History of Taiwan's Historic Preservation Movement: Three Paths Beginning with the Demolition of Lin An-tai Ancient House

30-second overview: On June 26, 1978, the Lin An-tai Ancient House in Taipei's Daan District was demolished for the widening of Dunhua South Road. Architect Li Chung-yao used grass ropes, chalk numbering, and seventy engineering drawings to dismantle this two-hundred-year-old courtyard house, numbering and preserving its components for later relocation and reconstruction at Riverside Park. This demolition made "historic preservation" a national issue for the first time, leading to the 1982 Cultural Assets Preservation Act. Thereafter, Taiwan's preservation movement grew along three paths: institutionalized designation and restoration, the Losheng case where preservation clashed directly with housing rights, and the Old House Cultural Movement that handed restoration to the market.

A House Dismantled into 38,000 Bricks

In the summer of 1976, Taipei Mayor Lin Yang-kang visited the Lin An-tai Ancient House and announced the next day that it would be relocated to the then-under-construction Muzha Zoo.¹ At the time, Dunhua South Road was being widened, and two-thirds of the ancient house's rear portion fell within the planned construction zone.¹

On March 8, 1977, the Taipei City Government's New Construction Office convened experts to discuss the relocation. Painter Hsieh Te-chin and architectural scholar Li Chien-lang both opposed the move.¹ In March of the following year, Lin Fu-chuan, representing the Lin family's property rights, informed the city government that if the ancestral home could be preserved in situ, the Lin family would ask for nothing in return and open it to the public and foreign guests. The city government did not accept.¹

Demolition preparations began on June 18, 1978, with official work starting on the 26th. That morning, the main hall and courtyard were packed with Lin family descendants. The caretaker burned incense before the ancestral tablets, passed incense to the dozen or so demolition workers, and lit firecrackers. Workers climbed wooden ladders and symbolically struck the saddle-shaped roof ridge a few times.¹

The real work was directed by Li Chung-yao. He required that workers' hammer heads not exceed five pounds, that only grass ropes be used for rigging, that bags be cotton or grass-woven, and that each stone brick be continuously watered for four hours before removal to soften the lime-and-glutinous-rice adhesive.¹ Materials were simply numbered with chalk by workers as reference for later reconstruction. The final tally: 20,982 beams and columns, 38,093 bricks and stones, and over 240,000 tiles.¹

This coding system later became a study model for historic preservation in Taiwan, and also facilitated the enactment of the Cultural Assets Preservation Act and the founding of the Chinese Association for Conservation of Historic Monuments.¹ Yet it was simultaneously criticized by contemporary professionals: an on-site architectural planner considered the numbering too simple, noting that in later stages, when encountering similarly shaped stones and tiles, the one-percent drawings or photos might not suffice to reassemble them; Hsia Chu-chiu recalled witnessing workers not handling dismantled components with care, a vast gap from Japan's practice of item-by-item documentation during historic reconstruction.¹

Materials sat stacked beside Anhe Road for several years, at one point covered with plastic tarps. Rainwater from the overpass drains flooded the warehouse, smearing the chalk and aluminum tags.¹ In January 1983, Min Sheng Daily held a forum where Hsia Chu-chiu, Ma Yi-kung, Lin Heng-tao, Li Chien-lang, Li Chung-yao, and others jointly urged immediate reconstruction. That same year the city council approved the budget; the contract was awarded in April 1984, ground was broken on August 13, Phase 1 was completed in November 1985, and it officially opened to the public on June 5, 1987.¹ In November 2012, it was registered as a Taipei City Historic Building.¹

For a complete introduction to the ancient house itself, see the Lin An-tai Ancient House entry.

That 1982 Law

The Lin An-tai case established one thing: historic structures could be demolished, could be moved, but the demolition process had to be recorded. What truly turned this into a system was the 1982 promulgation of the Cultural Assets Preservation Act. Only thereafter did Taiwan have legal categories like "historic site" and "historic building," and only then did a full set of procedures for designation, review, restoration, and penalties exist.¹

Notably, this law was born four years after the Lin An-tai case, and more than thirty years after Japan's 1950 Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties. Taiwan's first preservation movement achievement was a belated institutional framework, and this framework has faced the same problem ever since: when preservation conflicts with development, which side yields.

