Losheng Sanatorium: How an Isolated Home Became the Site of Taiwan’s Medical Human Rights

30-Second Overview: Losheng Sanatorium was established in 1930 at the border between Xinzhuang and Guishan, serving as Taiwan’s first and only public leprosy isolation hospital during the Japanese colonial era. It is not merely an old hospital complex with Japanese-style wards and a hillside landscape; it is also a living settlement where residents built families, religions, work structures, and mutual aid systems during long-term isolation. In the 1990s, the selection of the MRT depot site created a direct conflict between “transportation infrastructure” and the desire to “stay home.” The preservation movement of the 2000s pushed this socially isolated hospital into the center of public debate on medical policy, housing rights, patient autonomy, and cultural heritage.

Not Just an Ordinary Hospital

Looking up the hillside from the area around Huilong Station, Losheng Sanatorium first presents not an isolated monument, but a complex unfolding with the terrain. It once featured wards, medical spaces, dormitories, kitchens, bathhouses, welfare shops, libraries, religious sites, and a crematorium. These facilities together formed a community capable of long-term living. Official cultural heritage data therefore classifies it as a cultural landscape where medical history, public health history, and social life intersect, rather than merely a collection of old buildings. ¹

The name “Sanatorium” cannot mask its institutional background. The term currently in common use, “Hansen’s disease” (leprosy), has long been surrounded by fear, religious imagination, and stigma. The history of Losheng includes not only the gradual evolution of treatment technologies but also the state’s methods of separating patients from their families and society. To understand this complex, one must ask two questions simultaneously: What problem was the isolation policy at the time trying to solve? How did the isolated people rearrange their lives within the system?

1930: The State Built an Isolation System on the Hillside

Losheng Sanatorium was built by the Japanese colonial government in 1930. It was Taiwan’s first and only public leprosy isolation hospital during the colonial period. Located in the Dingpojiao and Huilong areas at the border between Xinzhuang and Taoyuan’s Guishan, it was near the city yet deliberately kept at a distance from general residential areas. Data from the Ministry of Culture’s Taiwan World Heritage Candidates indicates that the complex initially housed patients in five wards. After the war, the government continued to operate it, expanding the number of wards to over sixty. ²

Image: Wikimedia Commons, “Birdview of Rakuseiin (c. 1932).jpg”. This historical image is best read alongside the background of the hospital’s establishment in this section; see the image source attribution at the end for actual licensing.

This spatial arrangement reflected the contemporary understanding of the disease: patients were viewed as a group requiring isolation, rather than residents who could be treated within general communities. Isolation occurred not only in medical clinics but also extended to marriage, returning home, work, and death. Residents might spend the majority of their lives within the hospital grounds, so the hospital gradually ceased to be merely a short-term inpatient facility and became a home with its own paths, neighborhoods, and memories.

Wards Are Not Wards, But Residents’ Homes

The most notable spatial feature of Losheng is that its wards do not fully resemble the multi-bed wards of modern hospitals. Cultural heritage data notes that the complex utilized sun-facing slopes for building configuration, with early wards arranged in detached or small-cluster forms where residents lived long-term. The site also featured water and sewage systems, disinfection equipment, public kitchens, and bathhouses. ¹ These facilities served the isolation system on one hand, while allowing patients to establish daily order within restricted boundaries on the other.

Residents were not merely recipients of care. Within the grounds, there was work, religion, shopping, socializing, and mutual aid; residents tended to flowers and trees, repaired houses, and cared for one another. Some wards were named after the provinces of Taiwan, creating a spatial memory that condensed the island’s geography onto the hillside. This living history reminds us that if we only photograph roof tiles, arched windows, and old trees without explaining who ate, worked, argued, prayed, and said goodbye here, we silence the residents once again. ³

Image: Wikimedia Commons, “Losheng Prayer hall.jpg”. The Prayer Hall reminds us that life in the complex was composed not only of medical facilities but also of faith spaces where residents faced disease, death, and each other’s companionship; see the image source attribution at the end for actual licensing.

From Chaulmoogra Oil to Combination Therapy: A Turning Point in Medical History

Losheng also preserves the shift in understanding leprosy treatment. Early treatments used methods such as chaulmoogra oil, which had limited effects. After the mid-20th century, antibiotics and multidrug therapy gradually changed the treatability of the disease. Data compiled by the Taiwan Alliance for Progress on Human Rights places this process within a broader public health history: from forced isolation and institutionalization to later outpatient and open measures, the complex witnessed changes in disease policy. ³

Medical progress did not immediately eliminate social exclusion. As the disease became treatable, residents still faced alienation from family, interrupted work, difficulties returning home, and societal judgment. This is one of the most significant contrasts in the Losheng story: drugs can reduce the risk of infection and symptoms, but they cannot automatically repair interpersonal relationships severed by decades of isolation, nor can they decide where residents should live in their old age.

