Treasure Hill: The Informal Settlement Slated for Demolition for 30 Years That Became Taipei’s Coolest Artist Village

30-second overview: In July 1980, the Taipei City Government designated this hilltop as the “planned site of Park No. 297”¹. From that moment on, more than 200 illegal houses built into the hillside entered a state of “waiting to be demolished.” On June 25, 1993, the city formally announced demolition and relocation²; on July 20, 1994, Mayor Huang Ta-chou ordered the demolition of 46 legal military houses²; and in December 2001, the city demolished more than 40 of over 100 waterside-area residences². But after the anti-demolition movement around Parks No. 14 and 15 on March 4, 1997³, the city’s direction began to loosen: in 1999, Lung Ying-tai, the first commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs, proposed the concept of a “poor artist village”⁴; in February 2004, Treasure Hill was recognized as Taiwan’s first historic building registered “as an entire settlement”²; and on October 2, 2010, the international artist village officially opened⁵. Thirty years of demolition rulings ultimately became an “art-residence symbiosis” settlement that has hosted more than 500 artists from over 40 countries[^5]: a Guanyin temple first substantially renovated in 1791⁶, a group of people who built their own homes in the 1960s, more than 20 original households that stayed, plus a rotating cohort of international resident creators every three months, four layers of people living at the same time on this 46-meter-high hill beside the Xindian River⁷. This article is about this: the 30 years in which Treasure Hill went from stigmatized “illegal construction” to an international case study was not an uplifting tourism story. It was a miniature model of Taiwan’s civil society forcing open the public authority of urban planning.

At 5 p.m., the hillside stairways light up one by one

Aerial photograph of the Treasure Hill settlement, October 2018. Photo: Taipei City Government Department of Cultural Affairs, 2018-10-05. License via Wikimedia Commons (Attribution).

Come out of Exit 1 at MRT Gongguan Station, turn right into Lane 90, Section 4, Roosevelt Road, then left onto Tingzhou Road, walk to Lane 230, Section 3, and turn right: about a five- to seven-minute walk⁸. If it is your first time here, you may walk past it, because the mouth of the alley looks like an ordinary Gongguan lane, without any sign announcing that you are “about to enter a historic settlement.” After passing through the bustle of Shuiyuan Market and the Gongguan commercial district, then walking two more blocks, a small hill suddenly appears in front of you.

That is Treasure Hill.

At 5 p.m., students who have just finished an afternoon class at National Taiwan University, or tourists who have just left the Gongguan NET store, step onto the small road in Lane 14, Lane 230, that climbs up the hill. The first bend is the red-tiled facade of Guanyin Temple, a temple first substantially renovated in 1791⁶. It enshrines Guanyin Buddha, and today a new multistory temple structure completely encloses the old single-story temple within it. Climb upstairs and you can see the roof carvings of the old temple up close⁹. Walk farther up, and the paths begin to turn irregular: winding alleys, crooked stairs, asymmetrical house orientations, some lintels bearing the words “Lin Residence,” “Chen Family,” or “Mama Chang,” and some windows hung with signs reading “Artist Studio #14” or “Open Studio.”

If you arrive at 5:30, you will see the lights in the hillside buildings come on one by one. Behind each light is a different person.

The first light to come on is the living-room light of an elderly mainlander veteran in his eighties, in the house beside Guanyin Temple. He has lived here since the 1960s, when this hillside was still military land belonging to the Taiwan Northern Defense Area Command². He was one of several dozen retired mainlander military residents who built houses under the command’s tacit permission. The lights that come on in the middle section are artist-studio work lights: perhaps a visual artist who came from Seoul in 2026 for a three-month residency, adjusting an installation with a projector¹⁰. Near the hilltop, the corridor lights of the youth hostel are on: students from Germany, Sweden, Canada, and Thailand are staying for a night, and nearby you can hear travelers’ conversations mixing English with stiff Mandarin.

Four layers of people live on the same hill: the original residents who remained from the 1960s, the Guanyin Temple left from 1791, the international artists who have moved in since 2010, and overnight travelers. Thirty years ago, all four of these layers almost ceased to exist, because the 1980 urban plan had already sentenced this hilltop to become a “planned park site”¹.