Losheng: When Historic Preservation Is Bound to Housing Rights

Losheng Sanatorium represents another kind of case. In 1929, the Japanese government built the Taiwan Governor-General's Leprosy Sanatorium Losheng on the slopes of Xinzhuang to centrally house leprosy patients from across Taiwan, dividing wards by patients' places of origin.²

In the 1990s, the Taipei Rapid Transit Corporation selected the Losheng grounds as the planned depot site for the Xinzhuang Line, and the preservation controversy began. On October 15, 2004, over twenty residents in wheelchairs and on crutches went to the Executive Yuan to petition — the first time this group, long isolated from society, had taken to the streets.²

On May 30, 2007, the Executive Yuan's Public Construction Commission ruled: of the 55 buildings in the compound, 39 would be preserved in situ, 10 selectively relocated or rebuilt, and 6 demolished. This plan was criticized as unable to simultaneously achieve both historic preservation and resident housing goals. The Council for Cultural Affairs subsequently proposed a 90-percent preservation version, which the Rapid Transit Corporation assessed as infeasible. In December 2011, supporters protested on the eve of the presidential election against landslide risks from depot excavation.²

PTS's Our Island in its 2025 special report clearly defined the nature of the Losheng case: it is not merely a single preservation dispute, but a long-term test spanning urban governance, disease stigma, public safety, and transitional justice.² This sentence highlights the greatest difference between Losheng and Lin An-tai: Lin An-tai demolished an unoccupied ancestral home; Losheng demolished a compound where people still lived, and the object of preservation was simultaneously the architecture and the people living there.

Old House Cultural Movement: Handing Restoration to the Market

The third path appeared in 2012. The Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs, under the Act for Promotion of Private Participation in Public Construction, launched the "Old House Cultural Movement." The method: open bidding and evaluation to match private entities that would fund restoration of idle public cultural assets; no usage fees during construction; after restoration, private entities operate the properties.³⁴

This design solved a practical problem: many public old houses, limited repair budgets, and management agencies often unable to handle them. By outsourcing operation rights, the public sector collects rent, the private sector gains space, and at least the old houses stop crumbling. The actual result, however, is that many matched cases became restaurants and malls with not-low per-capita spending.⁴

Criticism followed. Cultural assets researcher Hsiao Wen-chieh, in a column for Collector's ARTouch, directly called it a "failed cultural movement": a building in the Yangmingshan U.S. Military Housing complex caught fire due to contractor construction issues, and the Department of Cultural Affairs claimed no penalties applied; the former Taipei Prison Official Residences, after restoration, were renamed "Rongjin Time Living Park" and marketed with "one second to Kyoto" exotic ambience, though the area was Fuzhucho (福住町) not Jincho (錦町) during the Japanese era — effectively rewriting the place name in commercial guidance; the Lai Family Ancestral House in Beitou and other sites lacking commercial incentives remained long idle.⁴ He also noted that this approach to operating cultural assets under the guise of private participation has been imitated by other counties and cities.⁴

Three Paths Are Actually One Question

Place the three cases side by side and you find they ask the same question: who determines the value of an old building, who pays for its maintenance, and who gets to use it.

The Lin An-tai answer: "record first, then move" — the cost being the permanent loss of the original site and surrounding fabric. The Losheng answer: "preservation cannot look only at architecture" — the cost being delayed engineering and prolonged resident struggle. The Old House Cultural Movement answer: "hand it to the market" — the cost being that restored old houses may retain only consumption functions. None of the three answers is perfect, but all are somewhat better than the situation on that 1978 morning when workers climbed the roof ridge with five-pound hammers, because at least now, before a house is demolished, someone must first ask: why is this house worth keeping?

Further Reading:

• Lin An-tai Ancient House — Architectural details, family history, and relocation history of this courtyard house
• Taiwan Architecture — Overall context from indigenous slate houses to contemporary public architecture

References