Shimen Reservoir: How a Dam Built to Solve Water Scarcity Resettled Immigrants and Water Culture

30-Second Overview: In April 1954, the Shimen Reservoir Design Committee was established, bringing Taoyuan Plateau’s water scarcity, the post-war government’s fiscal difficulties, and US aid technology into a single engineering blueprint. On June 14, 1964, the reservoir was completed, becoming Taiwan’s first multi-purpose reservoir. It supplied irrigation and public water, but also bore the engineers’ debates, foreign consultants’ contracts, the relocation of residents in the submerged zone, and the state’s choices on water allocation. This article treats the reservoir as a historical site where engineering, administration, and local life intersect. ^{1 2 3}

In April 2017, a photographer stood on the lakeside highway, lens pointed at the Shimen Dam. The earth-rock dam’s slope rose from the valley, the water spread out behind the dam, and the highway wound around the mountainside. What people see today is a stable public facility, but it is difficult to see that it was once the subject of a decades-long debate: whether to build a dam, where the money came from, who designed it, how high the dam should be, and who had to leave after the reservoir was filled. ⁴

The counter-intuitive aspect of Shimen Reservoir is that its completion in 1964 did not mark the end of the project. As the reservoir began supplying irrigation, power generation, flood control, and public water, engineering benefits entered daily life, while the land of the submerged zone, immigrant resettlement, and the environmental cost of the concrete dam remained in the locality. ^{1 3}

📝 Curator’s Note: This article does not write Shimen Reservoir merely as a dam completed in 1964, but traces water conservancy modernization through design, borrowing, construction, resettlement, and archives. Readers should note both engineering benefits and land costs, avoiding summarizing the entire history with a single narrative of success or failure.

Taoyuan’s Water: Starting with the "Thousand Ponds"

The Taoyuan Plateau is not a flat plain with stable natural rivers flowing through it. The National Archives and Records Administration notes that a significant portion of Taoyuan’s terrain belongs to higher plateaus. Ancestors opened many pi-tang (ponds) to store irrigation water, earning the area the nickname "Land of a Thousand Ponds." The ponds cut rainfall into small bodies of water, but water supply was still insufficient to support all farmland. ¹

During the Japanese colonial period, the government diverted water from the Shimen Gorge to build the Taoyuan Grand Canal, expanding the irrigation area. The Water Resources Bureau’s history of construction traces the earlier concept back to 1902, when civil engineer Tsunemi Tokumi surveyed the Shimen area and proposed a reservoir concept. This idea did not materialize immediately. When the Taoyuan Grand Canal was completed in 1928, Hideta Isoda mentioned the Shimen Grand Weir again in the "Showa Water Conservancy Project," bringing Shimen back into the Governor-General’s research focus. ²

This history is important because Shimen Reservoir was not a "modern miracle" that appeared suddenly after the war. It continued the hydrological surveys of the Japanese colonial period, the Taoyuan Grand Canal, and the imagination of basin-wide governance, as well as the earlier experience of people using ponds to handle water scarcity on the plateau. War and budget constraints halted the colonial-era dam concept, but the problem did not disappear.

The Taoyuan Grand Canal could only supply about 60% of the area’s water. During droughts, farmers would clash over water rights. The reservoir was re-proposed not just because engineers wanted to build something huge, but because small ponds and canal systems could no longer independently bear the increasing agricultural and population demands. ¹

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Starting from a Design Committee Roster

In April 1954, Premier Chen Cheng directed the establishment of the Shimen Reservoir Design Committee. Committee members came from the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Taiwan Provincial Department of Construction, the Taiwan Provincial Water Resources Bureau, the Taiwan Power Company, and the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR). Professor Hsu Shih-ta of National Taiwan University served as Chief Engineer, and foreign experts such as S. W. Jacobsen, Heim, and Condon were hired to participate in the research. In May of the following year, the Design Committee submitted the Shimen Reservoir Engineering Final Plan Report. ^{1 2}

This roster reveals one thing: the reservoir was never a project for a single agency from the start. It involved agriculture, power, public finance, local water conservancy, and international aid simultaneously. The 1954 Design Committee had to handle dam site selection, hydrology, engineering costs, subsequent repayment, construction equipment, and how technical consultants would enter the field. ¹