📝 Curator’s note: Ordinary travel writing frames Treasure Hill as an uplifting story of a “military dependents’ village transformed into an artist village,” but that narrative misses three things. First, Treasure Hill was never originally treated as a “military dependents’ village” at all. The Nationalist government never registered and managed it as one; all the houses were illegal structures, and residents included retired mainlander veterans, workers who had come north from central and southern Taiwan, and marginalized urban households⁷. Second, this hilltop nearly spent 30 years being demolished. After it was announced in 1980 as the planned site of Park No. 297, actual demolition took place in 1993, 1994, and 2001, making it one of the longest-running confrontations in the history of Taipei’s preservation movements². Third, behind the phrase “art-residence symbiosis” was a compromise produced in 2003, when OURs Urban Reform Organization and the Department of Cultural Affairs forced two originally conflicting demands, “cultural preservation” and “housing rights,” into a single governance framework¹¹. What changed over these 30 years was Taiwan’s overall view of “illegal buildings,” “disadvantaged settlements,” and “urban-planning authority.” The Taipei City Government’s decision at that moment in 1997 to move from “demolish everything” to “preserve in place” affected more than Treasure Hill.

The Guanyin Temple from 1791 is Treasure Hill’s first layer of history

To understand Treasure Hill, first separate two things: Treasure Hill the “temple” and Treasure Hill the “settlement” belong to two different historical timelines. The temple came first, the settlement came later, and nearly 170 years separate them.

Treasure Hill Guanyin Temple stands at No. 2, Lane 14, Lane 230, Section 3, Tingzhou Road, Zhongzheng District, Taipei City, next to the foot of Fuhe Bridge and beside the Xindian River⁹⁶. The temple was sited on the southern foot of Xiaoguanyin Mountain, also called Hukong Mountain, a 35-meter-high branch of Toad Mountain. Because it was “built against a cliff, it was called a ‘yan’,” or rock shelter⁶.

There are two accounts of its founding date. Most sources cite Tamsui Tingzhi, published during the Tongzhi era of the Qing dynasty, and hold that Treasure Hill was built during the Kangxi era, in the late 17th century, by Guo Zhiheng, a migrant from Anxi, Quanzhou, and his son⁹¹². But based on the text of the “Guanyin Pavilion Stele” erected inside the temple in the third year of the Jiaqing reign, 1798, by the student-official You Dachuan, together with land-reclamation studies showing that significant cultivation around Gongguan did not begin until the 1770s, some scholars argue that the founding date should be closer to the Qianlong era⁶⁹.

What is certain is this: in the 56th year of the Qianlong reign, 1791, Treasure Hill underwent its first major renovation, expanding the east and west side halls⁶. In the third year of the Daoguang reign, 1822, the monk Xinqian rebuilt Treasure Hill again, adding a Buddha hall, a merit hall, and a columbarium, while expanding the front hall and the corridor in front of the temple⁹. The main temple structure visible today is the result of these Qing-era alterations. The stone columns, stone piers, stone carvings, wood carvings, and steles that remain in the temple are still Qing originals. The most famous is the 1798 “Guanyin Pavilion Stele”⁹⁶.

📝 Curator’s note: The “temple within a temple” structure of Guanyin Temple is worth pausing over. Expansions and renovations across the years lacked the unified design concept of a master carpenter; most were small-scale construction jobs done in batches by contractors, so the building techniques and component styles appear mixed, even collaged⁹. But this “collage” in fact shaped Treasure Hill’s most memorable architectural feature: a new multistory temple structure completely encloses the old single-story temple within it, and by climbing the stairs, visitors can see the old temple’s roof carvings up close. On the same temple body, the Qing side halls from 1791, the Daoguang-era rebuilding of 1822, and the contemporary expansion of 1996 stack together three eras of architectural language⁹. Treasure Hill was once listed as an important historic site in 1974, but because renovation caused it to “lose its ancient style,” that status was revoked; only in 1997 was it again registered by the Taipei City Government as a city-designated historic site¹³⁶. One temple body contains four temporal layers: Qing, Japanese colonial, postwar, and contemporary. This multilayered “collage” quality later also became the material gene of the illegal settlement below the hill.

Looking uphill from Guanyin Temple, for the 158 years from 1791 to 1949, the hilltop consisted mainly of the temple, sparse farmland, graves, plus some Xindian River sand-mining households or rural families left from the Japanese colonial period². During World War II, the Japanese military stationed an antiaircraft artillery unit at Treasure Hill and built underground bunkers and barracks on the southern foot of the hill to store ammunition. These structures later became the military-remains substrate of the hilltop settlement⁷. After the Nationalist government took over Taiwan in 1945, the Taiwan Northern Defense Area Command moved onto this land, and the hilltop changed from a Japanese antiaircraft position into a Nationalist military command post⁷. In the early 1950s, apart from the Guanyin temple and the command headquarters, the hill had only three to five households left from the Japanese colonial period².

