Taiwanese liberalism and the White Terror². On November 20, 1949, Free China was founded in Taipei; on September 4, 1960, Lei Chen was arrested; Yin Haiguang was placed under house arrest in the Japanese-style dormitory at No. 1-1, Lane 16, Alley 18, Wenzhou Street until he died of stomach cancer in 1969⁴. Wistaria Tea House on Lane 16, Section 3, Xinsheng South Road went from the 1950 official residence of Customs Administration director Zhou Dewei to Taiwan’s first humanities-oriented tea house in 1981⁵. In the NTU Philosophy Department Incident of 1972-1975, the Kuomintang purged 13 teachers⁶. In December 1999, the MRT Xindian Line opened, and the Gongguan traffic circle became the dinner ATM of NTU students⁷. What this article wants to say is this: Imperial Japan’s laboratories, the martial-law underground salons, and contemporary students’ fried chicken cutlets compress three centuries of Taiwan into 500 meters.

Wenzhou Street at 6:30 in the Evening

If you ask an NTU student studying in Gongguan, “What is the most special moment on Wenzhou Street?” nine times out of ten they will answer, “Nothing special.”

But if you ask a 70-year-old retired NTU professor, they will say: 6:30 in the evening.

At 6:30 in the evening, outside the former residence of Tai Jingnong at No. 25 Wenzhou Street, students from NTU’s Department of Chinese Literature have just turned in from Section 3, Xinsheng South Road after class. They carry guitars, hold laptops, and have pepper buns bought from the Gongguan traffic circle in their mouths⁸. Tai Jingnong, the calligrapher who served for 20 years as chair of NTU’s Department of Chinese Literature, Lu Xun’s last student, and the writer of the six characters “National Taiwan University” on NTU’s main gate, moved into this Japanese-style dormitory built between 1935 and 1940 only on May 7, 1990, and died of esophageal cancer at NTU Hospital on November 9⁹. Students rarely look up when they pass by. They do not know that this wooden old house with an irimoya-hafu roof was not designated a “commemorative building” until 2020⁹.

Walk 200 meters north to Lane 18 of Wenzhou Street and, at the intersection, you will see a small sign for “Yin Haiguang Former Residence.” Follow the lane as it bends, turn again into Alley 16, and at the very end is the Japanese-style dormitory built in 1945: the chair in which Yin Haiguang sat from 1956 until his death in 1969 is still in the living room¹⁰⁴. After the Lei Chen case in 1960, intelligence officers were stationed for long-term surveillance at this small house. Today the former residence is open free of charge from 1 to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, closed Monday and Sunday, and requires a reservation⁴.

Walk another 300 meters south to No. 1, Lane 16, Section 3, Xinsheng South Road. That is Wistaria Tea House. It was an official residence built during the Japanese colonial period in the 1920s; Zhou Dewei brought Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty into it in the 1950s; Zhou Yu converted it into a tea house in 1981; it was listed as a municipal historic site in 1997⁵. Wistaria Tea House’s wisteria trellis remains in the front courtyard. It was planted in 1950, the year Zhou Dewei’s family of seven moved in, which means it is the same age as the Republic of China government’s relocation to Taiwan.

On this 500-meter road from NTU’s Xinsheng South Road entrance to the end of Wenzhou Street, the doorways of three generations of former residences all lie on the same axis. Between them are the Gongguan traffic circle, Tingzhou Road, Section 4 of Roosevelt Road, and NTU’s Palm Boulevard.

After walking these 500 meters, you notice one thing: the material formula of the “imperial laboratory” planned by the Japanese in 1928, university gate + Palm Boulevard + professors’ residence district + surrounding small street markets, has not been entirely demolished over the past century. After the war, scholars used the Japanese-style dormitories as living rooms for underground salons; a philosopher under house arrest taught logic inside; dismissed scholars continued to write books there. Then, in 1999, the MRT opened, NTU students came up to eat dinner, and three centuries were compressed into 500 meters.

📝 Curator’s note: Gongguan plays a different role in the historic district series from Dadaocheng, Bangka, and Ximending. Dadaocheng emerged as commerce in 1851, Bangka was the Qing-period flourishing center around 1738, and Ximending was a Japanese-era entertainment district from 1896. All three are “market-type” districts, where the material core is commerce and temples. Gongguan is a “campus-satellite type”: the entire district is the extended physical space of the university founded in 1928. Roosevelt Road south of the university gate is the commercial belt; Wenzhou Street, Qingtian Street, and Yongkang Street north of the gate are the scholars’ residential belt. This three-layer structure of “campus + dormitories + commercial district” has survived intact only in Gongguan in Taiwan. NTU’s Palm Boulevard, the Japanese-style dormitory cluster on Wenzhou Street, the fried chicken cutlets on Tingzhou Road, and Treasure Hill’s illegal buildings turned artist village are in fact four physical layers of the same empire-martial law-contemporary narrative.

The “Gongguan” of Quanshanbao Was a Rent-Collecting House

To understand Gongguan, you first need to know that this place name actually appears in many parts of Taipei. Northern, central, and southern Taiwan all have places called “Gongguan,” because the term referred to a house for collecting tenant rents during the Qing period¹¹. Taipei Gongguan’s story begins in the Qianlong reign of the Qing dynasty. Large numbers of immigrants from Anxi, Quanzhou entered and cultivated “Quanshanbao,” an old place name for the southeastern mountains of Qing-era Taipei. The leading cultivators set up a gongguan here, “a house for handling trade between Han Chinese and Indigenous people and for paying tenant rents”¹. From that moment on, the three characters “Gongguan” were bound to the idea of a “Han frontier / tax-collection station.”

But the story did not begin with the Han. In 1729, the seventh year of the Yongzheng reign, when the Hakka settler Liao Jianyue led people to cultivate Quanshan and establish Linkou Village, today’s Water Source area and Gongguan, this land was originally the territory of the Xiulang community of the Ketagalan people. “As a result, conflict broke out with the Xiulang community, causing several hundred casualties”¹. Five years later, immigrants from Anxi, Quanzhou entered the Wenshan area from Dajialaibao, expelled the Hakka settlers, and established Gongguan Village. In those five years from 1729 to 1734, this street saw three-way armed conflict among Hakka, Hoklo, and Ketagalan groups, with hundreds of casualties. This history predates the 1853 Ding-Xia-jiao conflict in Bangka by 124 years, but because no written records preserved the details, only the three characters “Gongguan Village” remain as a monument.

Gongguan’s administrative boundaries are more complicated than one might imagine. It simultaneously spans Zhongzheng District, Da’an District, and Wenshan District; historically, parts belonged to Guting District and Jingmei District¹. NTU’s main gate is in Zhongzheng District, Palm Boulevard is in Da’an District, Treasure Hill is in Zhongzheng District, Tingzhou Road is in Zhongzheng District, Wenzhou Street is in Da’an District, and Toad Mountain is in Wenshan District. A single place name crosses three administrative districts because “Gongguan” was originally a “border-crossing house”: its geographic essence was a “functional building on a boundary,” not the core of any single administrative district.

