A Touch of Green | Guangfu New Village — The Street That Outlived Its Government

Tsao Jui-yuan called Guangfu New Village a treasure of Taiwanese culture, and shot A Touch of Green here. The Taichung city government put that quote in its own press release the day the series took six Golden Bells.

The village is not a military one, which is what makes it useful. It was built in the 1950s for the staff of the Taiwan Provincial Government when the provincial administration was moved out of Taipei to central Taiwan — housing for civil servants and their families, laid out as a planned community with schools, a market, a clinic and shops inside it. Low buildings, front and back yards, wide lanes, trees grown to full size over sixty years. It is what the mid-century Taiwanese state looked like when it was housing its own.

That is exactly the texture a drama spanning 1945 to 1981 needs, and cannot build. The lane widths, the wall heights, the way a doorway meets a yard — those read wrong the moment they are constructed for a camera. Here they are simply correct, because people lived in them.

The 921 earthquake in 1999 emptied it. The provincial government had already been hollowed out, the buildings were damaged, and the village sat abandoned. Rather than clear the site, Taichung reopened it under a scheme that let makers and small businesses move in on the condition that they maintain the houses. So the village is now full of studios, craft workshops, cafés and weekend stalls, run by people young enough to be the grandchildren of the original tenants.

Open access, no gate, no ticket, any time. It sits next to the 921 Earthquake Museum, which is the other half of its story and worth the same afternoon.

Walk into one of the back lanes away from the cafés, where the houses are still shuttered. That is the register the drama was after: not ruin, and not restoration, but a street that has simply outlived the government that built it.

Cover photo: lienyuan lee, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.