Treasure Hill’s “settlement history” began after that.

From the 1960s onward, the “people urban planning did not see” on the hillside

Beginning in the 1960s, two things caused the illegal settlement later known as Treasure Hill to grow on the hillside.

The first was a slight easing of Cross-Strait tensions and a loosening of the ban on illegal construction. The military had originally strictly enforced the rule that “outsiders were prohibited from building houses around the command headquarters,” but that rule began to relax. The command’s military authorities began tacitly accepting mainlander residents building illegal structures around Treasure Hill². The second was the severe housing shortage in Taipei City caused by the 600,000 retired soldiers and dependents who came with the Nationalist government after it relocated to Taiwan, combined with the wave of rural-to-urban migrants who came north from central and southern Taiwan during Taiwan’s rapid industrial and commercial development in the 1960s and 1970s. Treasure Hill, with its steep slope, irregular terrain, and lack of incorporation into formal development under urban planning, was exactly the kind of place sought out by people who could not afford urban rents¹⁴.

The settlement’s resident composition therefore differed from that of ordinary “military dependents’ villages.” It was not registered or managed by the Nationalist government, and its residents included retired veterans, meaning mainlanders, workers who came north from central and southern Taiwan, meaning benshengren, low-income families, vendors, and other diverse groups¹⁴.

The way houses were built was also different. There were no architects, no structural calculations, no coordinated water or electrical infrastructure. It was purely self-built housing: people needed a place to live, so they built one⁷. Materials were gathered locally: pebbles picked up along the Xindian River, salvaged bricks, salvaged sheet metal, salvaged wooden boards. Construction stacked up layer by layer according to the hillside topography. There was no planned road network; alleys were made by the paths people walked. Apart from three to five more spacious official residences for generals and 40 legal military bachelor dormitories, most houses were narrow, self-built, locally sourced bungalows².

In the early 1970s, the Taiwan Northern Defense Area Command relocated, and the pace of illegal construction accelerated². By the mid-1980s, the settlement had already reached nearly four hectares in scale and housed about 200-plus households¹⁵. One account says that at its peak it had more than 250 households and over 400 residents¹⁴.

This was the physical reality faced by the demolition order of 1980: a dense illegal settlement of more than 200 households spreading from the temple up across the hilltop, inhabited by some of Taipei City’s most disadvantaged people.

📝 Curator’s note: In the eyes of the Taipei City Government in the 1980s, the concept of “disadvantaged people building their own homes” was defined as an urban-appearance problem to be solved, not as urban memory worth preserving. After Taiwan’s rapid industrial and commercial development in the 1970s and 1980s, the Taipei City Government’s urban-planning logic as a whole tended toward “tear down the old and build the new,” and illegal buildings not shown on planning maps were viewed especially as breaches in urban order. But for the people living here, this hill was the only place they could afford to live: the rent per ping down on Tingzhou Road was several times higher, and the bricks they picked up and the sheet metal they assembled on the hill were all the property they had. Treasure Hill’s real history exceeds thin labels such as “military dependents’ village” or “old soldiers’ story.” It is the story of how “people unseen by urban planning” in Taiwan’s first 30 postwar years of urban development built a settlement for themselves on an ignored hillside. Professor Liu Ko-chiang later described this period as “Phase 1.0”: “the process by which self-construction after the 1950s realized ‘local revitalization,’” and noted that “a vernacular architectural complex of more than 200 households reached its peak in the mid-1980s”¹¹.

From water-source protection land to the planned site of Park No. 297

Main building cluster of the Treasure Hill settlement, February 2026. Photo: Adao (User: 阿道), 2026-02-21. License via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

In July 1980, the Taipei City Government announced that Treasure Hill had been formally moved from water-source protection land into the planned site of Urban Planning Park No. 297 in the waterside area¹. For residents, that announcement was a judgment.

The planning logic of Park No. 297 was this: because the land directly bordered the Xindian River and lay on the edge of the river’s floodway, it needed to become green space for flood control and public access to the water. Except for the historic monument of Treasure Hill Guanyin Temple, which could remain, all other illegal structures had to be demolished according to law¹⁶. From that moment on, every household on the hill entered a state of “waiting to be demolished.”

But demolition was not carried out immediately. Although several warnings were issued in the 1980s, the city government never actually moved in the bulldozers. One reason was that the compensation measures for demolition and relocation were incomplete; another was resistance by the residents’ self-governing association. This “postponement” was a technical delay, not a policy shift: the legal status of the planned park site did not change, and residents continued to live in uncertainty through the second half of the 1980s and into the early 1990s.

