History of Taiwan's Military Dependents' Villages

30-second overview: Starting in the late 1940s, the Nationalist government built military dependents' villages (眷村, juancun) to house the dependents of soldiers who came to Taiwan. In 1984, the Ministry of National Defense administered 888 such villages; a 1982 survey counted roughly 470,000 residents. Zhongzhen New Village in Taoyuan was one of them, built in autumn 1954 for the dependents of the Yunnan Anti-Communist National Salvation Army that had withdrawn from northern Burma — a group that had fought guerrilla warfare along the China–Burma border for nearly four years before reaching Taiwan. From bamboo fences to public housing, the juancun ultimately evolved into a vital strand in Taiwan's multicultural DNA.

In autumn 1954, at Longgang on the border between Pingzhen and Zhongli in Taoyuan, the Ministry of National Defense erected about 530 crude dwellings (Wikipedia records 534 households; another source says 503)¹. These huts of bamboo lattice, yellow mud, and corrugated iron averaged less than 10 ping (≈33 m²) per household, yet they carried the fate of a special group of residents — they were not the military dependents who came directly to Taiwan with the Nationalist government, but rather the families of the "Lonely Army" who had traveled from the mainland to Burma, and only then to Taiwan.

The birth of Zhongzhen New Village illustrates the complex character of juancun culture: it is not merely a dialogue between waishengren (mainlanders) and benshengren (native Taiwanese), but a dialectic of exile and settlement, the temporary and the permanent, homeland and foreign land.

The Complex Spectrum of the Great Migration

1.2 Million People, Multiple Pathways

"1.2 million military personnel and civilians retreated to Taiwan with the government" is a common formulation, but the reality is far more complex. The arrivals came in several waves between 1945 and 1954:

Circa 1949: The government's roughly 600,000 troops retreated to Taiwan, accompanied by civil servants and civilians²
1950: The Zhoushan Islands evacuation — over 120,000 Nationalist troops and about 20,000 local residents withdrawn to Taiwan in three days³
1953: Huang Chieh's forces stranded on Phú Quốc Island, Vietnam, transported back to Taiwan — about 30,000 people⁴
Late 1953 to 1954: The Yunnan Anti-Communist National Salvation Army withdrew from northern Burma in three batches; the first withdrawal totaled 6,986 people⁵; over 14,000 Chinese People's Volunteer Army POWs from the Korean War chose to come to Taiwan, the first batch arriving in Keelung on 23 January 1954⁶

This was not a single retreat, but nearly a decade of intermittent exile. Behind each wave lay different despairs and hopes. Many mainlanders who came directly had government resettlement, but the Lonely Army families experienced a double exile — first the loss of their homeland, then survival on the border.

The Lonely Army's Unique Fate

The Yunnan Anti-Communist National Salvation Army under Li Mi was the most circuitous of all the groups that moved to Taiwan. After the Nationalist defeat in Yunnan in late 1949, this force did not withdraw directly to Taiwan but fell back into northern Burma, fighting guerrilla warfare along the China–Burma border for nearly four years.

📝 Curator's Note
The "lone" (孤) in "Lonely Army" (孤軍) signifies not only geographic isolation but political awkwardness. They were unrecognized by the Burmese government, unaccepted by the international community, and even their status as "friendly forces" remained ambiguous.

After the Burmese government complained to the UN about Nationalist troops occupying its territory, the ROC government negotiated with the U.S., Thailand, and Burma and decided to withdraw the troops in Burma. Starting in late 1953, Li Mi led the 93rd Division and their dependents to Taiwan in batches¹. What greeted these men, women, and children was not a hero's welcome but the reality of being dispersed and temporarily housed in Taiwan Sugar Corporation warehouses in Xizhou, Dalin, Wufeng, and elsewhere — material shortages "even worse than during the guerrilla days in northern Burma"⁷. This prompted the Ministry of National Defense's decision to build Zhongzhen New Village in Taoyuan in autumn 1954.

Zhongzhen New Village is often called "the first juancun built by the Nationalist government after retreating to Taiwan"⁷, but this claim does not hold up. The Forty-Four South Village (四四南村) in Taipei's Sanzhangli was already built in 1948⁸; Huangpu New Village in Fengshan was occupied by Sun Li-jen's troops in 1949⁹; and Qiao'ai New Village in Daxi, Taoyuan, was also among the first batch of juancun¹⁰. Zhongzhen New Village was one of the juancun built by the Ministry of National Defense for the late-arriving Lonely Army. Its distinction lies not in chronology but in its residents' origins: the accents and cuisine of Yunnan, Thailand, and Burma set it apart from other juancun from the start.

Building the Bamboo-Fence Republic

Military-Branch Geography

The spatial distribution of juancun reflected military-branch politics. Many villages were organized by service branch and unit; in a given village, nearly all the men belonged to the same branch, often the same unit[^7]:

Zuoying, Kaohsiung: Navy juancun, many Shandong natives concentrated here, markets dominated by wheat-based foods¹¹
Ching Chuan Kang, Taichung: Air Force juancun
Zhongzhen New Village, Taoyuan: Yunnan–Burma guerrilla veterans, strong Yunnan Bai (擺夷) culture
Rende Second Air Base, Tainan: Air Force, mainly Sichuan and Hunan natives¹¹

💡 Did You Know
By today's Chinese administrative divisions, the largest contingent of troops who came to Taiwan was from Shandong Province (72,604), followed by Guangdong (66,613) and Jiangsu (54,950)². These numbers directly determined the juancun "dialect map."

