Treasure Hill: The Illegal Hillside Settlement Taipei Tried to Demolish for 30 Years, Until It Became the City’s Coolest Artist Village

30-second overview: In July 1980, the Taipei City Government designated this hill as the “planned site of Park No. 297”¹. From that moment, more than 200 illegal hillside homes entered a state of “waiting to be demolished.” On June 25, 1993, the city formally announced demolition plans²; on July 20, 1994, Mayor Huang Ta-chou ordered the demolition of 46 legal military buildings²; and in December 2001, the city demolished more than 40 riverfront homes among the settlement’s more than 100 remaining households². Yet after the March 4, 1997 anti-demolition movement around Parks No. 14 and No. 15³, 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. 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 who stayed, and international resident artists who rotate every three months, all living together in four layers on this 46-meter-high hill beside the Xindian River⁷. This article argues that Treasure Hill’s 30-year transformation from a stigmatized “illegal building” settlement into an international case study was not an uplifting tourism story. It was a miniature model of how Taiwan’s civil society forced open the public authority of urban planning.

At Five in the Evening, the Hillside Stairways Light Up One by One

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

Come out of Exit 1 of MRT Gongguan Station, turn right into Lane 90, Section 4, Roosevelt Road, then left onto Tingzhou Road, and walk until you turn right at Lane 230, Section 3. It takes about five to seven minutes⁸. If it is your first visit, you may walk past it, because the mouth of the lane looks like an ordinary Gongguan alley. There is no sign announcing that you are about to enter a historic settlement. After passing through the noise of Shuiyuan Market and the Gongguan shopping district, then walking another two street corners, a small hill suddenly appears in front of you.

That is Treasure Hill.

At five in the evening, tourists who have just finished an afternoon class at National Taiwan University, or just walked out of the Gongguan NET clothing store, step onto the path of Alley 14, Lane 230, climbing toward the hill. The first bend is the red-tiled facade of Guanyin Temple: a temple first substantially renovated in 1791⁶, dedicated primarily to Guanyin Bodhisattva. Today, a multi-story new temple structure completely wraps around the old single-story temple inside it; if you climb upstairs, you can see the roof carvings of the old temple at close range⁹. Continue upward and the paths become irregular: winding lanes, tilted stairs, asymmetrical house orientations. Some lintels read “Lin Residence,” “Chen Family,” or “Mama Zhang.” Some windows carry signs saying “Artist Studio #14” or “Open Studio.”

If you arrive at 5:30, you will see the lights of the hillside building cluster switch on one by one. Behind each light is a different person.

The first light to come on is the living-room lamp of an elderly veteran in his eighties beside Guanyin Temple. He has lived here since the 1960s, when this hillside was still military land belonging to the Taiwan Northern Region Defense Command², and he was one of dozens of mainlander veteran households who built homes under the command’s tacit permission. The lights that come on midway up the hill are studio lights: perhaps a visual artist from Seoul, in residence for three months in 2026, adjusting an installation with a projector¹⁰. Near the top of the hill, the corridor lights of the youth hostel are on. Students from Germany, Sweden, Canada, and Thailand are staying for the night; nearby, you can hear travelers speaking a mix of English and halting Chinese.

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

Curator’s note: General travel articles write Treasure Hill as an inspirational story of a “military dependents’ village becoming an artist village,” but that narrative misses three things. First, Treasure Hill was never originally treated as a “military dependents’ village”: the Nationalist government never put it under formal household management, every house was an illegal structure, and the residents included mainlander retired soldiers, workers who had come north from central and southern Taiwan, and people pushed to the city’s margins⁷. Second, this hill almost faced demolition for 30 years. After it was announced as the planned site of Park No. 297 in 1980, actual demolitions took place in 1993, 1994, and 2001, making this one of the longest-running battles in the history of Taipei’s preservation movement². Third, behind the phrase “art-residence symbiosis” was the compromise produced in 2003, when the Organization of Urban Re-s (OURs) and the Department of Cultural Affairs forced two originally conflicting demands, “cultural preservation” and “housing rights,” into the same governance framework¹¹. What changed over these 30 years was Taiwan’s overall understanding of “illegal buildings,” “disadvantaged settlements,” and “the authority of urban planning.” The Taipei City Government’s decision after 1997 to shift from “demolish everything” to “preserve in place” affected more than Treasure Hill alone.