On June 25, 1993, the Taipei City Government formally announced that houses within the planned park site would be demolished and relocated². The following year, on July 20, 1994, Mayor Huang Ta-chou ordered the demolition of 46 legal military houses². This was Treasure Hill’s first truly large-scale demolition. Although the houses demolished were legal military buildings, after residents in the illegal-construction area saw the bulldozers, fear spread.

In the second half of the 1990s, demolitions of illegal buildings were taking place simultaneously elsewhere in Taipei. The key event was the anti-demolition movement around Parks No. 14 and 15 on March 4, 1997. That area, around Linsen North Road and Chang’an East Road, today Linsen Park and Kangle Park, had originally been the Japanese cemetery of Sanbanqiao in the Japanese colonial district of Mihashicho. After the war it became a large illegal-building cluster inhabited by residents from Zhoushan Island and Hainan Island who had come to Taiwan with the Nationalist government, but it was not a registered military dependents’ village³. At the end of February 1997, the Chen Shui-bian city administration decided to forcibly demolish it on March 4. In the early morning of February 26, resident Zhai Suoxiang hanged himself on the eve of demolition³. That same afternoon, more than 50 residents petitioned in front of the Taipei City Government. On the morning of March 4, “with the rumble of bulldozer engines, Kangle Li was reduced at once to broken bricks and shattered tiles”³.

The Kangle Li incident set off public controversy. Faculty and students from the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at National Taiwan University proposed an “in-situ rehousing” plan and joined the resistance. Student Peng Yang-kai later became secretary-general of OURs Urban Reform Organization and remained deeply involved in demolition and relocation issues³. In the same month, March 1997, the handling of Parks No. 14 and 15 received extensive media attention. On June 10, the Taipei City Government decided to suspend full-scale forced demolition at Treasure Hill and other sites and began drafting rehousing plans².

Treasure Hill escaped the fate of Kangle Li. The city government did not change its mind on its own. The Kangle Li demolition shook public opinion, and academia and the social-movement sector did not give the government a second chance.

📝 Curator’s note: The moment of the Kangle Li demolition on the morning of March 4, 1997, was a crucial turning point in the dialogue between Taiwan’s civil society and the public authority of urban planning in the 1990s. Before then, municipal demolition of illegal buildings was an administrative routine: announcement, compensation, or no compensation, then bulldozers entering the site. The entire process left no space for the option of “preservation.” After Kangle Li, scholars, activists, media, and city councilors began collectively questioning the very urban-planning logic of “demolish everything and rezone.” In September of the same year, faculty and students from NTU’s Graduate Institute of Building and Planning formally entered Treasure Hill to conduct resident interviews and spatial surveys, led by teams under Professors Hsia Chu-joe and Liu Ko-chiang; graduate students included Chen Chien-chung and others who later continued working in cultural-heritage preservation¹⁷. From that moment on, Treasure Hill was no longer “illegal construction waiting to be demolished,” but a “historic settlement with preservation potential.” A shift in terminology, from “illegal construction” to “settlement,” from “demolition” to “preservation,” changed the whole fate of Treasure Hill over the next decade.

The 2003 napalm performance art action

Marco Casagrande’s “napalm” performance art at Treasure Hill, 2003. Photo: Burgeoisnieves, 2003. License via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

The 13 years from 1997 to 2010 were Treasure Hill’s “experimental period.”

In 1999, writer Lung Ying-tai, at the invitation of Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou, became the first commissioner of the Taipei City Government’s Department of Cultural Affairs⁴. During her term, the department began including Treasure Hill in cultural-asset evaluation and used the concept of a “poor artist village” as the future operating direction for Treasure Hill⁴. Lung’s proposal was crucial: it redefined Treasure Hill from “illegal construction waiting to be demolished” into a “historic settlement with cultural potential.”

In December 2001, the Taipei City Government completed partial resident rehousing and demolished more than 40 of over 100 residences in the waterside area². These 40-plus households were concentrated in the Xindian River waterside area, on the edge of the legally uninhabitable floodway, making them the easiest part of the demolition ruling to carry out. The core hillside settlement was preserved, but the number of households fell from more than 200 in the 1980s to about 100-plus.

In June 2003, OURs Urban Reform Organization received a planning commission from the Department of Cultural Affairs to realize the original intention of preserving Treasure Hill, promote urban spatial reform, and advocate for residents’ rights¹¹¹⁸. That same year, OURs planned the “2003 GAPP Global Action for Planning Pedagogy,” placing “art action” inside Treasure Hill’s preservation strategy¹⁸.