📝 Curator’s note: Gongguan is more like a functional landscape than a single administrative place name. In the Qing period it was a tax station; under Japanese rule it was the back side of an imperial university; after the war it was a scholars’ residential district; today it is a commercial district. Every era has treated this land as “boundary + passage”: from Ketagalan territory to Han cultivated land, from the Bangka commercial district to the deep mountains of Wenshan, from inside Taipei City to beyond the Xindian River, from an imperial research district to a mass student-consumption district. The 500-meter scale is just enough to hold the dual quality of “boundary + passage.” Too long, and the sense of an interface disappears; too short, and there is no feeling of a route.

September 2017, National Taiwan University main gate. Photo: 寺人孟子, 2017-09-24. License via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The Imperial Opening Ceremony of 1928

On March 16, 1928, the Japanese empire’s sixth imperial university was formally established in Taipei’s southern outskirts.

It was originally to be called “Taiwan Imperial University,” but the Japanese feared the name might be interpreted as “the university of the Taiwan Empire,” so the final name became “Taihoku Imperial University”². Its first president was Dr. Shidehara Taira, whose term ran from March 1928 to September 1937, a full nine years². At the beginning there were only two faculties, the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Political Science and the Faculty of Science and Agriculture, plus an affiliated College of Agriculture and Forestry. Classes officially began on April 1 of that year².

The imperial university was sited in Gongguan not because the land already had any academic foundation. It was because, in 1922, Taishō 11, the Japanese carried out a large-scale “town-name reform” in eastern Taipei: the 15 large sections in the western half were redrawn into 64 towns, and farmland east of Xinsheng South Road, originally called “Shimo-uchiho,” was designated as new towns such as “Shōwa-chō” and “Tomita-chō”³. The name “Shōwa-chō” suggests the intention of its designers: a high-end residential district planned at the beginning of the Shōwa era, whose first year was 1926.

After the imperial university was founded, this area around “Shōwa-chō” and “Tomita-chō,” stretching two kilometers north from the university gate, immediately became the residence district for Taihoku Imperial University professors. During the 17 years from 1928 to 1945, 95 to 99 Japanese-style wooden residences were built along this axis, mainly single-family houses, each 30 to 60 ping, with front and back yards, one or two wooden stories, roofs of black Japanese tiles, and clapboard exterior walls. This is the physical skeleton of the Japanese-style dormitory cluster still visible today on Wenzhou Street, Qingtian Street, and the east side of Yongkang Street¹².

📝 Curator’s note: When that first group of imperial-university professors moved onto Wenzhou Street in 1928, they could not have imagined that Japan would surrender 17 years later. The official residences and houses built by the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office under Japanese rule had two postwar fates. One type was demolished and rebuilt under urbanization pressure from the 1950s to the 1980s; large numbers disappeared around Section 1 of Zhongshan North Road and Chang’an East Road. The other type was taken over by mainlander scholars and became postwar cultural salons, as on Wenzhou Street, Qingtian Street, and the east side of Yongkang Street. Why did the Gongguan-Wenzhou Street area survive? Because the land’s functional attribute did not change. In 1928 it was university professors’ housing; after 1945 it was still university professors’ housing, now for NTU; after 1949 it became mainlander scholars’ housing, still for university professors. Three regimes changed, but the land’s “functional formula” did not: it remained a low-density, high-knowledge-concentration residential district around a university. Unchanged function = material form need not be demolished = 100 years without being flattened by Xinyi District-style capital.

In 1949, Wenzhou Street Became a “Mainlander Scholars’ Village”

On November 15, 1945, the Republic of China government took over Taihoku Imperial University, first renaming it “National Taipei University,” and a few days later renaming it again as “National Taiwan University”². The former imperial-university professors’ dormitories immediately faced the question: who would live there now?

In March 1946, NTU’s public-property management office began allocating Japanese-style dormitories, including No. 25 Wenzhou Street, as housing for newly appointed professors in the departments of Chinese literature, foreign languages, and philosophy⁹. In 1949, when the Republic of China government comprehensively retreated to Taiwan, it brought with it more than 100,000 mainlander intellectuals: Lei Chen, Hu Shih, Xia Daoping, Mao Zishui, Fu Sinian, Tai Jingnong, Yin Haiguang, Zhou Dewei, Xu Daolin, Zhang Foquan. Some of these names later taught at NTU, some became officials, some ran magazines, and some moved along several axes at once.

Most of their homes were located north of Gongguan, around Wenzhou Street, Qingtian Street, Yongkang Street, Lishui Street, Chaozhou Street, and Jinhua Street: the Japanese-style dormitory cluster left behind in the Japanese-era “Shōwa-chō” and “Tomita-chō” area. This land had two special conditions. First, it was within walking distance of NTU and National Taiwan Normal University, convenient for teaching. Second, the “doma + entryway + guest room + study” structure of Japanese-style dormitories was especially suited to a scholar’s study-and-living-room life.

There have long been two explanations for the postwar naming of Wenzhou Street. One says that during address reorganization in 1947, the city government named it after Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province; many postwar Taipei street names were taken from cities in mainland China, such as Hangzhou South Road, Shantou Street, and Wuchang Street. The other says that many of the mainlander scholars who moved in were from Wenzhou, Zhejiang, and were accustomed to calling the street where they lived “Wenzhou Street,” which the city government then incorporated. Neither explanation has a single conclusive document, but between 1947 and 1949, the town name “Tomita-chō” was indeed replaced by “Wenzhou Street.”

Yet Wenzhou Street’s real historical role lies not in what the street was called, but in its becoming the cradle of postwar Taiwanese liberalism.

_August 2021, Lane 16, Wenzhou Street. Photo: Kiyoteru Awaji, 2021-08-09. License via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).*

Wistaria Tea House: The 1950 Official Residence, the 1981 Tea House

In September 1950, the Ministry of Finance allocated this 1920s Japanese-style higher official residence at No. 1, Lane 16, Section 3, Xinsheng South Road to Zhou Dewei, then director of the Customs Administration⁵. Zhou Dewei’s family of seven moved in.

Zhou Dewei was an unusual figure. Trained as an economist, he studied in Britain and Germany in the 1930s, and at the London School of Economics he studied under Friedrich August von Hayek, later a Nobel laureate in economics⁵. After returning to Taiwan, he translated Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, 800,000 Chinese characters, while regularly hosting an academic salon in this official residence on Xinsheng South Road. Once every two weeks, more than ten people regularly attended, including Yin Haiguang, Zhang Foquan, Xu Daolin, and Xia Daoping: Taiwan’s liberal scholars of the 1950s, who “systematically introduced Hayek’s thought”⁵.

“Zun Dexing Zhai” was the study name Zhou Dewei gave to this official residence. The 1958 exchange-rate reform plan chaired by Yin Zhongrong “was completed by Zhou Dewei in this official residence”⁵.

After Lei Chen was arrested and Free China suspended publication on September 4, 1960, this salon became an even more sensitive presence. Yin Haiguang retreated to the small house on Lane 18, Wenzhou Street and continued to be monitored; Zhou Dewei’s living room was also within the sightlines of intelligence units, but the salon did not stop. In 1963, part of the official residence was expanded into a two-story structure, adding space for receiving guests in the living room. That floor later became the second-floor seating area of the 1980s tea house.

