Highways: From MacArthur Road to Xueshan Tunnel, Fifty Years of Power and Speed on Taiwan's National Expressways

30-Second Overview

Taiwan's expressway system has grown from the MacArthur Highway in 1964 through today's Xueshan Tunnel and National Highway No. 7—used by all of Taiwan every day, yet few know its true depth. Nearly every version of this road's history circulating lacks a verifiable source: the first expressway wasn't the Zhongshan Expressway, the 1978 opening ceremony wasn't cut by Chiang Ching-kuo, the Control Yuan determined the ETC arrangement was "distinct in nature from BOT," and the legendary fighter jets never landed at that location. But one thread holds up under every check: from a solitary elderly woman in the authoritarian era whose name was never recorded, to the last toll collector who fought an 11-year legal battle, to farmer Wang Chun-fa in Kaohsiung today praying to the sea god that "this road never gets built," behind every push for speed there is a concrete person paying the price.

Legends You Can Find, Accounts You Can't Finish Tallying

On the morning of December 15, 1997, at 8 a.m., deep in the westbound tunnel of the Xueshan Tunnel, water flooded in from all directions. A full-face tunnel boring machine, worth over a billion NT dollars, was stuck in a fractured fault zone. Leng Yao-tung, the deputy chief of electromechanics, noticed something: the machine's 22.8 kilovolt-ampere (KVA) high-voltage main power supply had not been shut off. With the power still on, the two or three hundred rescue workers at the scene were all exposed to the risk of electrocution. He and a colleague rushed back to the control room to cut the power, then turned and ran outside. Behind them came the sound of collapse¹.

Nearly three hundred lives hung on one person remembering to flip a switch. This is one of the few moments in Taiwan's fifty years of national highways that has been repeatedly retold. Yet even this story—and the number hanging beside it, the Xueshan Tunnel's "25 fatalities in the line of duty"—is wrong.

This road that almost all of us use nearly every day: most of the versions circulating about it don't hold up to scrutiny. Most people think Taiwan's first expressway was the Zhongshan Expressway (in fact, the MacArthur Highway came fourteen years earlier—it just wasn't formally classified as an "expressway"). They think the 1978 opening ceremony ribbon was cut by Chiang Ching-kuo (he had stepped down as Premier half a year before). They think the ETC was a BOT project (the Control Yuan itself said it was "different in nature from a BOT"). They think an F-104 fighter jet test-landed on the national highway near Huatuan, Changhua in 1978 (both the aircraft type and location are wrong). Over fifty years, almost no "one-sentence version" of this road's history can stand up to scrutiny².

But there is another thread that holds up no matter how many times you check it: behind every step forward, every bit faster, there are concrete people paying the price for that speed. There is an elderly man living alone beside the Zhongli interchange whose name was never recorded. There is a toll collector who fought a lawsuit for eleven years and ended up with a settlement whose amount cannot even be made public. There is an old farmer in Kaohsiung facing a statue of the sea god, praying that National Highway No. 7 "never gets built." This article does two things: it takes apart and fact-checks the legends that have circulated, one by one, while putting back into the ledger those people whose costs have never been counted.

So let's start with the earliest of those roads: the first expressway that even Taiwanese themselves have almost forgotten.

Taiwan's First Expressway—Nobody Remembers Its Name Today

Taiwan's first expressway was not called the Zhongshan Expressway; it was called the MacArthur Highway, which opened on May 2, 1964—fourteen years before the Zhongshan³. It ran from Taipei to Keelung, with a main line of 22.65 kilometers plus a branch line of less than one kilometer. It was Taiwan's first expressway to use grade-separated interchange design, with all at-grade intersections either elevated or depressed, and toll booths at each end. Where did the money come from? Of the construction cost of over 227 million yuan, U.S. aid provided over 120 million—it was Cold War infrastructure through and through⁴.

It was not originally called this. It was called the "Taipei-Keelung New Road." On April 5, 1964—less than a month before opening—General MacArthur died. The government, grateful for American assistance and the general's friendship, hastily renamed the road the MacArthur Highway⁵. This is one of the rare cases where Chinese and English historical records align so closely that we can use it with confidence: "News of the general's death arrived at the time of the opening."

