Lin An-Tai Old House: You Can Dismantle a House, but Not a Piece of Taipei

30-Second Overview: The Lin An-Tai Old House originally stood on Siwei Road in Da’an District. It was dismantled in 1977 when Dunhua South Road was widened, passed through way stations including a warehouse on Anhe Road and the space under the Heping West Road viaduct, and was finally reassembled in Binjiang Park. It preserves partial material evidence of a Qing-dynasty Anxi immigrant residence and a Minnan courtyard house, but it also leaves behind the problem that relocated preservation can never fully carry away a site’s original landscape and way of life.

Image: Adam Jones, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. Original image and licensing details at the image description page. Image not modified.

Image: Bernard Gagnon, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Original image and licensing details at the image description page. Image not modified.

Image: Bernard Gagnon, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA multiple licenses. Original image and licensing details at the image description page. Image not modified.

Image: Bernard Gagnon, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Original image and licensing details at the image description page. Image not modified.

In 1977, at No. 141 Siwei Road, Da’an District, Taipei, a house that had stood for about two hundred years began to be dismantled. It was not excavators that moved in first, but windows, furniture, roof tiles, wooden members, bricks, and stone slabs, leaving their original positions one piece at a time. That year, the widening project on Dunhua South Road closed in on the Lin An-Tai Old House.¹

From the original site to Binjiang Park, the straight-line distance is about ten kilometers. It would take ten years for the old house to stand again on its new ground.² The Lin An-Tai Old House therefore doesn’t quite fit a story that can be summed up as simply "preservation succeeded." It really did survive — and it really did lose its original geography, its neighborhood, and its way of life.

Curator’s Note: A house can be moved. The relationship between a house and its land cannot be packed up and moved with it.

A Person Comes First, Then a House

In 1754, Lin Qin-ming, whose ancestral home was Anxi in Fujian, crossed the sea to Taiwan with his family. His fourth son, Lin Zhi-neng, later went into business in Monga (Wanhua), founding the Rongtai Trading House. Once the family had accumulated some wealth, the Lins built a residence on what is now Siwei Road in Da’an District. The main building was completed around 1783–1785, and the flanking wings (hulong) followed in 1822–1823.³

"An-Tai" is not a tourist label added later. The official history explains that the name draws the "An" from Anxi and the "Tai" from the Rongtai Trading House. A house name that places the ancestral home and the family business on the same plaque also preserves the process by which an immigrant family put down roots in Taipei.³

Before it became a museum, this house was a container for the Lin family’s daily life: a main hall, flanking wings, a front courtyard, and a pond, along with the daily sounds of family members coming and going, cooking, washing clothes, and playing. A 2014 press release for a special exhibition by the Taipei City Government’s Department of Civil Affairs preserved descendant Lin Qing-long’s memories of his childhood there. He recalled being born in the old house and growing up among its lattice doors, ancestral altar, and front courtyard.⁴

Look only at the roof ridge, the brick walls, and the carvings, and the old house turns into a beautiful specimen — the fact that Lin family members once lived inside it fades into the background. What is truly irreplaceable about the Lin An-Tai Old House is that it was, all at once, a home, an ancestral house, the center of a rural family’s life, and, later, a piece of private land that road engineering happened to cut through.

The City Needs a Road, an Old House Needs a Place

In 1976, the widening of Dunhua South Road put the Taipei City Government in a position where it had to decide whether to tear down the Lin An-Tai Old House. At the time the old house was not yet listed on the heritage register, and part of the structure sat inside the planned road corridor. Official research records show that roughly two-thirds of the rear structure — about 170 ping (a floor-area unit still used in Taiwan real estate) — fell within the project’s footprint, which is what set off the dispute between preserving it in place and rebuilding it elsewhere.⁵

The dispute was never as neatly split as "preservationists" versus "developers." Some proposed routing the road around the site, or putting it underground or on an elevated section; others argued for dismantling the house and rebuilding it somewhere else. Experts, architects, government agencies, and the Lin family each faced a different kind of cost. A road is a piece of public infrastructure for a city; an ancestral house is a family’s living space, and no language of public engineering can substitute for it.⁵

In 1967, the Ministry of the Interior convened officials from transportation, education, historical archives, and urban planning, along with outside experts and scholars, to discuss how to preserve the Lin An-Tai Old House. Official research records show that the meeting concluded in favor of preserving it on-site, but the Taipei City Government went on to pursue relocation anyway.⁵