The 1791 Guanyin Temple Is Treasure Hill’s First Layer of History

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

Treasure Hill Guanyin Temple stands at No. 2, Alley 14, Lane 230, Section 3, Tingzhou Road, Zhongzheng District, Taipei, beside Fuhe Bridge and the Xindian River⁹⁶. The temple was sited on the southern foot of Little Guanyin Mountain, also known as Hukong Mountain, 35 meters above sea level and part of the Toad Mountain branch ridge, because it was “built against a cliff, and therefore called a ‘yan,’ or cliff shrine”⁶.

There are two accounts of its founding date. Most sources cite the Tamsui Subprefecture Gazetteer, published during the Tongzhi reign of the Qing dynasty, and hold that Treasure Hill was built during the Kangxi period, in the late seventeenth century, by Guo Zhiheng, an immigrant from Anxi in Quanzhou, and his son⁹¹². But according to the inscription on the “Guanyin Pavilion Stele” erected inside the hall in the third year of the Jiaqing reign, 1798, by licentiate student You Dachuan, and because reclamation-history research shows that the Gongguan area did not see significant cultivation until the 1770s, some scholars argue that the founding date should be closer to the Qianlong period⁶⁹.

What is certain is that in the fifty-sixth year of the Qianlong reign, 1791, Treasure Hill underwent its first major renovation, expanding its eastern and western side halls⁶. In the third year of the Daoguang reign, 1822, the monk Xinqian rebuilt Treasure Hill again, adding a Buddhist hall, a hall of merit, and a columbarium, while expanding the front hall and the corridor before the temple⁹. The main temple body visible today is the result of these Qing-era renovations. The stone columns, stone bases, stone carvings, wood carvings, and steles preserved in the temple are still original Qing objects; the most famous is the 1798 “Guanyin Pavilion Stele”⁹⁶.

Curator’s note: The “temple within a temple” structure of Guanyin Temple is worth an extra second of attention. Successive expansions and renovations lacked the unified design concept of a master carpenter; most were small-scale construction jobs completed in batches, so the construction methods and component styles appear mixed or collaged⁹. But that “collage” instead produced Treasure Hill’s most striking architectural feature: a multi-story new temple body completely encloses the old single-story temple, and by climbing the stairs you can see the roof carvings of the old temple up close. On one temple body, three architectural languages overlap: Qing side halls from 1791, a Daoguang-period reconstruction from 1822, and a contemporary expansion from 1996⁹. Treasure Hill was listed as an important historic site in 1974, but lost the status because renovations had “lost the ancient style”; it was not until 1997 that the Taipei City Government registered it again as a municipal monument¹³⁶. One temple contains four temporal layers: Qing, Japanese colonial, postwar, and contemporary. This multi-layered “collage” quality later became the material gene of the illegal settlement below.

Looking uphill from Guanyin Temple, during the 158 years from 1791 to 1949, the hill consisted mainly of the temple, sparse farmland, graves, and a few sand-mining households along the Xindian River or farm families left from the Japanese colonial period². During World War II, the Japanese military installed anti-aircraft artillery units 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 foundation of the hillside settlement⁷. After the Nationalist government took over Taiwan in 1945, the Taiwan Northern Region Defense Command moved onto this land, turning the hill from a Japanese anti-aircraft artillery position into a Republic of China military command post⁷. In the early 1950s, aside from Guanyin Temple and the command post, there were only three to five households left from the Japanese colonial period².

Treasure Hill’s “settlement history” begins after this point.