💡 Did you know?
The MacArthur Highway harbored a secret in its route selection: it deliberately chose to build a new line on the north bank of the Keelung River rather than simply widen the old road on the south bank. The reason had nothing to do with engineering—it was military preparedness: if one road were destroyed in war, the other could still be used⁶. This "first expressway" carried the logic of "what if war breaks out" from the very beginning, a logic that would resurface again and again later.

The fate of the MacArthur Highway says much about the character of Taiwan's national highways. On July 10, 1977, when the Keelung-to-Neihu section of the Zhongshan Expressway opened, most of the MacArthur Highway was directly absorbed into the Zhongshan: not replaced, but swallowed by the road that superseded it⁷. Only the small segment that was not absorbed was downgraded to today's Provincial Highway 5A. If you drive along Provincial Highway 5A today, most people will not realize that the road beneath their wheels was once Taiwan's first ticket to modernization.

If the origins of the first road alone have so many versions, how much of the story of the Zhongshan—the largest in scale and most traveled over fifty years—has been simplified away?

Twelve Years of Relay, and Two People Whose Names Were Never Recorded

The most widely circulated version of the Zhongshan Expressway goes like this: Chiang Ching-kuo gave an order, uttered the phrase "if we don't do it today, we'll regret it tomorrow," and single-handedly directed the construction and completion of the largest of the Ten Major Construction Projects.

This version falls apart under scrutiny at nearly every point. The concept of the expressway predated Chiang Ching-kuo's involvement in any capacity, and the initial decision was not made by him alone but by a joint conference of the provincial governor, minister of economic affairs, and minister of transportation⁸. The actual groundbreaking ceremony took place on August 14, 1971, presided over by Vice President Yan Jia-gan, not Chiang Ching-kuo, because Chiang was only Vice Premier of the Executive Yuan at the time—he did not formally assume the premiership until 1972. By the full-line opening ceremony on October 31, 1978, Chiang had already become President on May 20 of that year and stepped down as Premier, so he did not preside over that ceremony either⁹. As for the phrase "if we don't do it today, we'll regret it tomorrow," it comes from a biography published in 1991, eighteen years after the decision was made—it very likely represents a representative statement synthesized by later writers, not a verbatim recording.

There is another detail frequently misremembered: the full-line "completion and opening" (October 31, 1978) and the formal "naming as Zhongshan Expressway" (April 19, 1979) are two separate events nearly half a year apart, not the same day¹⁰.

📝 Curator's Note
The prevailing account compresses a process spanning twelve years, three transportation ministers, and Chiang Ching-kuo himself holding three different titles (Vice Premier, Premier, President) into a single moment of one person's decision. This is precisely how authoritarian-era memory operates—another invisible kind of speed in this road: the speed at which power consolidates narrative. Credit flows upward and concentrates in the name of the top leader, while Yan Jia-gan, Lin Jin-sheng, Huang Jie, and Sun Yun-xuan—along with the costs they bore—vanish from the narrative. But those who disappeared most completely were not these ministers.

The truly disappeared were the people run over by this road. Land acquisition for the Zhongshan Expressway was handled by the Freeway Engineering Bureau's "Right-of-Way Section," established in 1971 and expanded from thirty-some staff to forty-some. Why establish a dedicated unit? Wang Chaosheng, the administrator of the Right-of-Way Section, explained it clearly in his oral history: "The expressway was the first of the Ten Major Construction Projects, and Mr. Chiang Ching-kuo required it to be opened, completed, and opened to traffic on schedule. Local government efficiency was poor—a single provincial road would take local government a very long time to acquire land for, so it would be impossible to meet the deadline."¹¹

Wang Chaosheng personally handled land acquisition for the Zhongli-Yangmei section, the Taipei section, and the Yangmei-Sanyi section. He had to go to the site himself for cadastral surveys and assessments of structures, "walking the site I don't know how many times." He remembers two households.