After Zhou Dewei retired and moved to the United States in 1975, his youngest son Zhou Yu took over the old house⁵. Zhou Yu was then participating in the Formosa movement, and frustrated dangwai figures gathered here one after another. A liberal salon of the 1950s became a living room for dangwai literary youth in the late 1970s.

On January 18, 1981, Zhou Yu converted this old house into Taiwan’s first humanities-oriented tea house, “Wistaria Tea House”⁵. The word “Wistaria” came from the wisteria planted in the courtyard in 1950. Founder Zhou Yu wrote, “The rediscovery of the natural spirit, the recreation of the humanistic spirit.” In 1981 Chiang Ching-kuo was still president and martial law had not yet been lifted; saying the words “humanistic spirit” in public did not come without cost.

But Wistaria Tea House opened on Xinsheng South Road. Saturday afternoons became a fixed gathering time for dangwai cultural figures. Hu Shih had visited, Li Ao had visited, Chen Guying had visited, and editors of Contemporary Monthly had visited. Much of the most important cultural discussion in Taiwan before and after the lifting of martial law in the 1980s and 1990s took place on the wooden floor of this second story.

May 2017, exterior of Wistaria Tea House. Photo: 寺人孟子, 2017-05-06. License via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

On July 8, 1997, the Taipei City Government approved Wistaria Tea House as part of the first group of municipal historic sites⁵. Fifteen days later, on July 23, the Taipei District Court ruled that the Japanese-style bungalow portion should be returned to the Ministry of Finance’s Keelung Customs. At the end of 2001, the Customs Administration transferred Wistaria Tea House to the city government as municipal property, after which it could be revitalized through a publicly commissioned operating model⁵. Today Wistaria Tea House remains at its original location, No. 1, Lane 16, Section 3, Xinsheng South Road. From Zhou Dewei in 1950 to Zhou Yu in 1981, historic-site designation in 1997, and public-private operation in 2001, seventy years of stories are compressed beneath that wisteria trellis.

📝 Curator’s note: What is most special about Wistaria Tea House is that its function has never completely changed. In 1950 it was a liberal salon; in 1975 a dangwai gathering place; in 1981 a humanities tea house; in 2026 still a place where cultural figures drink afternoon tea and talk. Compare it with the tea-trade mansions of Dadaocheng: tea trade in 1891, warehouses after the war, museums after 1990, a new function with every era. Wistaria Tea House, by contrast, is “the same house doing the same thing for seventy years”: a group of people sitting down to talk. This kind of “functional continuity” is almost impossible to find elsewhere in postwar Taipei. The reason is that this salon never relied on commerce. In 1950 it was an official residence, supported by the state; in 1981 the tea house did not charge high prices, almost like a subsidy; after 1997 it was operated under public commission by the city government, supported by public resources. It was never interrupted by market pressure.

1960 Lei Chen, 1969 Yin Haiguang: House Arrest on Lane 18, Wenzhou Street

On November 20, 1949, Free China magazine was founded in Taipei. Its publisher was Hu Shih in name; its actual director was Lei Chen; its principal writers included Xia Daoping, Mao Zishui, and Yin Haiguang⁴¹³. Yin Haiguang, a young man from Hubei who had just turned 30, born Yin Fusheng, had followed the Central Daily News from Nanjing to Taiwan not long before. In his luggage were Jin Yuelin’s logic lecture notes and notes on Carnap’s analytic philosophy.

Free China ran for ten years and nine months, publishing a total of 260 issues¹³. In its early years, the magazine positioned itself as “a member of the anti-communist camp,” but Yin Haiguang gradually transformed its editorial column into a space for “using logic and empirical facts to examine the Kuomintang’s own governance and propaganda”⁴. He wrote “Anti-Communism Is Not a Talisman for Dark Rule,” pulling “anti-communism” down from a political totem into a policy that could be examined. He wrote editorials criticizing party-state education, the China Youth Corps, and military intervention in speech. In 1950s Taiwan, these articles were taboos among taboos. The White Terror was at its height, and Lei Chen, Fu Zheng, and Xia Daoping in the editorial office weighed every day which sentence might get the magazine raided.

1960 was the watershed. Chiang Kai-shek sought a third presidential term by amending the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion; Free China published editorials such as “A Final Loyal Warning to President Chiang” and “Why We Urgently Need a Strong Opposition Party,” and began working with local political figures such as Li Wan-ju, Kao Yu-shu, and Kuo Yu-hsin to organize the “China Democratic Party”⁴.

On September 1, 1960, Yin Haiguang wrote the editorial “The Great River Flows East, and Cannot Be Stopped” in Free China, volume 23, issue 5, describing democratization as an irreversible historical tide. Three days later, in the early morning of September 4, 1960, Taiwan Garrison Command arrested Lei Chen on charges of “knowing of communist spies without reporting them” and “propagandizing for the communists,” sentencing him to ten years¹³¹⁴. The magazine was shut down, and the opposition party was stillborn.

Because Yin Haiguang held the status of an NTU professor and already had international academic recognition, he was not imprisoned. But from then on he was systematically stripped of all public space for speech.

He retreated to No. 1-1, Lane 16, Alley 18, Wenzhou Street, Da’an District, Taipei City, a Japanese-style dormitory built in 1945⁴. Intelligence officers were stationed there for long-term surveillance; his National Science Council research grant was revoked; the Ministry of Education attempted to transfer him out of NTU’s Department of Philosophy under the title of “ministry-appointed committee member”; later, even his promotions were deliberately blocked.

Yet this small house instead became the densest liberal classroom in postwar Taiwan. At NTU he taught courses including “Logic,” “Logical Empiricism,” “Russell’s Philosophy,” “Modern Symbolic Logic,” and “Philosophy of Science.” Outside class, he brought students home to talk, training them with a full system of logical positivism: how to distinguish emotive language from cognitive language, how to see through the rhetorical structures of political propaganda, and how to find falsifiable conditions for a belief⁴. Lin Yusheng, Chang Hao, Chen Guying, and Li Ao were all part of this circle.

In 1965, Yin Haiguang published his career-defining work, The Prospects of Chinese Culture; in 1966 it was banned by the authorities. In April 1967 he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. That same year, Harvard University invited him to the United States to study modern Chinese thought, but the Kuomintang government refused to let him leave the country⁴. On September 16, 1969, he died of stomach cancer at NTU Hospital, aged 49. His wife Xia Junlu and only daughter Yin Wenli buried his ashes in Nangang.

February 2016, main gate of Yin Haiguang Former Residence. Photo: 林高志, 2016-02-02. License via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

After his death, the former residence was almost demolished. Only in May 2003 did the Taipei City Government designate it a municipal historic site⁴. After the Yin Hai-kuang Foundation was established in 2008, it took over operations, and the former residence became one of Taiwan’s few thinker memorial spaces open to the public and preserved in its original condition. Inside remain his desk, mimeographed lecture notes, and the original layout of the living room where he and his students gathered to talk⁴.