From the 1960s Onward, the “People Urban Planning Could Not See” on the Hillside

Beginning in the 1960s, two things caused the illegal settlement that would later occupy Treasure Hill to grow across the slope.

First, tensions across the Taiwan Strait eased slightly, and the ban on illegal building loosened. The military had originally enforced a strict rule prohibiting outsiders from building homes around the command post, but that rule began to relax. The command’s military authorities began to tacitly accept mainlander residents building illegal structures around Treasure Hill². Second, after the Nationalist government relocated to Taiwan, 600,000 retired soldiers and dependents arrived with it. Together with the wave of rural-to-urban migrants who came north from central and southern Taiwan during Taiwan’s rapid industrial and commercial growth in the 1960s and 1970s, this produced a severe housing shortage in Taipei. Treasure Hill’s steep, irregular hill, not incorporated into formal development by urban planning, was precisely the kind of place sought by people who could not afford urban rent¹⁴.

The settlement’s residents therefore differed from those of a typical “military dependents’ village.” It was not placed under Nationalist government household management. Its residents included retired soldiers, mostly mainlanders; workers from central and southern Taiwan, mostly benshengren; low-income families; street vendors; and other diverse groups¹⁴.

The way houses were built was also different. There were no architects, no structural calculations, no integrated water and electricity planning. It was purely self-help construction: people built because they needed somewhere to live⁷. Materials were gathered locally: cobblestones picked up along the Xindian River, discarded bricks, sheet metal, wood planks. Construction rose layer by layer along the slope, without a planned road network; lanes emerged only where people walked. Apart from three to five more spacious officers’ residences and 40 legal military bachelor dormitories, most dwellings were narrow single-story homes, self-built with whatever materials were available².

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

This was the physical reality facing the 1980 demolition order: an illegal settlement of more than 200 densely packed households, spreading from the temple across the hill, inhabited by some of Taipei’s most disadvantaged people.

Curator’s note: In the eyes of the Taipei City Government in the 1980s, the concept of “disadvantaged self-help housing” was defined as an urban appearance problem to be solved, not a form of urban memory worth preserving. After Taiwan’s rapid industrial and commercial development in the 1970s and 1980s, the overall logic of Taipei’s urban planning leaned toward “demolish the old, build the new.” Illegal buildings outside the planning map were especially treated as breaches in urban order. But for the people who lived here, this hill was the only place they could afford. Rents per ping on Tingzhou Road below the hill were several times higher; the bricks they picked up and sheet metal they assembled on the hill were their entire household wealth. 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” built a settlement for themselves on an ignored hillside during the first 30 years of Taiwan’s postwar urban development. Professor Liu Ke-qiang later described this period as “Stage 1.0”: “the process by which self-built construction after the 1950s realized ‘local revitalization,’” noting that “the 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

The main building cluster of Treasure Hill in February 2026. Photo: 阿道 (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 would be formally reclassified from water-source protection land into the planned site of Urban Planning Park No. 297 in the riverfront zone¹. For residents, this announcement was a verdict.

The planning logic of Park No. 297 was this: because the land sat beside the Xindian River and belonged to the edge of a river conveyance zone, it needed to become flood-control and waterfront green space. Apart from Treasure Hill Guanyin Temple, a monument that could remain, all other illegal buildings had to be demolished according to law¹⁶. From that moment, every household on the hill entered a state of “waiting to be demolished.”

But demolition was not carried out immediately. Although the 1980s saw repeated warnings, the city government never truly sent in the bulldozers. One reason was that demolition compensation rules were incomplete at the time; another was the residents’ organized resistance through a self-governance association. This “postponement” was a technical delay, not a policy shift. The legal status of the planned parkland did not change, and residents continued living in uncertainty from the late 1980s into the early 1990s.