In October 2003, the Department of Cultural Affairs invited Finnish artist and architect Marco Casagrande to take up residence at Treasure Hill. Casagrande later proposed the concept of “Urban Acupuncture”: treating the city as a living organism and using small-scale, tactical interventions to trigger a repair process across the urban tissue¹⁹. What he did at Treasure Hill was simple: on the ruins of demolished houses, he manually built wooden stairs to make it easier for hillside residents to move in and out; on rubble left after demolition, he opened vegetable gardens and encouraged local residents to grow crops; and he built bamboo scaffolding for a farmers’ market¹⁸¹⁹. He named the project “Organic Layer Taipei”¹⁹.

What people remember most is the napalm performance art action: on the demolition ruins, Casagrande used flames in a ritual performance, painted his face red, and led volunteers in a “procession,” symbolizing the possibility that this settlement might soon disappear¹⁸. Flames burning atop the ruins of houses already half demolished were a message for the city government and society: “If you keep demolishing, what remains will be ashes like these.”

📝 Curator’s note: Marco Casagrande’s 2003 napalm performance art caused major controversy at the time. On the one hand, it pushed Treasure Hill’s demolition issue into international media. The Organic Layer Taipei project was later selected for the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale, and The New York Times described Treasure Hill as a “must see location” in Taipei¹⁹²⁰. On the other hand, some residents and preservation activists worried that a dramatic performance like napalm would typecast Treasure Hill as a “spectacle,” rather than a serious housing-rights issue¹¹. What cannot be denied is this: beginning in 2003, Treasure Hill gained a name in international architectural and urban-planning circles. Casagrande later wrote the Treasure Hill experience into the book Biourban Acupuncture: Treasure Hill of Taipei to Artena¹⁹, turning “urban acupuncture” from a concept into a teachable methodology. An illegal settlement originally seen as an urban flaw became, in reverse, teaching material for international urban-planning theory. This reversal later became the basis of international legitimacy for Treasure Hill’s “art-residence symbiosis” label.

Treasure Hill’s vegetable gardens, stairs, and half-demolished houses

Vegetable garden from Marco Casagrande’s “Organic Layer / Treasure Hill” ecological urban-repair practice, 2003. Photo: Jan jörg, 2003. License via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

The three years from 2003 to 2006 were Treasure Hill’s most complicated.

On one side, OURs and the Department of Cultural Affairs were planning the future blueprint for the “Treasure Hill Symbiotic Artist Village,” with four directions: “Treasure Hill Home” for disadvantaged groups to live in; “artist-in-residence action” using art activities to participate in the community; an “international youth hostel” providing affordable accommodation for international students; and “ecological architecture and environmental learning” combining wetland environments with the settlement’s characteristics¹⁸. These four directions later became the three major theme zones when Treasure Hill Artist Village opened in 2010, with the ecological-architecture learning direction folded into the other three²¹²².

On the other side, the city’s demolition ruling had not been completely changed. Not until 2005 was Treasure Hill formally changed from “park land” into a “special-purpose district,” with the competent authority transferred from the Parks Office to the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs²¹. From 1980 to 2005, Treasure Hill’s identity on the urban-planning map as “a park” remained in place for 25 years.

In June 2006, the Taipei City Government issued an official letter reminding residents that they had to move out voluntarily by October 31, 2006, so that repairs could be made to the houses of original residents who wished to stay and met socially disadvantaged criteria, and so that part of the area could be renovated into the Treasure Hill Symbiotic Settlement²²²¹. The city proposed three rehousing measures: receive an administrative relief payment of NT$720,000; receive a relief payment of NT$360,000 and be allowed to move back after two years; or move to nearby transitional housing²².

Beginning at the end of 2006, the Department of Cultural Affairs carried out settlement restoration work⁴. In 2007, the Treasure Hill historic settlement area was formally changed into a “special-purpose district”²¹. This legal classification change was crucial, because originally, “park land legally could not have residential use,” while a special-purpose district permitted the mixed use of “residence and cultural preservation co-constructed together.” Professor Liu Ko-chiang later explained: “Preserving Treasure Hill required seeking breakthroughs under the real conditions of law and regulation, after years of mediation and negotiation”¹¹.

In October 2009, the Department of Cultural Affairs opened the renovated “Treasure Hill Home” zone for 22 original households to move in²². On October 2, 2010, “Treasure Hill Artist Village” formally began operations under the Artist Village operation division of the Taipei Culture Foundation⁵²¹. From the announcement of the planned Park No. 297 site in 1980 to the opening of the international artist village in 2010, exactly 30 years had passed.