Post-war Taiwan’s fiscal situation made it difficult to independently support large-scale water conservancy projects. Data from the Water Resources Bureau records that the total cost of Shimen Reservoir was approximately NT$3.39 billion, of which US aid loans accounted for approximately NT$1.902 billion (56.1%), non-US aid loans for approximately NT$1.097 billion (32.4%), and government fundraising subsidies for approximately NT$390 million (11.5%). US aid funds had specific uses, required for US engineering consultants, permanent equipment, and construction machinery. This indicates that Shimen Reservoir’s technical choices were influenced by loan conditions; the engineering ledger and international politics could not be completely separated. ²

US aid also brought new engineering relationships. The Shimen Reservoir Construction Committee signed service contracts with the US firms Ames and Moch. US consultants participated in design, inspection, construction, and training. This made Shimen Reservoir a field of transnational technical cooperation, allowing Taiwanese engineers to learn new construction systems through cooperation and friction. ^{2 5}

This cooperation had an easily overlooked temporal scale. The services provided by the consulting firms focused on the design, inspection, and construction phases, while the Reservoir Construction Committee (RCC) had to translate external technology into rules that Taiwanese agencies could manage long-term. Engineers had to learn to operate equipment and establish processes for documentation, contracts, testing, and acceptance. After the reservoir was completed, these processes did not disappear with the departure of foreign consultants; they remained in later water conservancy administration and construction habits. This is precisely where the influence of US aid cannot be measured by a single loan amount. ^{2 4}

📝 Curator’s Note: US aid changed the reservoir’s ledger and also changed the professional relationships for judging dam safety, benefits, and subsequent investment.

The Dam Type Also Changed

When initially applying for US aid, Shimen Reservoir proposed an arch dam design. After the design team signed an engineering design service contract with the TAMS company, they re-evaluated the pros and cons of arch dams versus earth-rock dams. In 1959, the failure of the Malpasset Arch Dam in France caused over 400 deaths, an accident that changed Shimen Reservoir’s safety assessment. The project was paused, TAMS re-examined the design, and finally, the arch dam was changed to an earth-rock dam. ¹

This turning point allows us to see another side of engineering history. Reservoirs in textbooks are often written as a straight line: survey, design, construction, completion. But on site, the dam type was not fixed from the start; safety accidents, international experience, consultant opinions, and administrative approvals could divert the plan. The "completion" of large projects often rests on many moments of admitting the original plan was insufficient.

Engineering minutes preserved by the Water Resources Bureau show that on July 7, 1955, a groundbreaking ceremony for preliminary works was held. In July 1956, the Shimen Reservoir Construction Committee was officially established, launching the water diversion tunnel project. On August 5, 1958, the groundbreaking ceremony for the Shimen Dam was held. The water diversion tunnel was completed and put into operation in December 1960, the Shimen Grand Canal in October 1963, and finally, the completion ceremony was held on June 14, 1964. ²

The National Archives and Records Administration records that the entire project employed over 7,500 people and lasted eight years. After the main dam was completed, the reservoir’s water collection and storage engineering also included the water diversion tunnel, spillway, power plant, tailwater weir, and Shimen Grand Canal. The reservoir’s catchment area was approximately 8.15 square kilometers, with a length of approximately 16.55 kilometers, a total storage capacity of 316 million cubic meters, and an effective storage capacity of 251 million cubic meters. ¹

The Other Map of Engineering: The Submerged Zone and Resettlement Sites

The engineering blueprints of a reservoir show the dam body, tunnels, spillways, and power plants, but do not necessarily depict the people originally living in the valley with equal clarity. After organizing the archives of the Shimen Reservoir Construction Committee, the Academia Sinica pointed out that the project required expropriating over 1,000 hectares of land; after filling, over 600 hectares of land and houses would be submerged, requiring over 400 households and more than 2,000 reservoir immigrants to find new resettlement sites. ³

These numbers cannot be treated merely as engineering appendices. They represent a family potentially losing fields, ancestral homes, neighbors, and familiar roads. Reservoir resettlement did not end with a single move. Research reports mention that some were forced to relocate multiple times and had to reclaim land in the Haidou and river wastelands. Places originally planned as resettlement sites might already have been farmed by others, leading to new land conflicts between immigrants and original reclamation families. ^{3 6}

In 1959, a conflict occurred at the Shulinzi Resettlement Site in Guanyin Township, Taoyuan. Reports from Academia Sinica record that Zhao Jizheng, responsible for resettlement affairs, and the Wu family father and son had a dispute over land; their office was damaged, and the incident was eventually settled under police mediation. The land originally farmed by the Wu family was planned as a resettlement zone for immigrants. The RCC initially advocated handling it according to law, but due to the county government’s land leasing and the complexity of existing reclamation, resettlement principles were re-examined, and the land was ultimately returned to the Wu family. ³

This small event makes the "immigrants" of Shimen Reservoir no longer just people moved by the state. Resettlement policies involved at least the reservoir immigrants, farmers originally cultivating the land, local governments, courts, and the RCC. Water conservancy projects renamed a piece of land as a "resettlement zone," but the existing life on the land did not automatically disappear because official documents changed its name.