In 1978, the Lin family agreed to the demolition. That decision cannot be reduced to the Lin family voluntarily donating the old house, nor can it be written up as a unilateral rescue by the government. Official research documents the tug-of-war among property rights, compensation, living conditions, and the road’s planned right-of-way. When a house has not been placed on the heritage register, there is no fair answer to the question of what power a family actually has to make a city stop and wait.⁵

The Old House’s First Move Was Actually Three Moves

According to a press release from the Taipei City Government’s Department of Civil Affairs, the dismantling that began in 1977 first placed the old house’s components in a temporary warehouse on Anhe Road, then moved them under the Heping West Road viaduct, before a reconstruction site was finally found in the Binjiang Street area. From dismantling to reconstruction, the whole move took roughly ten years — it did not happen in one step.⁴

A Taipei Times report describes the process as something closer to a logistics operation that had spun out of control. Dismantling the old house took five months. Its components then sat stranded in the Anhe Road warehouse because of a land dispute, and were later moved under the Heping West Road viaduct, where wooden members and columns were damaged in a leaking, damp environment. It was six years before the government found a new site in Binjiang Park.²

Timeline sources: the Taipei City Government Department of Civil Affairs’ history page, official research reports, and the Taipei Times.

The difficulty of the move was never only about distance. The old house was originally a structural system with its own direction and order: roof tiles bearing down on the frame, wooden columns and brick walls interlocking with each other, doors and windows sized to daily use. Once every part was taken apart, the relationships between those parts were dismantled along with them.

Official research notes that after multiple relocations and reassemblies, some of the old house’s original wooden members were damaged, and its original roof tiles are no longer in use.⁶ This detail is worth remembering more than any claim of "complete preservation." Preservation is not about delivering every piece of material safely to a new home — it is about deciding, after losses have already happened, which traces can still be left behind honestly.

Image: Bernard Gagnon, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA multiple licenses. Original image and licensing details at the image description page. Image not modified.

Image: Bernard Gagnon, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Original image and licensing details at the image description page. Image not modified.

For engineers or conservation workers, the difficulty of this case breaks down into several layers. The first is identification: every roof tile, every piece of timber, and every brick or stone slab needed its position recorded before dismantling. The second is storage: components could not simply be piled up together — they still had to withstand the wear of humidity, transport, and waiting. The third is reassembly: the new site’s foundation, orientation, drainage, and functional needs forced restorers to choose between old materials and new engineering.

Coding the components, then, is not simply a construction technique — it is a way of turning architectural memory into traceable data. It lets later observers know where each component originally stood, and lets them see what has already been lost. Photographs taken only after reconstruction make it easy to assume the house was never interrupted at all. Keeping dismantling records, material inventories, and damage reports together is what makes a technical record actually responsible to a historic building.

This also explains why relocated preservation cannot be judged by its final appearance alone. Academic research points out that a relocated building loses its original setting, and that engineering technique itself can affect authenticity.⁷ For a public cultural institution, what is put on display should not be limited to an intact roof ridge and a tidy courtyard — it should also include photographs of the original site, the relocation route, records of material loss, and the disputes behind each decision. Only by making that process public do visitors get a chance to understand that the building in front of them did not simply survive on its own, but is the result of choices made, and costs paid, by multiple parties over time. That is also why this article places official histories, government research, academic abstracts, and English-language reporting side by side: each source illuminates a different stretch of the process, and no single one of them can stand in for the whole history.

Curator’s Note: "Moving house" sounds like an everyday verb. For a historic building, every move redefines what it actually is.

Reconstruction Is Not Putting the Original Back Where It Was

In 1984, Binjiang Park was chosen as the reconstruction site. Official press releases record that architect Li Chong-yao used a coding method to manage the dismantled components, and completed the reconstruction despite aged materials, wear from the dismantling process, and limited conditions for preservation. The old house was finished in 1985 and opened to the public in 1987.^{4 2}

The Taipei Times additionally records that the reconstruction rules banned the use of metal, plastic, and nails, that the project was completed after 400 days, and that it cost NT$45.3 million. These figures are not meant to show how impressive the project was — they are meant to let readers see that "off-site preservation" is, in practice, an extremely concrete body of technical work.²

The more refined the engineering, the more clearly the preservation problem shows through. A 2006 study from Chung Yuan Christian University points out that on-site preservation is generally treated as the best way to preserve a historic building, while relocated preservation is a last resort forced by the conflict between urban development and cultural preservation. The study surveys 28 relocation-preservation cases in Taiwan from the Japanese colonial period to the present, and warns that a relocated building may lose its original setting and still face open questions about material authenticity and engineering technique.⁷

So the Lin An-Tai Old House in Binjiang Park is not simply "a copy of the original site," nor is it just "a fake heritage building that kept only its looks." It is a historic building that was taken apart, damaged, reinterpreted, and finally reassembled out of some of its old materials and a set of new engineering decisions. Its authenticity lies not only in whether the bricks are old, but in whether people are willing to say out loud what the move broke.