📝 Curator’s note: The 2006 rehousing decision deserves an extra moment. The city’s three options, a one-time NT$720,000 payment, NT$360,000 plus return after two years, or moving into transitional housing, all looked acceptable, but for elderly veterans who had built their own homes 30 or 40 years earlier, every choice was painful. Taking NT$720,000 once meant giving up the hill where they had lived their whole lives. Returning after two years meant moving into a renovated “cultural-preservation residence,” not the original house. Moving into transitional housing meant severing a 30-year physical connection to this settlement²². The 22 households that ultimately stayed, later reduced to 19, were overwhelmingly people who chose the “NT$360,000 plus return after two years” option. They agreed to leave for two years so the houses could be repaired, then move back and continue living there. But after returning, their status had changed from “illegal-construction households” to “objects of cultural preservation.” That status shift was not only a legal change. For veterans in their eighties, it meant moving from “people forgotten by urban planning” to “people incorporated into urban planning.” This reversal is the core achievement of Treasure Hill’s 30-year preservation movement¹¹.

Opening day in 2010, and the 16 years after

The opening on October 2, 2010, brought together residents, artists, Department of Cultural Affairs officials, and preservation activists. Treasure Hill Artist Village formally began operations, commissioned to the Taipei Culture Foundation for management⁵²¹.

At the moment it opened, Treasure Hill was defined as a “micro settlement-type artist village.” It adopted the concept of “art-residence symbiosis” and introduced three major theme zones: “Treasure Hill Home,” “Residency Program,” and “Youth Hostel”⁵²². “Treasure Hill Home” was the residential area for original households, 22 in total; the “Residency Program” was the international artists’ studio area, with a new group every three to six months; and the “Youth Hostel” was accommodation for international backpackers²²²¹.

By 2026, this structure had operated for 16 years.

Artist-in-Residence Taipei, AIR Taipei, uses Treasure Hill and Taipei Artist Village, at No. 7, Beiping East Road in Zhongzheng District, as its two main bases. Each year it holds three rounds of selection for domestic and international creative workers, providing accommodation and work space for three to six months²¹¹⁰. As of 2026, more than 500 artists from over 40 countries have taken part in residencies at Treasure Hill⁵. At the same time, it has sent more than 100 Taiwanese artists to overseas residency institutions for reciprocal visits and fieldwork⁵.

The first-quarter 2026 residency presentation brought together 11 groups of artists from Taiwan, Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States. Through visual art, performing art, music, literature, curating, and interdisciplinary artistic practice, and through forms including short fiction, staged readings, installation art, video, puppetry, and painting, they presented their lived experience during their residencies at Treasure Hill¹⁰.

Some artists have become special cases of long-term residency. Teacher Chou Ling-chih has been in residence since 2008, for more than 15 years as of 2026, shifting from ecological art to ceramic creation and co-creating an ecological garden with residents¹⁰. Beginning in January 2015, the poet Hsu Ta took up residence with “Climbing a Small Tower Poetry Cafe” as his base; after 2017 he initiated the “Poets Writing the Village” project, using modern poetry and prose to collect information from 27 households and document the settlement’s history¹⁰¹⁴.

On March 21, 2026, the “2026 Treasure Hill Light Festival: City of Glimmers” opened. Fourteen groups of interdisciplinary artists used light, sound installation, and performing art to respond to Treasure Hill’s distinctive historical texture and settlement landscape. The exhibition ran until May 3, open daily from 11:00 to 22:00, closed Mondays, with lights switched on from 18:00 to 22:00²³.

📝 Curator’s note: Treasure Hill’s “symbiosis” label has not always been beautiful in its 16 years of practice. Tourism pressure has led some residents to complain about noise, trash, and intrusions into privacy. On holidays, large numbers of visitors pass through the alleys taking photographs, capturing residents’ laundry yards, or knocking on elderly residents’ windows. The Taipei Culture Foundation has continued to use “family-name signs,” placing surname signs in front of each resident’s house, to try to remind visitors that “people live here”²². There has also been tension between artists and residents. Installation works by resident artists sometimes touch sensitive resident memories or occupy public space in ways that inconvenience residents. Professor Liu Ko-chiang later said: “Between residents and artists, each respects the other’s autonomous existence, and on the basis of this consensus they face external forces together”¹¹. He used “Treasure Hill 3.0” to describe the vision for the next stage: “repositioning the ‘art-residence symbiosis’ settlement as an integrated ‘creative living home,’” with the goal of integrating cultural preservation, living community, and social creativity¹¹. Treasure Hill’s “symbiosis” has been a process under constant negotiation for 16 years. It has never been in a state of “already completed.”

