Shortly after noon on 10 December 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and his son finished a meal in Chengdu, drove to the military airfield at Fenghuangshan, and flew to Taipei. Neither of them ever set foot on the mainland again. That flight is the date the evacuation is usually hung on. It tells you almost nothing about what the evacuation was.

What it was is visible here, in a row of low bungalows with tiled roofs and shared walls, wedged between Taipei 101 and a hill. This is Four-Four South Village 四四南村, and the people who moved into it worked at the 44th Arsenal of the Combined Service Forces, which had been picked up from Qingdao and set down in Taipei. The village went up around 1948 and 1949 to house them. It took its name from the arsenal and from its position — the south village, with an east and a west one nearby.

Roughly 1.2 million people came across in those years: about 600,000 troops, 400,000 officials and their families, 200,000 civilians, arriving on an island of some six million. There was nowhere to put them. The answer was the 眷村 — military dependants' villages, built fast and cheap out of bamboo, mud plaster, salvaged timber and whatever the units could scrounge, meant to last a few years until everyone went home. Taiwan eventually had more than eight hundred of them. Four-Four South Village was the first in Taipei.

They lasted forty years and became something nobody planned: a distinct culture with its own food, its own accents mixed from every mainland province, its own novelists and comedians and generation of children who grew up bilingual in Mandarin and the dialect of a place they had never seen. Then the land became valuable. Under the 1996 rebuilding act most of the villages came down; the residents here were moved out around the turn of the century and the demolition crews arrived for the rest.

Four buildings were saved after a preservation campaign and reopened in 2003 as a civic hall and a small village museum. Walk the alley between them. The gap between the eaves is narrow enough that two neighbours could pass a bowl across it without leaving their own doorways, which is exactly what people did, and it explains more about the last seventy-five years of Taiwanese society than the flight from Chengdu does.

Where: Four-Four South Village 四四南村 (Xinyi Public Assembly Hall), 50 Songqin Street, Xinyi District, Taipei. Free, open grounds; the 眷村文物館 exhibition room keeps its own hours. Two minutes from Taipei 101/World Trade Center MRT.

Cover photo: 隱身在都市的古蹟 四四南村 by HSIAO, WEN-CHIEN, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.