The first was on the land for the Zhongli interchange. Beside a rural road stood a dilapidated house with no roof or walls, just two beams still standing, inhabited by a solitary elderly man in his seventies with mobility difficulties. Within reasonable limits, Wang Chaosheng gave him somewhat more compensation, coordinated with the local government's social affairs department to help arrange his resettlement, and ultimately used the engineering bureau's official vehicles to help him move. "It took a lot of time back and forth before we successfully acquired the land."¹² The second household was at the Yangmei interchange, a small tile-roofed house where a couple lived—both were blind. Their eldest son was in military service, their younger son was in junior high school, the family had no money, the land belonged to someone else, and they could not even receive land compensation, only compensation for structures. All the other households had been demolished, but they still lived there. Wang Chaosheng tried getting help from the conscription office, social affairs department, and citizen service centers to no avail. Finally, the local village chief found an empty plot by the river and had a shelter built there, allowing them to move.¹³

These two households—their names were never recorded in any document. This is not forgetting; they had no channel to be recorded from the start. That era had no hearings, administrative litigation, or environmental review procedures like today. When compensation standards got stuck, the fate of the vulnerable hung on the conscience and connections of a single civil servant. "When these standards couldn't solve individual problems, we had to figure out solutions ourselves," Wang Chaosheng said—his words are the most apt evidence of "the cost of the authoritarian era": the cost certainly existed, only it was personalized and non-institutional, held together by personal relationships.

That era was not a monolith of public opinion either. Wang Chaosheng's colleague Chen Mao-xiong remembered that "when the expressway was being planned and built, many people came forward to oppose it, arguing that the expressway was built for the wealthy." Contemporary reports also wrote that "some criticized the expressway as favoring the rich, since only wealthy people could afford to buy cars, while others believed... it would be better to widen the existing western trunk line instead."¹⁴ Voices of opposition were always there, but in the martial-law news environment, they had no chance to be organized, recorded, or passed down.

How this road was built was itself a form of unequal cost. Taiwan had no expressway design standards at the time and could only rely on the American consulting firm De Leuw Cather to translate California standards and learn as they went. Engineer Xu Junyi remembered the salary gap: Taiwanese engineers earned four thousand yuan a month, foreign consultants earned four hundred thousand, plus room and board, transportation, and drivers—"a hundred times what we made." But the money bought real expertise: "Before, if you didn't know something at school, you'd go find a book. Now, when your sketch is wrong, after he corrects it, you know where you went wrong." Most vividly, they had a homespun method for road acceptance: they'd accelerate a properly aligned four-wheel vehicle to design speed, "then let go of the steering wheel, and the car would drive straight ahead without drifting out of the lane—that meant the construction was qualified."¹⁵ Within seven years, this group built three hundred seventy-three kilometers.

That "three hundred seventy-three kilometers" deserves a note too: the inscription on the Zhongsha Bridge monument erected at the Xiluo Service Area in 1978 reads the round number "373 kilometers," but after the Kaohsiung Port access elevated section was incorporated in 2015, the current official standard is 374.3 kilometers⁷. The same road yielded several different measurements over fifty years.

The Zhongshan Expressway ran from Keelung all the way to Kaohsiung, dramatically shortening north-south travel along the western corridor. But what it faced next was an entire Central Mountain Range.

Xueshan Tunnel Deaths: Thirteen, Not Twenty-Five

Back to the person who cut the power at the opening. The nearly three hundred people Leng Yao-tung saved, and those who could not be saved, are two sides of the same mountain. And the number of the dead is precisely the figure most commonly misremembered about this road.

The version in current circulation says "25 workers died in the Xueshan Tunnel construction." The Ministry of Labor's official press release in 2006 drew the distinction clearly: 25 is the workplace fatality count for the "Taipei-Yilan Expressway overall project," of which 13 belonged to the Xueshan Tunnel proper, with 8 from the Nangang-Pinglin section and 4 from the Toucheng-Su'ao section—13 plus 8 plus 4 equals 25¹⁶. Attaching the "full Taipei-Yilan line" figure of 25 directly to the "Xueshan Tunnel" is a scope error.

💡 Did you know?
What's interesting about the number 25 is that two completely different ways of categorizing it both yield a "13": by project segment, the tunnel proper is 13; by nationality, of the 25 deceased, 12 were nationals and 13 were Thai. The two 13s do not refer to the same group of people¹⁷. When reading numbers, always ask first: "What is the basis of this count?" That is also the method of this entire article.