Three places locals will take you to see

Graffiti in the Treasure Hill settlement, October 2012. Photo: Nisa yeh, 2012-10-14. License via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Tourists all know Treasure Hill. But these are the three places locals will take you to see.

Treasure Hill Guanyin Temple (No. 2, Lane 14, Lane 230, Section 3, Tingzhou Road). First substantially renovated in 1791, rebuilt in the Daoguang era in 1822, consecrated with a jiao offering ceremony in 1996, and designated a city historic site by the Taipei City Government on August 5, 1997⁹⁶. The point is not its exterior, which has already been covered by multiple layers of alteration. The point is to climb upstairs and look down from the side of the new temple body: you will see the roof carvings of the single-story old temple from 1791, completely enclosed inside the new temple. One temple body contains four temporal layers: Qing, Japanese colonial, postwar, and contemporary⁹. This “temple within a temple” is the most complete miniature of Treasure Hill’s material history. The later “layer upon layer” construction of the illegal settlement on the hillside followed the same material logic as this temple.

Machine-gun bunkers and air-raid shelters (inside the settlement). During the Japanese colonial period, the Japanese military set up an antiaircraft artillery position and underground bunkers on this hill. After the war, the ROC military took them over, and after 1949 they were reorganized as military facilities of the Taiwan Northern Defense Area Command⁷. After the Department of Cultural Affairs took over, these military remains were transformed into exhibition and performance spaces: the inside of the air-raid shelter is closed, with a plaza outside that can be rented for exhibitions; the machine-gun bunker preserves the concrete structure of military architecture and serves as a visual backdrop for outdoor performances²²¹⁴. These spaces are Treasure Hill’s deepest material-historical layer: later than Guanyin Temple, earlier than the illegal settlement, and physical evidence of wartime militarization under Japanese rule.

Household museums and the Historical Cross-Section Gallery (various households inside the settlement). The 19 households in the “Treasure Hill Home” zone each have a “surname sign” in front indicating which family lives there. In addition to their residential function, some residents open their own spaces as “household museums,” using their own photographs, furniture, and objects to tell the story of the family from the 1960s to today¹⁴²². The “Historical Cross-Section Gallery” is a permanent exhibition curated by the Department of Cultural Affairs. It uses a timeline to present Treasure Hill’s complete history, from Qing-era temple, Japanese colonial antiaircraft position, postwar illegal settlement, 1980s crisis, 1997 turning point, to the opening of the artist village in 2010²²¹⁶. These exhibitions avoid the museum-like posture of “displaying things for tourists.” Residents and preservation activists have written their own history into the space. The photographs on the walls are pictures of grandparents when they were young, and the objects on the tables are things still actually in use.

After visiting these three places, you understand Treasure Hill’s true texture. Tourists rush to photograph the art installations, but what they see is only the surface. Locals’ Treasure Hill consists of the old temple carvings from 1791, wartime Japanese concrete bunkers, the homes of elderly veterans from the 1960s, and household museums accumulated over 16 years: four material layers spanning 230 years, all stacked continuously on the same 46-meter-high hill.

1980 vs. 2026, the same hill

People walking in front of Treasure Hill’s ecological garden on January 30, 2025, the second day of Lunar New Year. Photo: Allervous, 2025-01-30. License via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

On that afternoon in July 1980, in the office of the Taipei City Government’s Department of Urban Development, several officials stamped the words “planned site of Park No. 297” on a document. More than 200 hillside households knew nothing about it. They only knew that beginning the following year, 1981, people would come to their doors to post demolition warning notices.

On an evening in May 2026, a visual artist from Seoul, South Korea, on a three-month residency walks along the stairs of Lane 14, Lane 230, toward his residency studio. He has just bought a bottle of water at a Gongguan convenience store and is using Google Maps to confirm the location of his residency unit. He has no idea that 46 years earlier, beneath these stairs, there was once a demolition ruling, and someone once used a napalm performance to stop this hill from being razed.

But he knows one thing: this hill is now one of Taipei’s most popular residency locations among international artists. He applied for seven Asian residency opportunities and ultimately chose Treasure Hill because “the history here is the most complex.”

Four layers of people live on this hill: the Guanyin Buddha left from the Qing dynasty, concrete bunkers left from the Japanese colonial period, retired veterans left from the 1960s, and international artists arriving for residencies in 2026. Thirty years ago, three of those layers nearly disappeared entirely.