Policies Changed, But the Home Did Not Disappear

Post-war Taiwan continued isolation and confinement policies, expanding wards in the 1970s. Records from the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s hospitals note that during the Provincial Government era, wards were increased to sixty and beds to 970, with Losheng’s population reaching its peak. Only with advancements in leprosy prevention and drug therapy did the function of medical institutions gradually transform. ⁴

For policy, this may be a progressive history from “confinement” to “treatment.” For residents, however, it was a different, complex experience. Many lived in the complex for decades, familiar with every tree, every slope, and every neighbor. When the government stated that the complex’s function had changed, it does not logically follow that residents could leave without cost. For a community formed under an isolation system, the place of residence was simultaneously a site of trauma and a home.

The 1990s: The MRT Depot Collides with Residents’ Later Years

In the 1990s, Losheng’s land was planned as the site for the Xinzhuang Line MRT depot. Data from the Taiwan Alliance for Progress on Human Rights indicates that of the approximately 30 hectares of hospital land, a large portion was planned as depot land, with the most historically significant building clusters within the engineering scope. ³ This was not merely a dispute over the demolition of monuments, as residents still lived within the grounds. The depot site selection involved engineering efficiency, resident resettlement, information transparency, and housing choices.

The Control Yuan later pointed out that the handling of the Losheng Sanatorium preservation case involved cultural heritage assessment, MRT engineering site selection, and administrative procedure issues, issuing corrections to relevant agencies. ⁵ This investigation shifted the controversy from “someone opposed the project” to more specific institutional questions: Did the government identify cultural assets early enough? Were residents fully informed before decision-making? Did the engineering and resettlement plans place the life needs of the elderly at the core?

Post-2004: The Preservation Movement Rewrites the Name of the Problem

Preservation actions expanded in the early 2000s. The Youth Losheng Alliance, resident self-help organizations, local historians, human rights groups, students, and cultural heritage professionals intervened together, making “how many buildings to keep” no longer the only issue. Public Television’s reports documented the Youth Losheng Alliance’s involvement in 2004 and the process by which the resident self-help society organized under engineering pressure. ⁶

Image: Wikimedia Commons, “The former Losheng Sanatorium Administration Center 20070322.jpg”. The remaining space of the administration center corresponds to the preservation disputes in this section; see the image source attribution at the end for actual licensing.

The most powerful aspect of the preservation movement is that it allowed residents to become the subjects of the narrative again. Residents are not objects to be preserved, nor are they numbers hindering construction. They are long-term dwellers, people who can explain the history of the complex, and those with the right to participate in decisions regarding relocation, resettlement, and restoration. This shift connects cultural heritage with human rights: the value of a building cannot be calculated apart from the people living in it.

“Preservation” Is Not Leaving Empty Houses After Moving Residents Out

In 2007, the government decided to preserve part of the complex, with plans including preservation, demolition, and reconstruction of different types of spaces. Ministry of Culture data later explained the policy direction with a plan for preserving 39 buildings, partial demolition, and reconstruction. ² However, the term “preservation” still requires questioning: What is being preserved? Facades? Houses? Courtyards? Or life relationships? If only unused buildings are left, the complex may become a site for viewing, losing its original meaning as a place of living.

In 2012, the Minister of Culture visited the complex, proposing the establishment of a medical museum. Media reports at the time noted that about one hundred residents still lived in the complex, and preservation groups continued to monitor the impact of MRT engineering on buildings and foundations. ⁷ This discussion presented a dilemma of preservation: A museum can allow society to see the history of leprosy, but a museum cannot replace residents’ rights to housing, privacy, and autonomous living.

Why Losheng Is a Cultural Landscape, Not a Nostalgic Attraction

In 2009, Losheng Sanatorium was registered as a cultural landscape. Official cultural heritage descriptions place its value in several layers: It witnesses leprosy prevention and modern public health. Residents formed a complete living settlement under restrictive conditions. Buildings, natural slopes, and residents’ memories together constitute the genius loci (spirit of place). Preserving it allows society to face disease stigma and human rights history. ¹

Therefore, Losheng is not suitable for packaging merely as “Japanese old houses” or a “photography secret spot.” Japanese-style wards are indeed visible architectural features, but their importance lies not only in their age, but in what they carry: how systems entered bodies and lives. Wards, bathhouses, kitchens, religious spaces, and paths to the crematorium form a map of treatment, isolation, faith, death, and mutual aid.