The Original Fengshui Could Not Be Moved

The Lin An-Tai Old House originally sat facing northeast to southwest, with a range of hills called the anshan ("table mountain") in front of it, protective ridges known as husha on either side, and a mingtang ("bright hall") in front of its half-moon pond. These geographic relationships were not decorative background — they were a traditional way of reading direction, wind, water, and family order into a home.³

After the move to Binjiang Park, that original geography no longer existed. The official history does not pretend this gap can be closed entirely — instead, it records that the current site uses an artificial hill called "Gu Zhu Ming Shan" (顧渚茗山), grassy slopes, and gardens to re-symbolize the original anshan and mingtang.³ The English-language official history page likewise states plainly that once the old house moved away from Siwei Road, its original fengshui landscape changed, and that the garden on the current site is a re-presentation of that landscape relationship, not the landscape itself.⁸

There is a subtle but crucial difference here. Re-presentation is not restoration. An artificial hill can help people understand the original vocabulary of fengshui, but it cannot call back Toad Mountain (Chanchu Shan), the fields, the neighboring houses, or the way of life that had continued there since the Qing dynasty. The garden is therefore both a work of preservation and a public admission: some things can only be explained, never moved.

The official architectural tour splits the grounds into a blue route and a red route, taking in Yue Mei Pond, the outer courtyard, Antai Hall, the main hall, the dougong brackets, the Cloud Wall, the Langgu Stone Courtyard, Aibo Pavilion, the Flying Stone Path, and Gu Zhu Ming Shan.⁹ These named stops give today’s visitors a route to walk, and they are also what turns the old house from a family space into a public educational one.

Three Scales: Material, Landscape, and Public Memory

The preservation record of the Lin An-Tai Old House can be read at three scales. The smallest scale is material: wooden members, bricks, tiles, stone slabs, doors, and windows. At this scale, what matters is whether components still exist, whether their original positions can be identified, and how losses get made up for. The middle scale is architecture: the main building, flanking wings, front courtyard, Yue Mei Pond, and perimeter wall. At this scale, what matters is whether the spatial order can still be understood. The largest scale is the city: Siwei Road, the road-widening project, the warehouse, the space under the viaduct, and Binjiang Park. At this scale, what matters is how a house gets changed by public engineering, and who has the power to decide which places are worth keeping.^{5 6}

These three scales also show why a single photograph can never carry the whole burden of preservation. A photograph records appearance; a survey records dimensions; coding tracks components; oral history restores lived experience; official reports preserve the policy and engineering context behind each decision. None of this evidence can substitute for the others, but each can check the others against reality. This kind of layered record still matters for digitizing cultural heritage today, because a 3D model on the internet, without the context of the original site, the materials, and the people who used it, can still end up being nothing more than a beautiful model that has lost its historical relationships.

Curator’s Note: Preservation is not about gathering all the evidence into one display case. It is about making different kinds of evidence line up with each other.

From Ancestral House to Public Everyday Life

In 2000, the Lin An-Tai Folklore Museum formally opened to the public. In 2010, after its garden was expanded, it served for a time as one of the pavilions of the Taipei International Flora Expo.⁸ The house had changed form again: no longer serving only one family, it now let strangers come in to understand a Qing-dynasty Minnan residence, a family’s life, and the changing city of Taipei.

The more the old house resembles an easy-to-reach attraction, the more that very openness produces its own contradiction: the easier it becomes to forget that it was not originally here at all. Visitors taking photos by the half-moon pond are looking at a Binjiang Park garden and a reassembled courtyard. Without the history, the research, and the relocation records, Siwei Road — the original site — simply recedes into the background.