On June 25, 1993, the Taipei City Government formally announced that it would demolish the houses within the planned park area². The following year, on July 20, 1994, Mayor Huang Ta-chou ordered the demolition of 46 legal military buildings². This was Treasure Hill’s first true large-scale demolition. Although the structures demolished were legal military buildings, once residents in the illegal-building area saw the bulldozers, panic spread.

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

The Kangle Borough incident detonated public opinion. Faculty and students from National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Building and Planning proposed an “in-place resettlement” plan and joined the resistance. Student Peng Yang-kai later became secretary-general of OURs, the Organization of Urban Re-s, and remained long involved in demolition issues³. That same month, March 1997, the handling of Parks No. 14 and No. 15 drew intense media attention. On June 10, the Taipei City Government decided to suspend the full forced demolition of Treasure Hill and other places, and began studying resettlement plans².

Treasure Hill avoided Kangle Borough’s fate. The city did not change its mind on its own. Kangle Borough’s demolition shook public opinion, and academics and movement organizers did not give the government a second chance.

Curator’s note: The moment of demolition in Kangle Borough 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 that, city demolition of illegal buildings was administrative routine: announcement, compensation or no compensation, bulldozers entering the site. The whole process left no room for “preservation” as an option. After Kangle Borough, scholars, activists, media, and city councilors began collectively questioning the logic of “demolish everything and rezone” itself. In September that year, faculty and students from NTU’s Graduate Institute of Building and Planning formally entered Treasure Hill to conduct resident interviews and spatial surveys. The work was led by teams under Professors Hsia Chu-joe and Liu Ke-qiang, and among the graduate students was Chen Chien-chung, who later remained active in cultural-heritage preservation¹⁷. From that moment, Treasure Hill was no longer an “illegal settlement waiting to be demolished,” but a “historic settlement with preservation potential.” A shift in terminology, from “illegal building” to “settlement,” from “demolition” to “preservation,” changed the entire next decade of Treasure Hill’s fate.

The 2003 Napalm Performance Art

Marco Casagrande’s “napalm” performance at Treasure Hill in 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, the writer Lung Ying-tai, invited by Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou, became the first commissioner of the Taipei City Government Department of Cultural Affairs⁴. During her tenure, the department began including Treasure Hill within cultural-asset evaluation, and adopted the concept of a “poor artist village” as the direction for Treasure Hill’s future operation⁴. Lung’s proposal was crucial: it redefined Treasure Hill from an “illegal settlement waiting to be demolished” into a “historic settlement with cultural potential.”

In December 2001, the Taipei City Government completed partial resident resettlement and demolished more than 40 riverfront homes among the settlement’s more than 100 households². These more than 40 households were concentrated in the Xindian River waterfront area, at the edge of the river conveyance zone where residence was legally prohibited, making them the easiest part of the demolition judgment to execute. The core hillside settlement was preserved, but the number of households fell from more than 200 in the 1980s to around 100.

In June 2003, OURs received a planning commission from the Department of Cultural Affairs to realize the original goal of preserving Treasure Hill, promote reform of urban space, 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, using small-scale tactical interventions to trigger repair across the urban fabric¹⁹. His specific work at Treasure Hill was simple: he built wooden stairs by hand over the ruins of demolished houses to help hillside residents move in and out; opened vegetable gardens on demolition rubble and encouraged local residents to plant crops; and used bamboo to build scaffolding for a farmers’ market¹⁸¹⁹. He named the project “Organic Layer Taipei”¹⁹.

What people remember most was the napalm performance art. Casagrande staged a ritual performance with fire on demolition ruins, painted his face red, and led volunteers in a “procession,” symbolizing the possibility that the settlement would soon disappear¹⁸. Flames burned over the ruins of houses already half-demolished. It was a message to the city and to society: if you keep demolishing, this ash is what will remain.