📝 Curator’s note: The physical details of Yin Haiguang Former Residence deserve an extra second of attention. This small house, built in 1945, was an imperial-university professors’ dormitory at the end of Japanese rule: wooden, one story, about 30 ping, with front and back yards. A philosopher under house arrest could do only limited things in a 30-ping space, but he did one thing: “turn the living room into a classroom.” That square table in the living room seated, at least between 1960 and 1969, Lin Yusheng, Chang Hao, Chen Guying, Li Ao, Xu Fuguan, who visited occasionally, and more than ten other young people who later became central figures in Taiwanese intellectual history. What they learned at that square table was the core method of “how to use logic to verify any claim,” which went beyond the abstract claim called “liberalism.” Students in NTU’s Department of Philosophy can still read Yin Haiguang’s lecture notes today. Those notes were spoken at this square table.

1972-1975 Philosophy Department Incident: Purging 13 Liberal Professors

After Yin Haiguang died in 1969, his students Chen Guying and Wang Xiaobo continued to teach in NTU’s Department of Philosophy. In 1971, the Defend the Diaoyutai Islands movement erupted. Chen Guying served as an adviser to the student magazine University News and to NTU’s University Forum Society, becoming one of the most outspoken liberal teachers on campus.

The incident began on December 4, 1972⁶.

That day, NTU’s “University Forum Society” held a “Nationalism Symposium,” discussing “The Voice of a Small Citizen,” an article that had then stirred society. Written under the pseudonym “Lonely Shadow,” its tone of orphaned loyalism was widely seen as officially instigated by the Kuomintang. Philosophy associate professor Chen Guying forcefully rebutted the article’s argument and was opposed in a speech by Feng Huxiang, then a second-year graduate student in the Institute of Philosophy⁶. Chen Guying publicly accused Feng Huxiang of being a “professional student”: a student party worker planted on campus by Kuomintang intelligence units to monitor classmates. Fourth-year philosophy student Qian Yongxiang immediately spoke in support of Chen Guying.

Feng Huxiang complained to president Yan Zhenxing. NTU’s Office of Student Affairs issued a document requiring acting philosophy chair Zhao Tianyi to remove Chen Guying from his adviser duties. Qian Yongxiang was also given one major demerit for “absurdly slandering a classmate”⁶.

Second stage: February 12, 1973⁶.

Qian Yongxiang and Huang Daolin, a student in the Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, were questioned by Taiwan Garrison Command. The next day, February 13, Garrison Command searched Chen Guying’s residence. NTU philosophy associate professor Chen Guying and philosophy lecturer Wang Xiaobo were detained by Garrison Command on the charge of “propagandizing for the communists.” Although Chen Guying and Wang Xiaobo were soon released on bail provided by NTU president Yan Zhenxing, Chen Guying did not receive an NTU appointment letter after the semester ended, and Wang Xiaobo was also not renewed after June 1974⁶.

Third stage: from June 1973 onward⁶.

Feng Huxiang, believing he had been deliberately made to fail after receiving a 0 on his final exam in logic, petitioned everywhere. Then department chair Zhao Tianyi was removed for allegedly mishandling the matter. Newly appointed visiting associate professor Sun Zhishen took over as acting department chair, labeled multiple professors as “fellow travelers of the communist bandits,” and recommended that several teachers not be reappointed.

The incident widened. In the end, 13 people in total were suspended[^6]:

Chen Guying, Wang Xiaobo, Yang Feihua, Hu Jijun, Li Rizhang, Chen Mingyu, Liang Zhensheng, Huang Tiancheng, Guo Shiyu, Zhong Youlian, Huang Qingming, Zhao Tianyi, and the American visiting professor Robert Ma.

After the June 1975 final wave of dismissals, involving Huang Tiancheng and Guo Shiyu, the entire faculty structure of the philosophy department had been purged⁶. NTU’s graduate Institute of Philosophy suspended admissions for one year as the closing act of “rectification.”

This incident is considered to have been launched by the Kuomintang’s special-agent system to suppress the student-movement wave that arose from the Defend the Diaoyutai Islands movement, and Taiwan Garrison Command also intervened in the matter⁶. The incident was vindicated in 1997⁶.

📝 Curator’s note: The deepest damage of the Philosophy Department Incident was not that 13 people were dismissed. It was that, after this incident, NTU’s Department of Philosophy never again formed a liberal school with the same density as in Yin Haiguang’s time. Chen Guying went into exile in the United States, later taught at Peking University, and did not return to NTU until the 2010s; Wang Xiaobo moved to Chinese Culture University; Zhao Tianyi transferred to Providence University in Taichung. The liberal backbone of NTU’s philosophy department, built by Yin Haiguang through the 1950s and 1960s, was wiped clean within three years. The “Nationalism Symposium” where the 1973 incident began was held in the College of Law area, 200 meters inside the university gate. Walking from the eruption point back to Yin Haiguang Former Residence takes only eight minutes. But after the incident, there was never a second Yin Haiguang teaching logic in the living room of Lane 18, Wenzhou Street. A line of transmission broke within 500 meters.

February 2016, rear garden of Yin Haiguang Former Residence. Photo: 林高志, 2016-02-02. License via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

1990 Tai Jingnong, 2020 Commemorative Building: No. 25 Wenzhou Street

After the Philosophy Department Incident purged the liberals, Wenzhou Street’s scholars’ village did not fall silent. Two streets away, Chinese literature professor Tai Jingnong still lived at No. 25 Wenzhou Street after retiring in the 1980s.

Tai Jingnong (1903-1990), courtesy name Bojian, was from Huoqiu, Anhui⁹. He was one of the six gentlemen of the Weiming Society after graduating from Peking University’s Faculty of Letters in the 1920s, and was both teacher’s friend and student to Lu Xun; Lu Xun’s diary mentions “Jingnong” many times. After the War of Resistance broke out in 1937, he moved through Chongqing and taught at Baisha Women’s Normal College. He came to Taiwan after the war in 1946, was appointed professor in NTU’s Department of Chinese Literature in 1948, and became department chair in 1950, holding the post for 20 years⁹.

Tai Jingnong’s calligraphy is another major thread. From childhood he copied stele models such as Zhang Heinu, Zhang Menglong, Liqi, and Si San Gong Shan; in running and cursive scripts he followed Ni Yuanlu, Bada Shanren, and Xu Wei; he was accomplished in seal, clerical, cursive, running, and regular scripts⁹. The six characters “National Taiwan University” on the university gate pillars were assembled from Tai Jingnong’s calligraphy⁹. Every student who read that gate in the imperial-university era after 1928, every student who entered postwar NTU after 1949, and every NTU freshman in 2026 sees the six characters handwritten by this Anhui man born in 1903.

Tai Jingnong’s timeline on Wenzhou Street is unusual. He arrived at NTU in 1948 and, from 1949 onward, lived for decades in another dormitory on Lane 18, Wenzhou Street. Only in May 1990 did he move to No. 25 Wenzhou Street, an old dormitory closer to the university gate⁹. But only half a year after moving in, on November 9, 1990, he died of esophageal cancer at NTU Hospital, aged 87⁹. He named his study “Longpo Zhangshi.” “Zhangshi,” literally “one-zhang room,” is an abbreviation of “abbot’s room,” a Chan Buddhist term for a small room capable of containing a thousand people.

In 2020, NTU had considered demolishing this Japanese-style dormitory at No. 25 Wenzhou Street, built between 1935 and 1940. The Taipei City cultural-heritage review committee met in May 2020. All 17 attending members unanimously agreed to register Tai Jingnong Former Residence as a “commemorative building”⁹. Restoration of the main house was completed in November 2022. A commemorative exhibition opened at the end of 2024.

