A Touch of Green | Fengshan Wireless Station — The Refuge That Was an Interrogation Centre

A Touch of Green uses this place for the shelter where the characters land after fleeing the mainland — a hall full of strung-up laundry and mosquito nets, everyone's life in a bundle. What the camera does not say is that the building around them was, at that exact moment in history, a secret naval interrogation centre for people who had made the same crossing.

The site began as engineering, not repression. In 1917 the Imperial Japanese Navy started building three great long-wave wireless stations — Funabashi outside Tokyo, Hario at Sasebo, and this one at Fengshan, finished in 1919. They were the most advanced communications technology on earth at the time, and their placement maps Japan's Pacific strategy: put together, they tell you what Kaohsiung was worth strategically a century ago. Two of the three survive. Hario is protected in Japan; this is a national monument in Taiwan.

After 1945 the site was carved into three. The northern dormitories became a dependants' village. The southern end went to a navy signals unit. The core became the Fengshan Guest House, which handled no guests: it was where the navy's Taiwan Work Team interrogated and held military political prisoners. Detainees were called guests in the paperwork. Accommodation was graded, and the worst grade was the cave — the interior of the enormous concrete bunker still standing on the site. A naval captain's defection to the mainland in February 1949 triggered a purge that filled these rooms.

In 1962 it became a navy discipline centre, and in the mid-1970s the Minde Training Class, which is the name most Taiwanese still use. It handled soldiers described in the official phrasing as never committing a big offence and never stopping the small ones. The military finally left in January 2006.

Check before you go. Kaohsiung's tourism service and the city film commission both currently list the site as closed for restoration works. When open it has been free, roughly nine to five, closed Mondays, about ten minutes on foot from Fengshan Junior High School MRT station, run by a local dependants' village heritage association.

What survives is the circle of concrete antenna mounts, the air-raid shelters, the red brick and black tile, and the bunker. If you get in, go to the bunker last. Everything the drama is about — arriving with nothing, being at the mercy of an institution — was administered from inside it, to people who had arrived on the same boats.

Cover photo: Zu3612403, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.