Curator’s note: Marco Casagrande’s 2003 napalm performance caused major controversy at the time. On 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 theatrical performance like napalm would typecast Treasure Hill as a “spectacle,” rather than as a serious housing-rights issue¹¹. But what cannot be denied is that from 2003 onward, Treasure Hill began to have a name in international architecture and urban-planning circles. Casagrande later turned the Treasure Hill experience into the book Biourban Acupuncture: Treasure Hill of Taipei to Artena¹⁹, transforming “urban acupuncture” from a concept into a teachable methodology. An illegal settlement once regarded as an urban flaw instead became teaching material for international urban-planning theory. This reversal later became the foundation of international legitimacy for Treasure Hill’s “art-residence symbiosis” label.

Treasure Hill’s Vegetable Gardens, Stairways, and Half-Demolished Houses

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

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

On one side, OURs and the Department of Cultural Affairs were planning the future blueprint of “Treasure Hill Symbiotic Artist Village” along four directions: “Treasure Home” for disadvantaged groups to live in; “artist residency action,” using art activities to participate in the community; an “international youth hostel,” offering affordable lodging to international students; and “ecological architecture and environmental learning,” combining the wetland environment with the settlement’s features¹⁸. These four directions later became the three main thematic areas when Treasure Hill Artist Village opened in 2010; ecological-architecture learning was folded into the other three²¹²².

On the other side, the city’s demolition judgment had not completely changed. Treasure Hill was not formally rezoned from “parkland” to a “special-use zone” until 2005, and the competent authority shifted 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 remained “a park” for 25 years.

In June 2006, the Taipei City Government issued a document reminding residents that they needed to move out on their own before October 31, 2006, so that the homes of original residents who were willing to stay and met socially disadvantaged criteria could be repaired, and part of the area could be renovated into the Treasure Hill symbiotic settlement²²²¹. The city offered three resettlement measures: receive NT$720,000 in administrative relief money; receive NT$360,000 in relief money and move back after two years; or move into nearby temporary housing²².

Starting at the end of 2006, the Department of Cultural Affairs began settlement repair work⁴. In 2007, the Treasure Hill historic settlement area was formally rezoned as a “special-use zone”²¹. This legal classification change was crucial. Under the original category of “parkland,” residence was prohibited by law; a special-use zone allowed the mixed use of “residence and cultural preservation.” Professor Liu Ke-qiang later explained: “The preservation of Treasure Hill had to seek breakthroughs under the real conditions of law, and went through many years of mediation and negotiation”¹¹.

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

Curator’s note: The 2006 resettlement decision deserves an extra second of attention. The city’s three proposals, NT$720,000 once and for all, NT$360,000 plus the right to return after two years, or temporary housing, all seemed acceptable on paper. 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 for a lifetime. Returning after two years meant moving into a repaired “culturally preserved residence,” not the house they originally had. Moving into temporary housing meant cutting the physical connection they had maintained with the settlement for 30 years²². The 22 households who ultimately stayed, later reduced to 19, were mostly those 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 identity changed from “illegal-building households” to “objects of cultural preservation.” This identity conversion was not only a legal change. For veterans in their eighties, it meant changing from “people forgotten by urban planning” into “people incorporated by 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 October 2, 2010 opening was attended by residents, artists, cultural-affairs officials, and preservation activists. Treasure Hill Artist Village officially began operating, managed under commission by the Taipei Culture Foundation⁵²¹.

At the moment it opened, Treasure Hill was defined as a “micro-settlement artist village.” It adopted the concept of “art-residence symbiosis” and introduced three main thematic areas: “Treasure Home,” “Residency Program,” and “Youth Hostel”⁵²². “Treasure Home” was the original residents’ living area, with 22 households. The “Residency Program” consisted of international artist studios, with a new cohort every three to six months. The “Youth Hostel” provided lodging for international backpackers²²²¹.

By 2026, this structure had been operating for 16 years.