📝 Curator’s note: The registration of Tai Jingnong Former Residence as a “commemorative building” came out of an early-2020 controversy over “NTU wanting to tear down its own history.” NTU had originally wanted to demolish the old house and build a new structure. Numerous cultural figures campaigned and appealed, and in the end the cultural-heritage review committee voted 17:0 to preserve it⁹. But the cost of this victory was another round of cultural-heritage protection campaigning after Yin Haiguang Former Residence. From Yin Haiguang in 2003 to Tai Jingnong in 2020, Wenzhou Street has had to fight a new “preservation battle” every decade or so. The material heritage of this street has constantly been threatened by urban-renewal pressure. Each preservation case has been handled individually, not through systematic protection. Of the 95 to 99 original buildings in the broader Shōwa-chō Japanese-style dormitory cluster, perhaps only 30 to 50 remain in their original locations today; most have already been rebuilt as apartment blocks.

Treasure Hill: Illegal Buildings on a Hillside Become an Artist Village

Walk south from NTU’s main gate, pass Siyuan Street and the Xindian River bank, and you will see a hillside. The impossibly dense cluster of illegal buildings on the slope is called Treasure Hill¹⁵¹⁶.

The character “巖” in Baozangyan is pronounced yán and means “built against a cliff.” Treasure Hill Guanyin Pavilion was first substantially renovated in the 56th year of the Qianlong reign of the Qing dynasty, 1791, with eastern and western side halls added¹⁵. Located under Fuhe Bridge, beside the Xindian River, and leaning against Hukong Mountain, a branch of Toad Mountain, it is one of Taipei’s oldest Buddhist temples. It was once a public temple for the Wenshan area and a faith center for local immigrants from Anxi, Quanzhou. It is “also historical testimony to Anxi people’s development of Guting, Gongguan, and Jingmei”¹⁵.

Treasure Hill’s illegal settlement formed in the 1960s. “In the 1960s, the ban on illegal construction was relaxed, and military command authorities tacitly accepted the fact that mainlander residents were building illegal structures around Treasure Hill”¹⁶. Mainlander veterans and rural-urban migrants from southern Taiwan seeking work in the north built dense rows of sheet-metal houses and brick huts along the slope. “By the end of the 1980s, the settlement had reached nearly four hectares in scale and housed more than 200 households”¹⁶.

In July 1980, the Taipei City Government formally incorporated Treasure Hill from a water-source protection area into Urban Plan Park No. 297 in the riverside zone, and the whole area faced demolition and relocation¹⁶. A demolition controversy then lasted for more than ten years.

In 1999, Lung Ying-tai, serving as commissioner of Taipei City’s Department of Cultural Affairs, proposed the concept of an artist village as Treasure Hill’s future operating direction¹⁶. It was announced as a historic building in 2004. On October 2, 2010, “Treasure Hill Artist Village” officially began operations¹⁶. In 2011 it was announced as Taipei’s first historical settlement, and in 2018 it was announced as a settlement architectural complex¹⁶.

Today Treasure Hill, Forty-Four South Village, and Bopiliao are often placed together as Taipei’s three major cases of illegal buildings transformed into cultural-creative parks. But Treasure Hill differs from the other two: it preserved original resident households. “Art-residence coexistence” is Treasure Hill’s official strategy. The illegal-building residents were not all moved out; some remained to continue living there, sharing the hillside with resident artists. Walk into Treasure Hill on a weekend evening and you will see the lights of artists’ studios side by side with an older woman drying quilts outside her own door.

📝 Curator’s note: The relationship between Treasure Hill and the Gongguan-Wenzhou Street axis is one of “twins below and above the hill.” Gongguan-Wenzhou Street was a legal residential district planned by the imperial university in 1928; Treasure Hill was an illegal settlement of the martial-law era from the 1960s to the 1980s. One was a scholars’ village planned by the state; the other was an illegal settlement tacitly permitted by the state. But the two share material-form similarities: both are dense low-rise housing, both depended on the flow of people around the Gongguan traffic circle for survival, both were threatened by urban-renewal pressure after the 1990s, and both survived through cultural-heritage protection movements. If Gongguan-Wenzhou Street is the “legal material heritage” planned under Japanese rule, Treasure Hill is the “illegal material heritage” of the martial-law years. Both are “historical evidence of marginal states,” differing only in legality.

March 2016, Treasure Hill Guanyin Pavilion. Photo: panoramio user, 2016-03-16. License via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).

After 1999, Gongguan Became NTU Students’ Living Room

On December 24, 1999, the Taipei MRT Xindian Line opened. Gongguan Station officially entered service⁷.

From that moment on, Gongguan’s role from the previous century completely flipped. Originally a “boundary + passage” landscape, it was connected by one MRT stop to Taipei Main Station, Dongmen, and Zhongxiao Fuxing, becoming the student-consumption hub of southern Taipei.

The “Shuiyuan Market,” established after the war in 1953, was named because it was located in the Japanese-era “Suidō-chō,” the Taipei water-source area¹⁷. After the Shuiyuan Building was constructed in 1980, vendors moved into the building, but the market’s food ecology did not move away. In the 1990s and 2000s, Shuiyuan Market and the snacks in the lanes on both sides became the area with the second-highest snack density in Taipei, behind only Shilin Night Market. Walking out of NTU’s Palm Boulevard takes five minutes to Shuiyuan Market, and another five minutes to the Gongguan traffic circle. Those ten minutes are the NTU student dinner route.

The bookstore ecology also took shape in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1982, Chen Longhao founded Tonsan Publishing House, “with the purpose of publishing and circulating books of the left, the non-mainstream, and those speaking for vulnerable groups”¹⁸. In 1984, Tonsan Bookstore was established, and “for many years, with its style as a professional humanities and social-sciences bookstore, it became a symbol of progressive thought on the island and a must-visit place for idealistic students”¹⁸. Located in a basement on Lane 333, Section 3, Roosevelt Road, Tonsan Bookstore was a spiritual stronghold for the NTU student-movement generation in the 1990s and 2000s. In 2002, Mollie Used Books founders Cai Moulang and Dai Lizhen opened their first store near NTU in the Gongguan commercial district, later expanding to National Taiwan Normal University, Taichung, and Kaohsiung¹⁹.

Gongguan’s specialness lies in the fact that the six material layers of “campus + dormitories + bookstores + snacks + market + Treasure Hill” all exist within 500 meters, and they are linked to one another.

📝 Curator’s note: The food map of the Gongguan commercial district is very different from other Taipei commercial districts. It is not a tourist district like Ximending, not a nightclub district like Xinyi, and not a literary-youth cafe district like Yongkang Street. It is an “NTU student ATM”: average prices of NT$80-150, large portions, places to sit and study, and 24-hour operation. Why did it grow this way? Because it serves students from NTU, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, and National Taiwan Normal University’s Gongguan campus. The three universities have a combined population of about 50,000, and on average students need to eat one to two meals in Gongguan every day. Long-term, dense student-consumption pressure means that Gongguan shops cannot charge high prices and cannot orient purely toward tourism. They must be “cheap + large portions + fast.” The Japanese-era imperial university’s planned double structure of “campus + dormitories” was joined after the war by the layer of scholars’ salons, after 1980 by the bookstore layer, and after 1999 by the mass-consumption layer. Only when these four layers are stacked together does the density of Gongguan in 2026 emerge.