Those 13 Thai migrant workers have names that appear in contradictory versions across different reports—dates, causes of death, spellings all fail to align, making it impossible to trace back to a single primary source. Rather than pick one version and fix it in writing, it is more honest to acknowledge: a group of people gave their lives for this tunnel, and their names could not even be accurately preserved. That fact itself is a form of cost.

The engineering details of the Xueshan Tunnel (quartzite harder than steel, six major fault zones, high-pressure water inflow, five major construction methods) are covered in detail elsewhere on this site; here we add only one commonly misspoken term. During construction, the tunnel boring machines became stuck a total of 26 times¹⁸. One main shaft TBM affected by the 1997 water inflow was never extracted—it "ended its days in the Xueshan Range"¹⁹. A machine can be left in the mountain as a memorial; 13 lives cannot.

The retired Taipei-Yilan No. 1 tunnel boring machine main unit preserved at Wulao Gorge Scenic Area. During Xueshan Tunnel construction, boring machines became stuck a total of 26 times. Photo: Outlookxp, 2025, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

The mountain was pierced, east and west were connected, yet the toll method would have to change.

The Control Yuan Itself Says: This Is Not a BOT

Everyone assumed ETC was a BOT deal: the government outsourced national highway toll collection to a corporation, and Fareastone Telecom got a twenty-year concession. The Control Yuan's corrective measure dismantled that framework in a single sentence.

The official text states in black and white: "After Fareastone Telecom collects tolls on behalf of the Freeway Bureau and remits them to the national treasury, the Freeway Bureau then pays Fareastone Telecom a service fee for the commissioned work. The Freeway Bureau's statutory authority has never been transferred from start to finish, making this more akin to the procurement of services under the Government Procurement Act, and thus distinct from a BOT arrangement."²⁰ The eTag toll lanes themselves remained under the Freeway Bureau's control. This is the official legal determination. Yet the industry—including Fareastone's own English press releases—continued using the term "BOT." An arrangement that operates much like a BOT but was officially determined to be "distinct" from one remains stuck in this ambiguous space.

Even the contract duration got rounded into a whole number. The actual term was 18 years and 4 months: signed August 22, 2007, expiring December 2025—not "twenty years."²¹ And there was a compressed detour in between: in the first selection process in 2004, Fareastone's status as the preferred applicant was revoked by the Supreme Administrative Court on August 3, 2006. After roughly a year, a new selection and new contract were finalized.²² Even earlier, the government had originally planned to handle electronic toll collection itself through Chunghwa Telecom before canceling that contract and opening it to bidding instead. The impression that "ETC rolled out smoothly as a BOT" erased both reversals.

In late 2013, all manual toll booths nationwide shut down simultaneously and switched to distance-based electronic toll collection. The transition produced numerous duplicate-charge incidents. Official figures put the number of affected vehicle owners at 121 (vehicle owners, not the "number of transactions" circulating in public discourse).²³ What truly ignited public anger was a single response from Fareastone spokesperson Zhou Shi-hui: "Duplicate transactions are an inescapable fate and challenge that any eTag system must face."²⁴ The Control Yuan's original wording was sharper than the phrasing news headlines typically used—"subject to the vendor." It employed language stating the response "gave the public the impression of favoritism toward the vendor, only compounding the vendor's excess profits… and seriously damaged the government's image."

📝 Curator's Note
We habitually frame ETC as a clean "government versus corporation" BOT story, but the Control Yuan itself says it is not a BOT. This ambiguous space is the real point: a "successful" technological upgrade whose legal classification remained murky and whose regulatory responsibilities remained unclear, leaving the question "Was this a government victory or a vendor victory?" without a clean answer even today. What deserves equal attention is that this technological transition eliminated over nine hundred jobs.

Eleven Years, One Settlement That Cannot Be Disclosed

On December 30, 2013, toll booths across Taiwan went dark overnight. Approximately 947 toll collectors—the official figure—lost their jobs. Another count put the number at 942, with 486 choosing to find work elsewhere and 456 reassigned by the ETC operator, figures that add up but coexist as competing narratives to this day²⁵. The fact that even the victim count cannot be reconciled speaks volumes about this story itself.