Artist-in-Residence Taipei, or AIR Taipei, centers on two sites: Treasure Hill and Taipei Artist Village at No. 7, Beiping East Road, Zhongzheng District. Each year, it selects domestic and international creative workers in three rounds, providing three to six months of housing and work space²¹¹⁰. As of 2026, more than 500 artists from over 40 countries had taken up residence at Treasure Hill⁵. At the same time, more than 100 Taiwanese artists had been sent to overseas residency institutions for reciprocal visits and field research⁵.

The first-quarter 2026 resident-artist 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 arts, music, literature, curating, and interdisciplinary art practice, and in forms including short stories, staged readings, installation art, video, puppetry, and painting, they presented their lived experiences during their Treasure Hill residencies¹⁰.

Among the artists are special cases of long-term residency. Teacher Chou Ling-chih has been in residence since 2008, more than 15 years, shifting from ecological art to ceramics and co-creating an ecological garden with residents¹⁰. Starting in January 2015, the poet Xu Da took up residence at the poetry cafe Deng Xiao Lou. After 2017, he launched 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, “2026 Treasure Hill Light Festival: City of Glimmers” opened. Fourteen groups of interdisciplinary artists used light, sound installations, and performance art to respond to Treasure Hill’s distinctive historical texture and settlement landscape. The exhibition ran through May 3, from 11:00 to 22:00 daily, closed Mondays, with lights activated from 18:00 to 22:00²³.

Curator’s note: In 16 years of practice, Treasure Hill’s label of “symbiosis” has not always been beautiful. Tourism pressure has led some residents to complain about noise, garbage, and disturbed privacy. Large numbers of weekend visitors walk through the lanes taking photos, photographing residents’ backyards where laundry is drying or knocking on elderly residents’ windows. The Culture Foundation has continued using “family surname signs,” installing a surname sign in front of each resident household, to remind visitors that “people live here”²². There have also been tensions between artists and residents. Sometimes installation works by resident artists touch sensitive memories for residents, or occupy public space in ways that inconvenience them. Professor Liu Ke-qiang later said: “Between residents and artists, each respects the other’s autonomous existence, and under this consensus they jointly face external forces”¹¹. He used “Treasure Hill 3.0” to describe the vision for the next stage: “repositioning the art-residence symbiotic settlement as a comprehensive ‘creative living home,’” with the goal of integrating cultural preservation, living community, and social creativity¹¹. Treasure Hill’s “symbiosis” is a process that has been under negotiation for 16 years. It has never been in a state of “already completed.”

The Three Places Locals Will Take You to See

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

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

Treasure Hill Guanyin Temple (No. 2, Alley 14, Lane 230, Section 3, Tingzhou Road). It was first substantially renovated in 1791, rebuilt in the Daoguang period in 1822, held a completion jiao ritual in 1996, and was designated a municipal monument by the Taipei City Government on August 5, 1997⁹⁶. The key is not its exterior; that exterior has already been covered by multi-layer renovations. 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 illegal hillside settlement’s later layer-upon-layer structure follows the same material logic as this temple.

Machine-gun pillboxes and air-raid shelters (inside the settlement). During the Japanese colonial period, the Japanese military installed anti-aircraft artillery positions and underground bunkers on this hill. After the war, the Republic of China military took over, and after 1949 the site became part of the military facilities of the Taiwan Northern Region Defense Command⁷. After the Department of Cultural Affairs took over, these military remains were transformed into exhibition and performance spaces. The interior of the air-raid shelter is closed, while the exterior serves as a plaza that can be rented for exhibitions. The machine-gun pillbox 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 Museum (various households inside the settlement). The 19 resident households in the “Treasure Home” area each have a “surname sign” in front of their home, identifying which family lives there. In addition to their residential function, some residents open their homes as “household museums,” using their own photos, furniture, and objects to tell the story of that household from the 1960s to the present¹⁴²². The “Historical Cross-Section Museum” is a permanent exhibition curated by the Department of Cultural Affairs. Using a timeline, it presents the full history of Treasure Hill from Qing-era temple, to Japanese colonial anti-aircraft artillery site, postwar illegal settlement, 1980s crisis, 1997 turning point, and the 2010 opening of the artist village²²¹⁶. These exhibitions avoid the museum mode of “displaying things for tourists.” Residents and preservation activists write their own history into the space. The photos on the wall are real pictures of grandfathers and grandmothers when they were young; the objects on the table are things still in actual use.