A better way to visit is to treat the route as a scaled-down map of the preservation itself. Start with the perimeter wall and the entrance, and notice how the old house divides inside from outside using doors, walls, and the front courtyard. Then walk to Yue Mei Pond and the main hall, and watch the sightlines between the water, the courtyard, and the main building. Finally, look at the roof ridge, the dougong brackets, the recessed three-bay front gate (sanchuanmen), and the painted details, and put them back into the context of craftsmanship and family life rather than treating them as mere decoration. The official tour lists these stops separately, which gives visitors a way to read the space on their own, without needing a guide.⁹

If you also hold the original site in mind, the visit gains an invisible coordinate. Siwei Road is not an exhibit inside the park, but the starting point for understanding why this house had to be moved at all. Binjiang Park, in turn, is not a stand-in photo for the original site, but a new public scene created after reconstruction. Both places have to exist together, or the history of the Lin An-Tai Old House gets compressed into just a beautiful old residence. Reading it this way is also a reminder that a visitor is not simply looking at a finished object, but recognizing a piece of urban relationship that was cut, preserved, and then explained all over again. The wall at the entrance, the water inside the courtyard, the scale of the main hall, and the decoration on the roof ridge each preserve a different layer of information. Only by tracing them back to the original site and the relocation itself can one see that the cultural value of the old house is not hiding only in its finest carvings.

The National Cultural Heritage Network’s registration entry lists the Lin An-Tai Old House as a historic building, and records its original site, historical background, and current status.¹⁰ The act of registration itself makes a point: cultural heritage does not earn its public meaning simply by "looking old." It is investigation, registration, research, and management that turn a house’s value into a memory society can actually share and use.

Curator’s Note: What is most worth seeing at the Lin An-Tai Old House today is not just its roof tiles and carvings, but the fact that it leaves the cost of the verb "preserve" right there on site.

The Institutional Memory This Case Left Behind

The influence of the Lin An-Tai Old House does not stop at the perimeter wall of Binjiang Park. The Taipei City Government’s official research places it within the broader context of relocating and preserving historic buildings in Taiwan, organizing the dispute over the original site, the expert meetings, the dismantling, and the reconstruction into a case that could later be studied, compared, and reviewed.⁵ That is what turned "can a heritage building be moved" from a one-off dispute over a single house into a question public policy has to answer.

A 2006 graduate thesis used the Lin An-Tai incident as a dividing line, and went on to survey relocation-preservation cases across Taiwan afterward. The research did not treat every later relocation as progress — instead, it asked, case by case, why each building was moved, what methods were used, what legal basis applied, and what the outcome actually was.⁷ This approach is worth noticing, because it breaks "preservation succeeded" down into several checkable questions: how much of the original spatial relationship remains, whether the materials are still identifiable, whether the new location can still explain the old way of life, and whether public use lets the building keep generating meaning.

For today’s urban engineering, this case offers a reverse warning as well. If a piece of cultural heritage is only noticed after a road’s alignment, land rights, and construction schedule are already fixed, preservation is usually left with only two choices: dismantle it, or lose it. A better approach is to bring historic buildings, the surrounding landscape, and community memory into the planning process early — comparing the costs of on-site preservation, rerouting the road, going underground, partial retention, and relocation before deciding whose loss it will be, and how much. This is not about turning every old house into an untouchable zone. It is about refusing to let "moving it" be mistaken for a neutral option that costs nothing.

The Lin An-Tai Old House preserves part of the evidence of a Qing-dynasty Anxi immigrant family building a residence in Taipei, along with the spatial form, craftsmanship, and imagined daily life of a Minnan courtyard house. It also preserves the record of how government, experts, and family pulled against each other when Taipei, in the 1970s, ran into a conflict between an urban road and a historic building.^{3 5}

The original land was not preserved. The street grid of Siwei Road, the original fields, the neighborhood, and the family’s daily rhythms did not travel to the new site along with the building. Academic research treats the Lin An-Tai Old House as a representative case of relocated preservation not because the method has no flaws, but because this case turned its own flaws into a question later discussions of cultural heritage could no longer skip.⁷

Walking into Binjiang Park, you can treat the house as an old residence, or you can treat it as a file that has been moved. The first way of looking lets you appreciate the architecture; the second makes you notice the relationship between architecture and land. Both are necessary — leave out either one, and the Lin An-Tai Old House gets talked about too easily.

What gets preserved is not necessarily the original place — it is people’s willingness to admit the loss, even after the original place is gone. The Lin An-Tai Old House is therefore not just a house that got left standing. It is also the first question Taipei was ever forced to answer between road widening, urban renewal, and cultural memory. That question has not been relocated anywhere else; it is still sitting right where it was, waiting for someone to ask it again. That is exactly why the Lin An-Tai Old House deserves to be treated as an entry point into Taiwan’s modern urban history, not merely a heritage-site name on a tourist checklist.

Further Reading

• Lin An-Tai Folklore Museum official website
• National Cultural Heritage Network: Lin An-Tai Old House
• Wikimedia Commons: image and licensing information

References