Zhutian toll booth, 2012. More than a year later, all manual toll collection booths across Taiwan shut down simultaneously. Photo: Chi-Hung Lin, 2012, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Holding this 11-year struggle together was Sun Xiu-luan, chair of the self-rescue association. She had worked as a toll collector since 1997 and was laid off in 2013 after 17 years of service (details about her age and family circumstances could not be verified across four searches and are omitted here). The protest began on a bewildered morning: "We thought our employer was the Ministry of Transportation, so we went there, but once we arrived we didn't know what to do. A police officer told us to go to the Presidential Office instead, so we went there."²⁶

Source: Focal Point, Judicial Yuan, Ministry of Transportation Freeway Bureau

Protest tactics escalated to the body's limit. In October 2014, they performed six steps followed by a kowtow on a Zhongli highway shoulder. A month later, three hunger strikers climbed the ETC gantry in Taipei's Donghu district (the machine that replaced them became their final stage of protest), fasting for 200 hours before withdrawing due to hypothermia²⁷. Sun Xiu-luan recalls the psychological tension at the negotiating table: "During the negotiations, they were watching us too—would we really abandon everything for these nine people?"²⁶

In the early morning of August 16, 2016, after standing for more than 30 hours²⁶, the self-rescue association and the government (represented by Executive Yuan official Lin Wan-yi) signed the "0816 Consultation Conclusion." Lin Wan-yi acknowledged on the spot that "both the government and the ETC operator admit there were lapses in the toll collector reassignment process."²⁸

The agreement was signed, but the dispute continued: the self-rescue association alleged compensation was cut by 60–70 percent and some members were excluded, taking the case all the way to administrative court. On December 19, 2019, they lost at first instance. But the court's reasoning was not simply "the government reneged unilaterally"; the judgment argued from procedural defects that the agreement did not constitute a formal administrative contract²⁹. Here lies a crucial distinction: politically, the "broken promise" (the self-rescue association's anger stands on solid ground) and legally, "whether it constitutes an administrative contract" (the court ruled it did not), are two separate matters—the latter should not be used to refute the former. That afternoon after losing, the self-rescue association went to Tsai Ing-wen's campaign headquarters to protest; the journalists covering the event were actually the ones removed first³⁰. Sun Xiu-luan later wrote in a letter the heaviest words: "The judicial system told us that the government's written agreement with the people counts for nothing—it's worth less than a private contract, with no obligation to be fulfilled."³¹

The opposing position must also be presented. The Freeway Bureau's official stance is: toll collectors were "year-to-year" employees whose employment contracts explicitly stated termination upon implementation of distance-based electronic toll collection; under regulations, there was no mandatory reassignment obligation, though the government assisted with reassignment out of compassion³². National Highway Engineering Bureau Director Chen Yen-po also calculated the cost: if the government fully complied with the self-rescue association's demands, compensation alone would cost NT$2.6 billion³³. In this conflict, one side brought bodily rage to the streets; the other side calculated administrative costs.

The ending is an unfindable period. On December 30, 2024, during appellate proceedings, both sides reached mediation (not a judgment) and signed a confidentiality agreement; the specific amount will never be disclosed. On February 15, 2025, the self-rescue association held a 20-table banquet in Kaohsiung; many joked it was the self-rescue association's happiest mobilization, and hoped it would be their last rally cry³⁴. From hunger strikes, six steps and kowtows, climbing steel structures, to sitting at tables—11 years of protest ended in a settlement where the system need not even publicly account for how much it paid.

ETC replaced toll collectors, but the road network ETC serves—still growing—is replaying the same story elsewhere: taking away some people's land. Residents of Kaotuan Village in Kaohsiung have renamed National Highway No. 7, which will soon cut through their homes, as "National Highway Deception Number."

Third Expropriation: Wang Chun-fa's Kaotuan

Old farmer Wang Chun-fa had lived in Kaotuan for generations, making his living from farming. This was not the government's first time expropriating Kaotuan land to build roads: first came the opening of Routes 1 through 3, then Highway 88, and now National Highway No. 7—the same household facing expropriation three times over³⁵. He went to Zhentuan Temple, the spiritual center of the village, and whispered prayers to the Jade Emperor.