📝 Curator’s Note: This article treats immigrant resettlement on a local history scale, not expanding a single Shulinzi incident into the common experience of all submerged zone residents. What truly needs to be seen is how planning terminology encountered existing cultivators, and how compensation, land, and houses were redefined in administrative procedures.

American Bungalows in Shifen and Engineer Life

The construction site of Shimen Reservoir was not just dam bodies and machinery. When the Academia Sinica research team organized archives, they discovered that engineering personnel and their families formed a residential community in the Shifen area of Longtan, Taoyuan. Foreign consultant bungalows had swimming pools, sports fields, and golf greens, as well as dining halls, clinics, kindergartens, and canteens. General staff and foreign consultants lived in different areas; the master plan of the general office area showed nearly 300 households at the time. ³

These facilities constituted the living conditions for the long-term operation of transnational engineering. Foreign consultants needed to work in Taiwan, and Taiwanese engineers and administrative staff needed to live near the construction site. RCC archives left records of stamp collecting clubs, bridge clubs, Go clubs, photography clubs, badminton teams, volleyball teams, and tennis teams. The modernity of engineering was not just in dam height and storage volume, but in how a group of people was organized into a work and life community. ³

Archives also left traces of Taiwanese and American engineers evaluating each other. On the status reports for Moch Company personnel contracts, there were work comments from Taiwanese senior engineers on American engineers: some were written as "enthusiastic and responsible," others criticized for "poor command and training skills," and some recommended for repatriation due to violent temper. These texts turned "US aid technology transfer" from a one-way aid story into a work relationship requiring negotiation, judgment, and磨合 (friction/adaptation). ³

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A Debate on Dam Height, Making Archives Speak Again

From May 2020 to December 2021, the Academia Sinica Institute of Taiwan History team resided at the Northern Region Water Resources Office for 19 months, organizing over 7,000 documents and hundreds of thousands of pages of Shimen Reservoir Construction Archives. The digital images made public in 2023 included 1,700 items, approximately 140,000 pages. These numbers are important, but more importantly, the archives made the hesitation and debate inside the engineering process visible again. ^{3 4}

On November 29, 1954, Liu Yong-mao, representative of the Taiwan Provincial Department of Construction, attended a Shimen Reservoir design meeting. Official meeting minutes calmly recorded that a dam height of 250 meters was approved. However, Liu Yong-mao’s diary left another scene: "Today went to Shimen for another meeting, decided dam height at 250 meters, fierce debate, decided this figure at 3 PM." ³

The same decision: in meeting minutes, it is institutional completion; in the diary, it is a debate lasting until 3 PM. Both are true, yet each preserves a different history. Only by placing official documents, diaries, photos, drawings, and private letters together can one see how a reservoir is composed of overlapping professional judgments, power relations, and personal emotions.

Airiti’s research points out that the Shimen Reservoir Construction Committee archives are mainly concentrated between 1954 and 1966, representing one of the few relatively complete sets of important post-war national water conservancy construction archives. The organization work reconstructed the series and context of the archives according to the principle of provenance, allowing researchers not only to see photos but also to know which agency originally produced the documents, how they were preserved, and their position in the entire engineering process. ⁴

After the Reservoir Was Completed, Problems Did Not Finish with the Dam

After completion in 1964, Shimen Reservoir provided irrigation, power generation, flood control, and public water supply. The National Archives and Records Administration calls it Taiwan’s first multi-purpose reservoir, while the Water Resources Bureau records it was once the largest reservoir in the Far East. These achievements explain why the reservoir is so important in the history of post-war national development. ^{1 2}

But "multi-purpose" also means multiple demands must be borne simultaneously by the same reservoir. Agriculture needs irrigation, cities need tap water, industry needs stable water supply, the power system needs power generation, the Taipei Basin needs reduced flood risk, and tourism turns the reservoir into a public landscape. Whenever water is insufficient or siltation increases, these demands compete with each other. The reservoir redistributes limited water across different times and regions, but cannot eliminate the conditions of uneven rainfall and limited water volume.