✦ “The Treasure Hill settlement is a settlement formed through informal construction processes in postwar Taiwanese cities. It is a representative example of veterans, rural-to-urban migrants, urban Indigenous people, and other socially disadvantaged people building their own homes on marginal urban hillsides”⁷. This sentence comes from the official recognition issued by the Taipei City Government on May 27, 2011, when it announced Treasure Hill as “Taipei City’s first settlement architectural complex”²²²¹. It is not promotional copy. The three phrases “informal construction,” “self-built housing,” and “socially disadvantaged people” were originally negative labels used by the city government in the 1980s to justify demolition and relocation. After 2011, they became positive labels used by the city government to recognize a cultural asset. The same hill, the same group of people, the same architectural objects: the state’s view of them reversed 180 degrees over 30 years.

Treasure Hill’s core contradiction is this: the same illegal settlement the state sentenced to death in 1980 was turned by the state into a cultural asset in 2010. Between those two moments lay 30 years of demolition confrontation, the shock of the Kangle Li incident, Lung Ying-tai’s concept of the poor artist village, resident interviews by NTU’s Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, legal mediation by OURs and the Department of Cultural Affairs, Marco Casagrande’s fire performance art, and the insistence of 19 elderly original households on staying.

These 30 years far exceed the uplifting story on tourism-bureau webpages about a “military dependents’ village transformed into an artist village.” These 30 years are a miniature model of Taiwan’s civil society forcing open the public authority of urban planning: from “the government decides” to “the government, scholars, and residents negotiate and decide together.” Treasure Hill’s 1997 policy shift affected more than one hill. It told later sites of 21st-century urban-planning conflict in Taiwan, from Losheng Sanatorium to Huaguang Community, Shaoxing Community, the residents beside Jut Art Museum, and many others, that “demolish everything and rezone” is not the only option.

Next time you pass through Gongguan, go past Shuiyuan Market and see the irregularly stacked building cluster on that hillside. Stop for 30 seconds and look. Two hundred thirty years ago, the ground under your feet was a Guanyin temple for the faith of Qing-era Zhangzhou migrants; 80 years ago, it was a Japanese antiaircraft position; 60 years ago, it was a refuge of self-built homes; 30 years ago, it nearly got razed; now it is an international artist village. The same 46-meter-high hill, four eras, four fates.

Treasure Hill was not demolished because enough people refused to let it be demolished.

Further reading:

• Taipei City: Three Times Inside One City, where Longshan Temple from 1738 Looks at Taipei 101 from 2004 — Treasure Hill’s position among Taipei’s 12 districts, placed alongside the three timelines of Bangka, Dadaocheng, and Xinyi
• The Development of Cultural and Creative Parks in Taiwan — Treasure Hill read together with cases such as Forty-Four South Village, Huashan, and Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, Taiwan-style case studies of “military dependents’ villages / industrial ruins turned cultural and creative spaces”
• Dadaocheng: 800 Meters Holding Three Centuries of Taipei — a fellow Batch 1 historic-district sibling; an 1851 tea-trade street and a 1960s illegal settlement are two completely different “moments when a street takes shape”
• Bangka: The Busiest Place in Qing-ruled Taipei — a fellow Batch 1 sibling; the Qing religious landscape of Longshan Temple from 1738 and Treasure Hill Guanyin Temple from 1791 were contemporaneous faith centers for Zhangzhou and Quanzhou migrants
• Ximending: The Entertainment District the Japanese Built in 1896 — a fellow Batch 1 sibling; an entertainment district planned under Japanese rule versus a postwar self-built illegal settlement, two contrasts in “people unseen by urban planning”
• Gongguan — the scholar-student consumer circle 800 meters to the north, and Treasure Hill’s illegal settlement, are two completely different spatial ecologies around NTU

Image Sources

This article uses six Wikimedia Commons licensed images, all cached under public/article-images/geography/ to avoid hotlinking source servers:

• Treasure_Hill_Village_01_20260221.jpg — Photo: 阿道 (User: 阿道), 2026-02-21, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Treasure_Hill_20181005.jpg — Photo: Taipei City Government Department of Cultural Affairs, 2018-10-05, Attribution (Government Open License)
• Treasure_Hill_fire.jpg — Photo: Burgeoisnieves, 2003, Public domain
• Treasure_Hill_garden.jpg — Photo: Jan jörg, 2003, Public domain
• Graffiti_at_the_Treasure_Hill,\_Taipei.jpg — Photo: Nisa yeh, 2012-10-14, CC BY-SA 2.0
• Street_in_Taipei_Treasure_Hill.jpg — Photo: Allervous, 2025-01-30, CC BY 4.0

References