✦ "I beseech the Jade Emperor to protect Kaotuan village, to protect us from National Highway No. 7 being built. Please don't let it succeed." "I was able to make a living from farming—growing pineapples and fruit—and survive. But National Highway No. 7 will expropriate my farmland, and I will have nothing left. How am I supposed to live out the rest of my life? What about my descendants?" — Wang Chun-fa, Public Television's Our Island, 2013

Kaotuan residents did not only seek divine help; they also took to the streets. "Stop Highway 7, we're furious!" they chanted as they came to protest outside the Environmental Protection Administration, because the environmental impact assessment meeting had already been held three times without residents knowing anything about it³⁶. Geopolitics scholar Hsu Shih-jung put the absurdity most plainly: "To spend 66 billion to build a 23-kilometer road is like paving the highway with gold!"

Wang Chun-fa and the two households Wang Chao-sheng handled, separated by exactly fifty years, stood on the same hidden line. The difference was: Wang Chun-fa at least had a name, had his words recorded verbatim. The old man Wang Chao-sheng remembered, that blind couple—they didn't even have names. Whose sacrifice is remembered and whose is not—this line runs straight from authoritarianism through to today.

If we can verify things down to this level of detail, what about those stories we cannot verify, only circulating online? Like that airplane.

Emergency Airstrips: Not That Aircraft, Not That Location

A popular internet claim circulates a cool-sounding story: in 1978, an F-104 fighter jet conducted an emergency landing test on the national highway in Huatan, Changhua, proving that Taiwan's expressways were designed for war.

Every concrete detail in this version is wrong. The 1978 emergency landing test that Chiang Ching-kuo inspected took place at the Chungli Emergency Airstrip, the aircraft was a T-33 trainer piloted by an Air Force Academy instructor, followed later by F-5 fighters—it had nothing to do with the F-104 or Huatan³⁷. Huatan (renamed Changhua Emergency Airstrip in 2019) has the earliest verifiable emergency airstrip exercise record from 2007's Wan Guang 23 drill; the specific aircraft types deployed in that exercise remain unconfirmed, but what is certain is: the Huatan emergency airstrip records have never included any F-104.

But emergency airstrips themselves are real, and more layered than the legend suggests. Taiwan has at least five emergency airstrips (Chungli, Huatan, Minxiong, plus Rende and Madou in the south), each roughly two to three kilometers long, capable of converting from highway to combat-ready airfield in 24 to 48 hours—a concept originating from the Ten Major Construction Projects planning of the 1970s. This was "civil-military integration" written into the design from the start³⁸. From the MacArthur Highway's deliberate routing along the north bank of the Keelung River as a backup corridor, to today's emergency airstrips, this road has carried the logic of "if war breaks out" from day one.

Wan Guang 35 exercise in 2019: fighter jets conducting takeoffs and landings at Changhua emergency airstrip, with the president personally overseeing operations. Photo: Office of the President (photographer Mori), 2019, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

The cost of civil-military integration fell on Minxiong. National Highway No. 1 passed through Minxiong, Chiayi in 1978, but because that section of roadway itself served as a military emergency airstrip and involved national defense, interchanges could not be constructed, leaving local residents waiting for over three decades. The final solution was to relocate the emergency airstrip segment two kilometers south, freeing up land for the interchange, which finally opened on December 23, 2011³⁹. A road forced to obey both "national defense secrecy" and "local development" logics pays the price in thirty years of waiting. By the 2019 Wan Guang 35 exercise, F-16V, Mirage 2000-5, and IDF fighters—the three main combat types—successfully conducted takeoffs and landings at the Changhua emergency airstrip, with the president personally present to oversee operations⁴⁰.

Beyond verification, this road also lives in the bodily memory of every Taiwanese person.

Between the Kilometer Markers: Fifty Years of Everyday Life

Heading south for Lunar New Year, "the whole road is a parking lot"—the radio tuned to traffic reports, eyes fixed on the kilometer markers slipping past along the shoulder. This is probably the strongest shared bodily memory of all Taiwanese people. On the fourth day of Lunar New Year 2025, the western expressway system logged approximately 76 million vehicle-kilometers in a single day, about 1.6 times the weekday average⁴¹.

There's an interesting cognitive gap hidden here. Most people stuck in traffic want to know "how many kilometers backed up." But the Freeway Bureau measures traffic volume in "vehicle-kilometers"—adding up every kilometer driven by every vehicle, measuring total traffic flow rather than queue length. The public asks how long the line is; the authorities calculate total traffic volume.