This branch-based clustering was both an administrative necessity and a natural extension of military culture. Comrades-in-arms who had faced life and death together on the battlefield became neighbors to rely on in Taiwan. The juancun were not just residential districts; they were the civilian extension of military culture.

Material Hardship, Spiritual Richness

Early juancun material conditions were extremely primitive. Zhongzhen New Village houses "averaged less than 10 ping per household, with actual weatherproof space of only about 4.5 to 5 ping"⁷; living room doubled as bedroom, kitchen fit only a single stove. Bamboo-lattice walls, yellow-mud chinking, corrugated-iron roofs — thunderstorms brought the risk of electrocution.

Yet amid material deprivation, juancun residents developed astonishing ingenuity:

Empty gasoline drums repurposed as water tanks
Scrap lumber partitioned into rooms
Broken umbrellas turned into sunshades
Flour sacks sewn into bedsheets and clothing

"Making do" (克難) was not a choice but a survival skill. And it was precisely this shared hardship that forged the juancun's distinctive community cohesion.

Reconstruction of Culinary Memory

Folk Fusion of the Eight Great Cuisines

The most tangible cultural legacy of the juancun is food. Juancun mothers from every corner of China, in cramped kitchens with limited ingredients, reconstructed the Eight Great Cuisines of China — but this reconstruction was itself a process of innovation.

⚠️ Contested View
Writer Chiao Tung once said: "Sichuan has no 'Sichuan-style beef noodles,' Mongolia has no 'Mongolian barbecue,' Fuzhou has no 'Fuzhou noodles.'"¹¹ Is juancun cuisine "homeland taste" or "Taiwan taste"? The answer may be both, or neither.

Three hallmarks of juancun cuisine:

Localization through local ingredients: Using Taiwanese vegetables to cook hometown dishes, adjusting seasoning to Taiwanese palates
Frugal practicality: One braised pot feeding the whole family; one block of tofu yielding ten dishes
Cross-provincial technique exchange: Shandong mothers learning Sichuan heat; Jiangnan mothers adopting Cantonese stir-fry methods

Beef noodle soup is the prime example. After the government's retreat, Sichuan-style beef noodles took root in Kaohsiung; later, beef noodle stalls appeared along Taipei's Yongkang Street and Xinyi Road; central and southern Taiwan developed red-braised beef noodles using Chinese medicinal herbs instead of broad-bean paste¹¹. "Beef noodle soup" became a representative Taiwan snack, but Sichuan has no "Sichuan-style beef noodle soup."

Markets as Cultural Intersections

Juancun markets were the front line of waishengren–benshengren cultural exchange. Take Zhongzhen Market: initially, vegetable farmers from nearby Xiaoli pushed carts into the village to hawk their produce⁷; juancun mothers became regular customers, and a market gradually formed.

This seemingly simple buyer–seller relationship was actually the first deep contact between two communities. Benshengren learned waishengren flavors; waishengren grew familiar with Taiwanese ingredients. Sesame flatbread with youtiao and braised pork rice, soy milk and old-style red tea, began to coexist in the same market.

Three Generations of Shifting Identity

First Generation: Eternal Nostalgia

The first juancun generation never relinquished longing for their homeland. Their "China" was not a political entity but the memory of Shandong steamed buns, Sichuan red-braised pork, Hunan cured sausages.

The government originally expected a quick, decisive "retake the mainland," so juancun were designed as temporary. Flimsy housing, inadequate infrastructure — all reflected the optimistic expectation of "going home soon." But three years became thirty; the temporary became permanent, and the juancun became a helpless "little homeland."

Language policy reflected this mindset. Juancun vigorously promoted Mandarin education, but this "national language" carried not just communicative function but cultural identity. Juancun children could recite Yangtze Basin place names but could not name the creek next door.

Second Generation: Identity Tug-of-War

The second generation faced an unprecedented identity dilemma. They grew up in juancun, received Chinese cultural education, but lived on the land of Taiwan. The 1987 lifting of martial law and opening of cross-Strait visits intensified this split.

The paradox is: When first-generation veterans could finally visit their hometowns, many found they no longer "fit." Forty years of separation had turned "homeland" into strange territory. Conversely, Taiwan — once a "temporary sojourn" — had become their true "home."

Second-generation political positions consequently diverged: some favored unification, some independence, most the status quo. "I am a juancun child, and I am also Taiwanese" — this is not a contradiction, it is reality.

Third Generation: Cultural Root-Seeking

The third generation mostly did not grow up in juancun; their memories come from parents' stories. Yet ironically, it is this generation that launched the "rescue" of juancun culture.