October 2011, Gongguan commercial district, Taipei City. Photo: panoramio user, 2011-10-31. License via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Three Centuries in 500 Meters, on the Same Axis

On the morning of April 1, 1928, when the first class of Taihoku Imperial University’s Faculty of Science and Agriculture began, an imperial-university professor stepped out of the newly built Japanese-style dormitory at No. 25 Wenzhou Street and walked five minutes to the university gate. He did not know Japan would surrender 22 years later, and that this dormitory would be taken over by a new government and allocated to a mainlander scholar named Tai Jingnong.

One afternoon in 1956, Yin Haiguang carried a stack of logic lecture notes out of NTU’s main gate and walked eight minutes to No. 1-1, Lane 16, Alley 18, Wenzhou Street. Intelligence officers stood at the grocery store at the mouth of the lane pretending to buy cigarettes. He opened the unlocked wooden door of his house. The students coming that afternoon were Lin Yusheng and Chang Hao. They would discuss Carnap’s analytic philosophy. In another 13 years, he would die inside that small house.

On the afternoon of January 18, 1981, Zhou Yu hung the sign with the three characters “Wistaria Tea House” at No. 1, Lane 16, Section 3, Xinsheng South Road. The wisteria trellis his father had planted in the front courtyard in 1950 was already 31 years old. Chiang Ching-kuo was still in the Presidential Office, and martial law had not yet been lifted. But the tea house opened.

One afternoon in May 1990, the 87-year-old Tai Jingnong moved from his old dormitory on Lane 18, Wenzhou Street to his newly allocated house at No. 25. He inscribed the name of his study, “Longpo Zhangshi.” Half a year later, he finished his life at NTU Hospital.

At 6:30 on some evening in 2026, an 18-year-old NTU Chinese literature student leaves class in the College of Liberal Arts, walks out of the university gate, and follows Section 3 of Xinsheng South Road north for eight minutes to No. 25 Wenzhou Street. She stops for one second at the entrance to Tai Jingnong Former Residence and looks at the wooden old house with the irimoya-hafu roof, then continues north to the Gongguan traffic circle and buys a serving of Blue Dragonfly salty fried chicken and a cup of frog milk, a brown-sugar tapioca milk drink.

She does not know that the 500 meters she just walked are layered with the scholars’ dormitories planned by Imperial Japan in 1928, the living room of a philosopher under house arrest, the study of a calligrapher who served 20 years as chair of the Chinese literature department, and the wisteria trellis of the first humanities-oriented tea house. She only knows: should today’s salty fried chicken get Thai basil or not?

✦ An imperial-university professor’s dormitory became an NTU professor’s dormitory, became the living room of a philosopher under house arrest, became a 1981 tea house, became a commemorative building glanced at by a passing student in 2026. Along a 500-meter axis, three centuries of Taiwan have never changed land.

Gongguan’s core contradiction is this: the material formula of “laboratory + professors’ residences + surrounding small street market” planned by Imperial Japan in 1928 became, 100 years later, the cradle of postwar Taiwanese liberalism, and then the irreplaceable consumption ecology of contemporary students. The material foundation that was originally “the other’s academic district,” university gate + Palm Boulevard + dense Japanese-style dormitories + lane-level small shops, unexpectedly allowed Lei Chen, Yin Haiguang, Zhou Dewei, Tai Jingnong, and Lin Yusheng in the 1950s and 1960s to write some of the most important intellectual history of postwar Taiwan. It also allowed the 1972-75 Philosophy Department Incident to happen here, the 1981 Wistaria Tea House to open here, Tonsan Bookstore after 1990 to survive here until today, and NTU students in 2026 to eat dinner here.

Dadaocheng is a commercial street sustained by the tea trade from 1860. Bangka is the Qing-period flourishing center sustained by Longshan Temple from 1738. Ximending is the Japanese-era entertainment special zone from 1896. Only Gongguan is a “functional city around a university” left by the Japanese in 1928, whose DNA has not changed for 100 years. Three centuries inside 500 meters. Next time you pass NTU’s Xinsheng South Road entrance, stop for 30 seconds and look at the irimoya-hafu roof of No. 25 Wenzhou Street. The land under your feet was an imperial-university professors’ dormitory 100 years ago, a living room under house arrest 70 years ago, a newly opened tea house 45 years ago, and only got an MRT station 26 years ago. The same axis, three centuries unchanged.

Further reading:

• Taipei City: Three Times Inside One City, 1738 Longshan Temple Watching the 2004 Taipei 101 — Gongguan’s cross-district position among the 12 districts, Zhongzheng + Da’an + Wenshan, placed alongside the four timelines of Bangka, Dadaocheng, and Xinyi
• Taiwan’s White Terror — the martial-law purge context of the 1960 Lei Chen case, 1969 Yin Haiguang, and the 1972-75 NTU Philosophy Department Incident
• Martial-Law Period — the 1949-1987 political background and legal framework behind Lei Chen’s 11 years in prison
• Yin Haiguang: The Philosopher Who Planted Liberalism in Taiwan on Lane 18, Wenzhou Street — the most representative resident of the Gongguan-Wenzhou Street area, with his full life trajectory from arrival in Taiwan in 1949 to death in 1969
• Taiwanese Magazines: From _Free China_ to _Ciao Lien Chih_ — the publication history of Free China from 1949 to 1960 and the political context of martial-law media
• Dadaocheng — a sibling historic district in batch 1, a tea-commercial street from 1851, with a completely different “street-formation logic” from Gongguan’s 1928 imperial-university founding
• Bangka — a sibling historic district in batch 1, the Qing-period flourishing district sustained by Longshan Temple from 1738, contrasted with Gongguan’s Qing-period function as the boundary station of “Gongguan Village”
• Ximending — a sibling historic district in batch 1, a Japanese-era entertainment special zone from 1896, contrasted with Gongguan’s 1928 Japanese-era imperial university as two different spatial plans made by the Japanese in Taipei
• Yongkang Street — together with Gongguan, supporting the NTU and NTNU faculty-student consumption circle, two material nodes from scholars’ residences to students’ dining tables
• Guling Street — a sister landscape of postwar mainlander scholars and used-book culture, forming two mainlander intellectual settlements with Gongguan’s Wenzhou Street scholars’ residences
• Treasure Hill — an illegal settlement turned artist village 800 meters south of Gongguan, two kinds of “marginal spaces” from the same era as Gongguan’s 1969 student-movement context

Image Sources

This article uses 7 CC-licensed images, all cached in public/article-images/geography/ to avoid hotlinking source servers:

• 國立台灣大學校門.jpg — Photo: 寺人孟子, 2017-09-24, CC BY-SA 4.0
• 台北市 公館商圈 Gongguan - panoramio.jpg — Photo: panoramio user, 2011-10-31, CC BY-SA 3.0
• 紫藤廬 20170712.jpg — Photo: 寺人孟子, 2017-05-06, CC BY-SA 4.0
• 殷海光故居.jpg — Photo: 林高志, 2016-02-02, CC BY-SA 4.0
• 殷海光故居 9100.jpg — Photo: 林高志, 2016-02-02, CC BY-SA 4.0
• WenZhou Street, Taipei (at Lane 16).jpg — Photo: Kiyoteru Awaji, 2021-08-09, CC BY 4.0
• 寶藏巖 Treasure Hill Temple - panoramio.jpg — Photo: panoramio user, 2016-03-16, CC BY 3.0

References

1. Gongguan (Taipei City) — Wikipedia — The Taipei Gongguan entry records that “during the Qianlong reign of the Qing period, large numbers of immigrants from Anxi, Quanzhou entered and cultivated Quanshan; the leading cultivators built a gongguan here as a house for handling trade between Han Chinese and Indigenous people and for paying tenant rents, and the place name ‘Gongguan’ comes from this”; that “Gongguan is a place name in Zhongzheng District, Da’an District, and Wenshan District of Taipei City, Taiwan, formerly belonging to Guting District and Jingmei District”; that in the seventh year of Yongzheng, 1729, the Hakka settler Liao Jianyue led people to cultivate Quanshan, clashed with the Xiulang community of the Ketagalan people, and caused several hundred casualties; that five years later immigrants from Anxi, Quanzhou expelled the Hakka and established Gongguan Village; and that it has “the consumer market of students from National Taiwan University, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, and National Taiwan Normal University’s Gongguan campus,” among other geographic and demographic background.↩
2. Taihoku Imperial University — Wikipedia — The Taihoku Imperial University entry records that it was “formally founded on March 16, 1928” under Imperial Ordinance No. 30; that the originally planned name “Taiwan Imperial University” was changed to “Taihoku Imperial University”; that first president Shidehara Taira served from March 1928 to September 1937; that at first it had only the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Political Science, the Faculty of Science and Agriculture, which began classes on April 1, and the affiliated College of Agriculture and Forestry; and the detailed process by which it was taken over by the Republic of China government on November 15, 1945, reorganized as “National Taipei University,” and soon renamed “National Taiwan University.”↩
3. Shōwa-chō (Taipei City) — Wikipedia + Tomita-chō (Taipei City) — Wikipedia — In the 1922, Taishō 11, town-name reform, 15 large sections in Taipei’s western half were changed into 64 towns, while 10 large sections in the eastern half remained unchanged; Shōwa-chō was named because it was planned in the early “Shōwa” years and was a residential district developed after the establishment of Taihoku Imperial University; Tomita-chō was located in the southeastern corner of Taipei City, east of Suidō-chō, roughly corresponding today to Section 3 of Xinsheng South Road, Sections 3-4 of Roosevelt Road, and Section 3 of Keelung Road in Da’an District, Taipei City; and on August 16, 1941, the Taipei City Gazette abolished “Da’an First District” and “Da’an Second District” and established “Horikawa-chō District,” “Shōwa-chō District,” and “Da’an District.”↩
4. Yin Haiguang Former Residence — Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs — The official Cultural Affairs page records the address “No. 1-1, Lane 16, Alley 18, Wenzhou Street, Da’an District, Taipei City”; the background of the Japanese-style dormitory built in 1945; that Yin Haiguang “originally taught at the nearby National Taiwan University”; that after the 1960 Lei Chen case he was “sealed off by the government, unable not only to continue teaching at the university, but also subject to bans on his writings and lifelong surveillance”; that he lived there “until his death in 1969”; that “in May 2003, Mr. Yin Haiguang’s former residence was officially designated a municipal historic site”; that “since restoration in 2008, it has insisted on free public visits and emphasized its character as a ‘public good’”; and core facts such as its opening hours, “Tuesday to Saturday 13:00-17:00.”↩
5. Wistaria Tea House — Wikipedia — The Wistaria Tea House entry records that it was “built in the Taishō era,” the 1920s; that “the traceable time is an electricity bill from 1921”; that “the house was originally the official residence of Taiwan Governor-General’s Office official Asaka Teijirō”; that “in 1950, Zhou Dewei, then director of the Customs Administration, moved in with his family of seven”; that “Zhou Dewei, who admired liberalism, used the house as a cultural salon in the 1950s, regularly gathering more than ten people including Yin Haiguang, Zhang Foquan, Xu Daolin, and Xia Daoping for academic seminars”; that “the 1958 exchange-rate reform plan chaired by Yin Zhongrong was completed by Zhou Dewei in this official residence”; that “after Zhou Dewei moved to the United States in 1975, Zhou Yu took over the dormitory”; that “Wistaria Tea House opened on January 18, 1981”; that “on July 8, 1997, Wistaria Tea House was approved as part of the first group of municipal historic sites”; and that “at the end of 2001, after the Customs Administration transferred Wistaria Tea House to the city government as municipal property, Wistaria Tea House could be revitalized through a publicly commissioned operating model.” It also records the full chronology, along with the academic context of Zhou Dewei studying under Hayek and translating The Constitution of Liberty, and Yin Haiguang translating The Road to Serfdom with his encouragement.↩
6. NTU Philosophy Department Incident — Wikipedia — The NTU Philosophy Department Incident entry records that the incident lasted “from December 1972 to June 1975”; that within National Taiwan University, “in the name of ‘anti-communism,’ Chinese liberal scholars in National Taiwan University’s Department of Philosophy were purged”; the complete list of 13 dismissed people, “Chen Guying, Wang Xiaobo, Yang Feihua, Hu Jijun, Li Rizhang, Chen Mingyu, Liang Zhensheng, Huang Tiancheng, Guo Shiyu, Zhong Youlian, Huang Qingming, Zhao Tianyi, and American visiting professor Robert Ma”; the December 4, 1972 “Nationalism Symposium” held by NTU’s University Forum Society; Chen Guying’s strong rebuttal to “The Voice of a Small Citizen” and conflict with Feng Huxiang; Chen Guying publicly accusing Feng Huxiang of being a “professional student”; Qian Yongxiang’s immediate support; Feng Huxiang’s complaint to president Yan Zhenxing; the February 12, 1973 questioning of Qian Yongxiang and Huang Daolin by Garrison Command; the next day’s search of Chen Guying’s residence by Garrison Command; Chen Guying and Wang Xiaobo’s detention by Garrison Command on the charge of “propagandizing for the communists”; newly appointed visiting associate professor Sun Zhishen serving as acting department chair; “NTU’s graduate Institute of Philosophy suspending admissions for one year”; and the full timeline including “vindication in 1997.”↩
7. Taipei Metro Ximen Station — Wikipedia — The Bannan Line “Taipei City Hall-Ximen” section and Banqiao Line “Ximen-Longshan Temple” section officially opened and entered service on December 24, 1999. Gongguan Station belongs to the Xindian Line, the Green Line, and likewise entered service when the Xindian Line opened in 1999, making it a key node in the metro-ization of southern Taipei.↩
8. NTU Gongguan Commercial District Travel Guide — ezTravel — The Gongguan commercial district is located in southern Taipei, with its main commercial area covering Roosevelt Road, Tingzhou Road, and Xinsheng South Road; it is near three university campuses including National Taiwan University and National Taiwan Normal University; from the 1950s it had the Southeast Asia Theater as a student dating spot; and after the MRT opened in the 1990s it became a student-consumption hub in southern Taipei.↩