Service areas are Taiwan's unique invention of turning rest stops into attractions. They are the midpoint of school trips, showcases for souvenirs, and rare opportunities for long-distance drivers to sit down for a proper meal. The most complete story arc in recent years belongs to Qingshui Service Area: after eight months of renovation in 2024, its revenue dropped to 587 million yuan, falling to second place. After a team from 7-Eleven took over in 2025, it grew nearly 70 percent within a year, surging to 1.015 billion yuan to reclaim the top spot. That same year, the combined revenue of all 15 national expressway service areas exceeded 6 billion yuan for the first time⁴².

Source: Ministry of Transportation Freeway Bureau, Central News Agency, 2025

So who sits at the exact center of this road? Tai'an Service Area's official website states it confidently: it is "located at the center point of National Highway No. 1," at the 158.6-kilometer mark⁴³—precisely the psychological midpoint where long-distance drivers heading north or south most need to stop and rest. This road has been completed for fifty years, and the service areas are still learning how to be loved. These fifty years of service areas raking in profits are exactly the years Wang Chaosheng remembers that blind couple, the years Sun Xiu-luan spent fighting an eleven-year legal battle. The money this road has earned and the price it has made people pay have never been calculated together.

But this account is not yet settled.

National Freeway No. 7: The Bill Isn't Settled Yet

National Freeway No. 7 had an official construction budget of NT$60 billion according to a 2013 Public Television report³⁵. By May 2026, the latest reporting showed total costs had reached NT$150.17 billion—2.5 times the 2013 figure. And in May 2026 itself, this massive billion-dollar project saw two civil construction contracts fail to attract any bidders and were withdrawn⁴⁴.

Construction is never a linear process, and bidding can stall. This thousand-billion-dollar road remains a work in progress to this day. And Wang Chun-fa? After that 2013 report, he vanished from public view. Even when Public Television revisited the same Kaotuan village in late 2024—this time discussing the rapidly disappearing water caltrop fields and a century-old ancestral home—the entire report never mentioned him once⁴⁵. No one knows whether his farmland was ultimately preserved. Kaotuan did not stop bearing the pressure of development after that 2013 report; only the protagonist of the story changed.

Fifty years ago, a land administration official remembered using a government vehicle to help an unnamed elderly man move. Fifty years later, an elderly farmer with a name and a voice—no one remembers what became of him. The legends that circulated along this road have been debunked one by one (the road's name, who cut the ribbon, the death toll, that airplane). Yet the fact that "someone has been paying the price for speed" has never been overturned, no matter how many times it is investigated. What has changed is only how it is seen—or forgotten.

Next time you're stuck in freeway traffic, glance at the kilometer marker on the roadside. The numbers on that sign are the accumulated bill for every "faster" decision Taiwan has made over fifty years—and all those people who were never counted in the ledger.

Further Reading

• Xueshan Tunnel — The engineering history this article only touches on lightly; the complete story of the Miocene sandstone, five major construction methods, and thirteen years of TBM struggle are all there.
• Ten Major Construction Projects — The Zhongshan Expressway was only the first of the Ten Major Projects; this piece covers the full scope and controversies of this entire authoritarian-era infrastructure program.
• Martial Law Period — Why the cost of land acquisition in the authoritarian era "left no record even of protest"—the answer lies in this history of press control.

Image Sources

This article uses 4 public-domain / CC-licensed images, all cached in public/article-images/lifestyle/ to avoid hotlinking source servers; all videos are standard YouTube embeds from official channels (Ministry of Transportation Freeway Bureau, Public Television News):

• MacArthur Highway Opening Ceremony (hero) — Photo: Taiwan New Life Post, 1964, National Cultural Memory Bank, CC BY 4.0
• Taipei-Yilan Expressway Tunnel No. 1 Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) Main Unit — Photo: Outlookxp, 2025, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
• Formosa Freeway Zhuotian Toll Station — Photo: Chi-Hung Lin, 2012, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
• Wan An Exercise 35 Changhua Emergency Airstrip Fighter Takeoff and Landing — Photo: Office of the President (photographer Mori), 2019, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

References