After seeing these three places, you understand Treasure Hill’s true texture. Tourists rush to photograph art installations, but what they see is only the surface. For locals, Treasure Hill is the old temple carvings of 1791, the concrete bunkers of wartime Japanese rule, the homes of elderly veterans from the 1960s, and the household museums accumulated over the past 16 years: four material layers spanning 230 years, always stacked 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).

One afternoon in July 1980, in the office of the Taipei City Government’s Department of Urban Development, several officials stamped “planned site of Park No. 297” on a document. More than 200 households on the hillside had no idea this had happened. They only knew that starting the following year, in 1981, people would come to paste demolition warning notices on their doors.

One evening in May 2026, a visual artist from Seoul, in residence for three months, walks along the stairs of Alley 14, Lane 230, toward his studio. He has just bought a bottle of water from 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, under these stairs, there was once a demolition verdict, or that someone once used a napalm performance to stop this hill from being flattened.

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

Four layers of people live on this hill: the Guanyin Bodhisattva left from the Qing dynasty, concrete bunkers left from Japanese rule, retired soldiers left from the 1960s, and international artists who came for residencies in 2026. Thirty years ago, three of those layers nearly disappeared.

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

Treasure Hill’s core contradiction is this: the same illegal settlement that the state sentenced to death in 1980 was turned by the state into cultural heritage in 2010. Between them lay 30 years of demolition battles, the shock of the Kangle Borough incident, Lung Ying-tai’s concept of a 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 households who stayed.

These 30 years far exceed the uplifting story on tourism-board webpages about “a military dependents’ village becoming 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 policy turn in 1997 affected more than this single hill. It told later scenes of twenty-first-century urban-planning conflict in Taiwan, including Losheng Sanatorium, Huaguang Community, Shaoxing Community, the residents beside Jut Art Museum, and others, that “demolish everything and rezone” is not the only option.

Next time you walk through Gongguan, pass Shuiyuan Market, and see that irregular cluster of buildings stacked up the hillside, stop and look for 30 seconds. The ground under your feet was a Guanyin temple for Qing-era Zhangzhou immigrant worshippers 230 years ago, a Japanese anti-aircraft artillery position 80 years ago, a self-help refuge 60 years ago, nearly flattened 30 years ago, and is now 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 in One City, Longshan Temple from 1738 Watching Taipei 101 in 2004 — Treasure Hill’s position within the 12 districts, placed beside the timelines of Bangka, Dadaocheng, and Xinyi
• The Development of Taiwan’s Cultural and Creative Parks — Treasure Hill read together with Taiwan-style case studies such as Forty-Four South Village, Huashan, and Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, where “military dependents’ villages / industrial remains became cultural-creative spaces”
• Dadaocheng: 800 Meters Holding Three Centuries of Taipei — a historic-district sibling in the same batch 1; the 1851 tea commercial street and the 1960s illegal settlement are two completely different “street formation moments”
• Bangka: The Busiest Place in Qing-Era Taipei — a sibling in the same batch 1; the Qing faith landscape of Longshan Temple in 1738 and Treasure Hill Guanyin Temple in 1791 were contemporary Zhangzhou-Quanzhou immigrant religious centers
• Ximending: The Entertainment District the Japanese Built in 1896 — a sibling in the same batch 1; a Japanese-planned entertainment district versus a postwar self-built illegal settlement, two contrasts in “people unseen by urban planning”
• Gongguan — the scholar-student consumption circle 800 meters to the north, and Treasure Hill’s illegal settlement, are two entirely different spatial ecologies around NTU

Image Sources

This article uses five 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