Through fieldwork, oral history, and digital archiving, the third generation rediscovered the juancun. This "cultural root-seeking" reflects a globalized era's yearning for cultural roots. They seek not political identity but the richness of cultural identity.

The Tug-of-War Between Demolition and Preservation

1996: The Double-Edged Sword of the Reconstruction Act

The February 1996 promulgation of the Statute for the Reconstruction of Old Military Dependents' Villages¹² marked the beginning of large-scale juancun disappearance. The policy aims were practical: improve residents' living quality, release prime land, meet urban development needs.

📊 Data Source
In 1984, the Ministry of National Defense administered 888 juancun comprising 109,786 households; after the Reconstruction Act, numbers declined yearly; in 2001 the Ministry announced 530 public juancun still under its administration¹⁰. In 2018, Presidential Office Secretary-General Chen Chu said at the opening of the 886 Taiwan Juancun Cultural Park in Kaohsiung that Taiwan had 886 juancun¹³.

Post-reconstruction juancun became modern public housing, genuinely solving housing-quality problems. But the original settlement morphology vanished, and neighborly relations frayed with it. Residents who moved into new apartments gained modern convenience but lost the old community spirit where "one family grills meat and ten thousand families smell it."

The reconstruction process was not smooth. Allocation disputes, relocation compensation, emotional loss — all sparked protests. The deeper question: When juancun become public housing, can "juancun culture" survive?

Preservation Awakening: From Illegal Structures to Cultural Assets

Baosangyan (寶藏巖) is a pivotal case in the juancun preservation movement. This hillside settlement near Taipei's Gongguan was originally classified as "illegal construction" facing total demolition. But after local advocates campaigned, it was registered as a "historic building" in 2004 and as a "settlement building group" in 2011¹⁴.

Rainbow Village (彩虹眷村) represents another preservation model. Located in Taichung's Nantun District, adjacent to Gancheng Sixth Village, it was not itself a Ministry-administered juancun but a cluster of houses built by veterans themselves. Veteran Huang Yung-fu bought one in 1979; later a land-readjustment project slated the area for demolition. In August 2008, to relieve boredom and leave a memento before demolition, he began painting the walls. In 2010, faculty and students from Ling Tung and Hungkuang Universities launched "Save Rainbow Village"; that September, the Taichung City Government decided to preserve it as "Rainbow Art Park"¹⁵.

💡 Did You Know
Huang Yung-fu was born in 1924; he was 84 when he started painting in 2008. After Rainbow Village went viral online, the Taichung Cultural Affairs Bureau, noting his unfamiliarity with the internet, commissioned an official website, recruited volunteers, and sold cultural merchandise on-site and online to fund his painting and building maintenance¹⁵. An old man's colored pencils unexpectedly became a new model for juancun preservation.

These two cases illustrate the multiple pathways of juancun preservation: academic discourse, community mobilization, internet dissemination, and policy shifts — none can be missing.

Contemporary Transformation of the Juancun Spirit

From Space to Memory

Physical juancun have largely disappeared, but the "juancun spirit" has found new carriers in the digital age:

Facebook groups: "XX Juancun Alumni Associations" rebuild virtual communities
Oral history projects: Video recording elders' stories
3D digital reconstruction: Vanished juancun reborn in virtual space
Cultural-creative industries: Juancun motifs become popular nostalgia products

Virtual juancun communities, to some extent, recreate the cohesion of physical juancun. But whether this "memory juancun" is still a "real juancun" — answers vary.

Taiwan's Model of Plural Identity

Reviewing over seventy years of juancun history, the greatest insight may be: Cultural identity need not be a zero-sum game. A person can simultaneously be a juancun child, Taiwanese, Chinese, and a global citizen — these identities do not exclude one another.

The juancun experience also challenges monolithic cultural imaginaries. Cultures from every corner recombined in Taiwan, producing the familiar-yet-strange. Beef noodle soup, luwei (braised snacks), juancun cuisine — none is a pure reproduction of any single tradition; all are innovations of "cultural hybridity."

In the globalized 21st century, the juancun's multicultural experiment may be precisely the important experience Taiwan offers the world.

The Bamboo Fence Enclosed Not Just Homeland

✦ A bamboo fence enclosed not only a new homeland for nearly 500,000 people, but the most complex, richest strand of DNA in Taiwan's cultural gene bank.

The juancun may be gone, but what they left is not mere nostalgia — it is a capacity for facing change: rebuilding life under the most difficult conditions, sowing culture on the most alien soil, keeping hope alive in the most uncertain future.

Making do and mutual aid, adaptation and persistence, exile and settlement — these seemingly contradictory traits synthesize the core of the juancun spirit. It reminds us that culture is not a static museum display but a vitality living in every stir-fry, every dialect sentence, every story passed down.

Today, as we move freely through Taiwan's multicultural tapestry — drinking leicha in a Hakka village, listening to ancient tunes in an Indigenous tribe, buying pepper buns at a juancun night market — we are actually experiencing the experiment the juancun began over seventy years ago: how to turn difference into richness, exile into belonging, foreign land into homeland.

This is the most precious legacy the juancun left Taiwan: an optimism that "culture can begin again," and a wisdom for "remaining oneself amid change."