9. Tai Jingnong — Wikipedia + Ministry of Culture National Cultural Heritage Database: Tai Jingnong Former Residence + History of Tai Jingnong Former Residence — National Taiwan University — Tai Jingnong (1903-1990), courtesy name Bojian, from Huoqiu, Anhui, was one of the six gentlemen of the Weiming Society and both teacher’s friend and student to Lu Xun; in 1948 he was appointed professor in NTU’s Department of Chinese Literature, and from 1950 served as department chair for 20 years. The former residence is at “No. 25 Wenzhou Street, Longpo Village, Da’an District, Taipei City”; the building was built between 1935 and 1940 in the “irimoya-hafu” form; in March 1946 it was allocated by the public-property management office for National Taiwan University use; in May 1990 Tai Jingnong moved into this allocated residence; on November 9 of the same year he died of esophageal cancer at Taipei’s NTU Hospital, aged 87; the “National Taiwan University” lettering on the university gate was assembled from Tai Jingnong’s calligraphy; in May 2020, all 17 members present at the Taipei City cultural-heritage review committee unanimously agreed to register Tai Jingnong Former Residence as a “commemorative building”; and restoration of the main house was completed in November 2022.↩
10. Hsiao Wen-chieh column: Shōwa-chō University Residential Settlement — ARTouch — Scholar Hsiao Wen-chieh’s in-depth report on the contextual location of Yin Haiguang Former Residence at No. 1-1, Lane 16, Alley 18, Wenzhou Street, in “a small lane that requires several turns to reach”; the historical scene that “about sixty years ago, young disciples came to ask Mr. Yin Haiguang about philosophical questions and the political situation, while military police and special agents also monitored him here”; and an analysis of the value of the whole Shōwa-chō university residential settlement as a White Terror cultural-heritage landscape.↩
11. “Gongguan” Everywhere: A Market Place Name Found in North, Central, and South Taiwan — TVBS — A report on the place name “Gongguan” appearing across northern, central, and southern Taiwan, mainly originating in the functional houses used during the Qing period to collect tenant rents and handle trade between Han Chinese and Indigenous people. Taipei Gongguan, Miaoli Gongguan, Pingtung Gongguan, and many other same-name places derive from this origin.↩
12. Rescuing Old University Dormitories, Hoping to Preserve the Wenzhou Street Settlement and Huanan New Village — Environmental Information Center — A report on the current state of surviving Japanese-style dormitory clusters in Taipei, recording that “Qingtian Street has already been designated a preserved settlement landscape area” while “the preservation proposal for Wenzhou Street is still under review”; that the Wenzhou Street Japanese-style dormitory cluster faces demolition and development threats, with many old houses gradually disappearing; and that the Taihoku Imperial University professors’ dormitory cluster “is extremely rare among existing Japanese-style dormitories in Taipei City, with orderly architectural layout and careful selection of materials, including exposed brick, stone steps, washed-gravel wall bases, floor tiles, and cypress beams and columns.”↩
13. Free China (magazine) — Wikipedia — The Free China entry records its founding in Taipei on November 20, 1949; publisher Hu Shih in name; actual director Lei Chen; principal writers Xia Daoping, Mao Zishui, and Yin Haiguang; a total of 260 issues; and the complete publication history in which, on September 4, 1960, Taiwan Garrison Command used Yin Haiguang’s editorial “The Great River Flows East, and Cannot Be Stopped” in volume 23, issue 5 as a pretext to arrest Lei Chen and others on suspected rebellion charges, shut down the magazine, and sentence Lei Chen to ten years, though he served 11 years from 1960 to 1970.↩
14. Lei Chen — Wikipedia — The Lei Chen entry records that on September 4, 1960, Taiwan Garrison Command arrested Lei Chen on charges of “harboring communist spies” and “knowing of communist spies without reporting them”; that he had originally been organizing the “China Democratic Party” to prepare to compete with the Kuomintang; and that from then on he spent 11 years in prison until his release in 1971. The Lei Chen Incident is one of the most representative political repression cases of the martial-law period.↩
15. Treasure Hill — Wikipedia — The Treasure Hill temple entry records that “in the 56th year of the Qianlong reign, 1791, Treasure Hill underwent its first major renovation, expanding the eastern and western side halls”; that it is “located under Fuhe Bridge, situated beside the Xindian River, and leaning against Hukong Mountain, a branch of Toad Mountain, and is one of Taipei’s oldest Buddhist temples”; that it “was once a public temple for the Wenshan area and a faith center for local immigrants from Anxi, Quanzhou”; and that “in the third year of Jiaqing, 1798, believer You Dachuan purchased paddy fields in today’s Nanshijiao and donated an annual harvest of five shi as lamp offerings for Treasure Hill,” among other temple history.↩
16. Treasure Hill Settlement — Wikipedia — The Treasure Hill Settlement entry records that “after a reconstruction in early 1973, it opened to worshippers, and religious activity gradually resumed; at the same time, mainlanders began building illegal structures on the hillside behind the temple”; that “in the 1960s, the ban on illegal construction was relaxed, and military command authorities tacitly accepted the fact that mainlander residents were building illegal structures around Treasure Hill”; that “by the end of the 1980s, the settlement had reached nearly four hectares in scale and housed more than 200 households”; that in July 1980 it was incorporated into Urban Plan Park No. 297 and faced demolition and relocation; that in 1999 Lung Ying-tai, as cultural affairs commissioner, proposed the artist-village concept; that it was announced as a historic building in 2004; that “Treasure Hill Artist Village” officially began operations on October 2, 2010; that it was announced as the first historical settlement in 2011; and that it was announced as a settlement architectural complex in 2018.↩
17. Shuiyuan Market — Taipei City Market Administration Office — The Taipei City Market Administration Office’s Shuiyuan Market page records that Shuiyuan Market was established in 1953; that it was named because it was located in the Japanese-era “Suidō-chō,” the Taipei water-source area; and that in 1980, Minguo 69, the Shuiyuan Building was constructed to house vendors. The market itself is a snack-distribution center in southern Taipei.↩
18. Friendly Store: Tonsan Bookstore — Taipei City Department of Social Welfare — The Tonsan Bookstore entry records that “Tonsan Publishing House founder and editor-in-chief Chen Longhao began in 1982, with the purpose of publishing and circulating books of the left, the non-mainstream, and those speaking for vulnerable groups”; that “in 1984, continuing the publisher’s direction and spirit, Tonsan Bookstore was established”; and that “for many years, with its style as a professional humanities and social-sciences bookstore, it became a symbol of progressive thought on the island and a must-visit place for idealistic students,” in the historical context of its location on Lane 333, Section 3, Roosevelt Road.↩
19. Mollie Used Books — Wikipedia — The Mollie Used Books entry records that “Mollie’s used bookstore originated in a three-square-meter used-book stall at Taipei’s Guanghua Market in the 1980s”; that “in 2002, the two owners, Cai Moulang and Dai Lizhen, opened the first Mollie storefront in the Gongguan commercial district near National Taiwan University”; and the business history of its later expansion to five branches.↩