A Living Medical History

Recent public information from the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Losheng Sanatorium still records residents, leprosy care, and international exchanges, showing that Losheng is not merely a cultural asset belonging to the past. In 2026, the hospital reported visits by International Leprosy Ambassador Yohei Sasakawa, with residents participating in the exchange. This reminds us that preservation work is not about erecting a monument to a history that has ended, but about continuously caring for people who still live in the complex. ⁸

A Losheng timeline compiled by National Taiwan Normal University places the 1930 founding, post-war expansion, 1990s development controversies, and 2000s preservation movement on the same timeline. ⁹ This timeline is important because it refuses to cut Losheng into two unrelated stories: “colonial architecture” and “MRT resistance.” The former explains how the complex formed; the latter explains who has the right to decide its future.

What Should One See When Visiting Losheng?

To understand Losheng, one may look at the architecture with the first eye, but the second eye should look at the relationships between buildings: Why are wards distributed along the slope? How did public facilities allow residents to maintain daily life? Which spaces once belonged to medical staff, and which were built by residents? How do the number of buildings on the preservation register align with residents’ life memories?

One must also remember that Losheng is a place with still-living residents and medical functions. Visits should not treat residents as exhibits to be photographed, nor enter living spaces without consent. The true way to respect a cultural landscape is not to turn it into a more convenient tourist attraction, but to understand that its formation included forced isolation and the residents’ ability to create life under restricted conditions.

Visitors can also divide “seeing” into three layers. The first layer is material: wooden structures, brick walls, arched windows, slopes, old trees, and roads, explaining how architecture responded to climate, hygiene, and terrain. The second layer is institutional: Who could enter? Who had to stay? How were items disinfected? How were wards managed? This explains how public health became spatial rules. The third layer is memory: How did residents name different wards? How did they establish religious and mutual aid networks? How did they transform a complex originally meant for exclusion into a livable home? Only when all three layers are combined will visits not reduce Losheng to a set of beautiful but silent old photographs.

Guided tours should also avoid treating leprosy as a curiosity. Disease history can discuss transmission, treatment, and isolation, but should not create viewing stimulation through the appearance of patients’ bodies or personal encounters. A more responsible approach is to use the contemporary common name “Hansen’s disease,” explain the old names and their stigma in historical documents, and treat residents as people with names, relationships, work, and the capacity to choose. This linguistic shift is not a decoration of political correctness, but a correction of the way medical systems once reduced patients to “cases.” One can also start to understand from objects and spatial usage left by residents, such as how furniture was arranged in wards, how potted plants were arranged along slopes, how public bathhouses and kitchens allowed people to maintain sociality, and how religious spaces provided language for facing disease and death. These details may not be directly visible on the building exterior, but they are an inseparable part of the cultural landscape. They let us know that Losheng’s history was not written unilaterally by policy documents, but accumulated by residents’ repeated use, adjustment, and memory of daily life.

After Preservation, Who Can Still Live Here?

The cultural heritage system solves issues of registration, restoration, and management, but Losheng’s特殊性 (special nature) lies in the fact that “living” cannot be detached. For general monuments, opening for visitation after restoration may be the main goal. For Losheng, residents are still the contemporary bearers of the place’s history. Restoration materials, visitor routes, activity noise, photography regulations, and medical privacy all need to establish boundaries between cultural display and resident life. This is not treating residents as people who need protection but have no decision-making power, but acknowledging their knowledge and rights formed through long-term use of the complex.

From the perspective of preservation engineering, the terrain, structure, and circulation issues left by MRT construction mean Losheng cannot return to a “pristine state” completely free of external pressure. Minutes from the New Taipei City Cultural Bureau’s Preservation Promotion Meeting show that engineering monitoring, platforms around buildings, connection to Huilong Station, and complex restoration require continuous coordination among cultural, transportation, and medical agencies. ¹⁰ Preservation is therefore a long-term governance process, not an administrative action that ends with a single announcement.