Academia Sinica’s research also reminds us that the reservoir was once seen as a panacea for water resources and floods, but as the environmental movement rose, the engineering halo gradually faded. A more historically accurate approach is to return to the conditions of the time, asking why people believed building a dam could solve problems, and asking whose land and voices were not included in early engineering narratives. ³

The reservoir is still operating today, while archives bring us back to the era when it was unfinished. This timeline begins with the 1902 concept that was not adopted, passes through the 1928 Taoyuan Grand Canal, the 1954 dam height debate, the 1958 US aid contract, the 1959 resettlement site conflict, and finally arrives at the 1964 completion ceremony. Engineers, immigrants, original reclamation families, and family members all left different directions on this map.

The engineering system of Shimen Reservoir also left a sample of post-war state governance. The Design Committee first integrated different agencies, the Construction Preparatory Committee handled funding and administrative preparation, and after the RCC took over, long-term construction began. After the project was completed, the Management Committee took over according to multi-objective use criteria. These organizational changes show that the reservoir was simultaneously an administrative experiment. Agriculture, power, urban water supply, flood risk, and local land were placed into the same decision-making framework, concentrating originally scattered water conservancy problems to central and professional agencies for handling. ^{1 2}

This framework improved engineering coordination efficiency, but also made it harder for local residents to directly participate in decisions. When the government marked the submerged zone, resettlement zone, and engineering land separately on plans, residents had to fight for land and compensation through petitions, litigation, or local administrative relations. The value left by the Shimen Reservoir archives is that these procedures are no longer just the four words "successfully completed." Dates, maps, petitions, and court往返 (back-and-forth) in documents allow people to see how a national project entered families, fields, and neighborhood relations. ^{3 6}

This is why Shimen Reservoir is worth reading together with cultural landscapes and archival history. The reservoir changed the existing pi-tang and canal relationships of the Taoyuan Plateau; new grand canals, roads, settlements, and resettlement sites formed another set of living geographies. Later research that only measures dam body, storage volume, or water supply benefits would miss how residents rearranged farming, transportation, and kinship interactions. Archives provide not just an engineering review. They allow changes at different scales to be compared: dam construction progress, agency decision-making processes, farmland boundaries, resident petitions, and how a settlement re-established life after relocation. ^{4 7}

📝 Curator’s Note: Shimen Reservoir left a set of problems still distributing water, land, and memory; engineering answers are only one layer.

Image Author: pang yu liu. Source: Wikimedia Commons Archive Page. License: CC BY-SA 2.0. This article embeds the original Wikimedia Commons hotlink directly, without downloading the image or altering its content.

Shimen Reservoir therefore belongs simultaneously to water conservancy history, local history, and archival history. Readers can see state capacity from the dam, and see people beyond the boundaries of engineering from resettlement sites and petitions. Only by placing these two perspectives together can we prevent water supply benefits from obscuring the cost of relocation, and prevent the cost from obscuring the water scarcity and flood problems people actually faced at the time.

References

• Water Sustainability: The Construction of the Multi-Purpose Shimen Reservoir: National Development Council Archives and Records Administration historical article.
• The RCC Period: Water Resources Bureau, Northern Region Water Resources Office construction history.
• Unsealing Archives from Half a Century Ago: Seeing a Different Shimen Reservoir from Multiple Perspectives: Academia Sinica "Research Matters" special feature.
• Archival Arrangement and Tracing the Origins of Water Culture: The Historical Memory of the Shimen Reservoir Construction Project: Wang Lijiao, Li Yiling, Archives Biannual.
• US Aid and the Construction of Shimen Reservoir: Focusing on Funding and Technology (1956-1964): US Aid and Technology Transfer Research.
• Research on the Change of Cultural Landscapes by Water Conservancy Construction: Taking Taoyuan County for Example over a Century: Taoyuan Water Conservancy and Cultural Landscape Research.
• Resettlement Planning and Practice for Residents of the Shimen Reservoir Submerged Zone: National Chengchi University Institutional Repository Research.
• Disappearing American Bungalow Communities and Immigrants: Academia Sinica Unlocks Shimen Reservoir Historical Archives: Environmental Information Center Report.

Further Reading

• Shimen Reservoir Construction Committee Archives: Academia Sinica Institute of Taiwan History Taiwan History Archive Resource System.
• Shimen Reservoir Environmental Education Network: Extending understanding of Taoyuan Plateau water resource history from the perspectives of water culture and environmental education.
• People and Events in the Shimen Reservoir Historical Archives: Introduction to the joint publication by the Water Resources Bureau, Northern Region Water Resources Office, and Academia Sinica.