More broadly, Losheng offers Taiwan’s memory politics a rare case. It does not simplify history into relics of colonial rule, nor does it write the post-war government as a single character. Japanese colonial isolation policies, post-war expansion, drug therapy, MRT development, and democratic civic actions all left traces in the same place. National Taiwan Normal University’s research project discusses Losheng and Taiwan’s leprosy policy from a global perspective, illustrating that this place is not just local history, but a case that can be compared with global leprosy isolation systems, medical modernity, and human rights transitions. ¹¹

A Timeline Connecting Medical Care, Development, and Preservation

Losheng’s key turning points were not sudden single events, but different systems layering sequentially on the same hillside. The timeline below lists only nodes directly related to the article’s main axis, avoiding misreading complex history as a straight line of only progress without cost. ^{2 5 9}

Source: National Cultural Heritage Network, Control Yuan, National Taiwan Normal University Losheng Timeline

The point of this timeline is not to select a “true starting point” for Losheng, but to remind readers: Spaces created by isolation policies later became, simultaneously, relics of medical transformation, homes for residents, and cultural/human rights sites that urban construction must face. ^{1 6}

Questions Left by a Homeland

Losheng Sanatorium’s most important legacy may not be a specific building, but a question forcing Taiwan to rethink: When public interest conflicts with the homes of the vulnerable, who has the right to define “necessary sacrifice”? When medical policy once isolated people, does society have a responsibility to let them participate in how their own history is preserved?

Curator’s Notes: Do Not Only Preserve the “Visible” Losheng

When curating Losheng, I deliberately shift my gaze away from the most easily photographed roof tiles, wooden windows, and old trees. These materials are certainly important because they allow people to identify the complex’s era and terrain. However, the National Cultural Heritage Network lists Losheng as a cultural landscape precisely because value lies not in single buildings, but in the overall relationship between medical facilities, living settlements, religious sites, natural slopes, and residents’ life memories. ¹ If an exhibition only makes buildings look prettier but moves residents’ lives, labor, faith, and mutual aid to the appendix, preservation may once again replicate the viewing method of “systems naming people.”

Therefore, this article chooses to juxtapose three types of materials: Official cultural heritage data lets us know the institutional language of registration and preservation. Narratives left by residents, human rights groups, and public media let us see how isolation entered families, bodies, and daily life. Administrative meetings and academic research let us question the distribution of responsibility among MRT engineering, cultural governance, and human rights. ^{3 5 6 11} They are not entirely identical to each other, nor should they be pressed into a conflict-free story. The curator’s work is not to manufacture false consensus for different positions, but to clearly mark where each type of material speaks from, what it sees, and what blanks it leaves.

I would also treat “residents still living here” as the starting point of exhibition design, not an ethical reminder added at the end. Public reports from the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Losheng Sanatorium show that the complex still has residents connected to care and exchange activities. This means visitor routes, photography methods, sound, and activity arrangements may touch the privacy and daily life of real residents. ⁸ For Losheng, the best exhibition is not necessarily the most information-rich one, but one that lets visitors understand the institutional history while knowing they are entering a place still inhabited and still needing respect.

Finally, Losheng should not only be placed in the cabinet of “tragic sites.” Residents certainly endured isolation and stigma, but they also built neighborhoods, work, religion, and care relationships under restrictions. If we only gaze at them through a victim framework, we once again deprive them of their subjectivity as life creators and historical interpreters. For me, what is most worth preserving in Losheng is not a consumable tragic story, but a public site that continuously asks how public construction, medical governance, and housing dignity should be jointly decided. This is a question the curator must leave for the audience, not answer for them.

This complex started from the state’s isolation system and ultimately became a public site of human rights and cultural preservation. It reminds us that buildings record not only the designer’s intent, but also how residents transformed institutional space into a living world. Seeing Losheng is not only looking back at a disease history, but also learning how to put human dignity back at the center of decision-making in urban construction, medical governance, and cultural heritage.

Further Reading

To further understand Losheng, one can follow three paths. The first is medical history, tracing the institutional shift of leprosy from isolation and confinement to multidrug therapy. The second is spatial history, observing how wards, public facilities, slopes, and the MRT depot jointly shaped the complex. The third is human rights history, reading resident self-help, youth participation, and administrative procedure controversies to understand how the preservation movement changed the language of public decision-making.

References

Sources and Images

Image Licensing

• Birdview of Rakuseiin (c. 1932).jpg | Wikimedia Commons — Remote embedded Wikimedia Commons image; actual author and licensing per file page.
• The former Losheng Sanatorium Administration Center 20070322.jpg | Wikimedia Commons — Remote embedded Wikimedia Commons image; actual author and licensing per file page.
• Losheng Prayer hall.jpg | Wikimedia Commons — Remote embedded Wikimedia Commons image; actual author and licensing per file page.