A Touch of Green | Houli Horse Ranch — Two Memorial Stones, Two Flags

Two memorial stones stand on this ground. One is for a Japanese riding instructor named Sasaki who died in service before the war. The other is for a Republic of China sergeant, Tsou Kuang-jung, who died in service in 1959. Same profession, same ground, two flags, thirty years apart.

A Touch of Green filmed at Houli, and the Taichung city government named it among the drama's locations when the series swept the Golden Bells in 2016. The fit is exact, because this is a military establishment that changed hands the way the drama's characters did.

The Taichung Prefecture stud farm was founded here in 1937 under the colonial administration's second horse policy plan — Japan needed cavalry and transport animals, and Taiwan was to breed them. The office building and the first and second stables date from the founding years, designed by the prefecture's own public works section in a deliberately hybrid manner, Western structure with Japanese detailing. The stables are the interesting part: cross-shaped internal circulation, queen-post trusses carrying a raised central monitor for ventilation, a mezzanine, twenty-eight stalls each, built for a subtropical climate and for earthquakes.

After the war the farmers' association ran it briefly, then in 1952 the military took it as the Combined Logistics Command stud farm, breeding horses for the army and training the cavalry. It went to the county in 1997 and turned to tourism. Of the nine ranches the Japanese built across Taiwan, this is the only one left.

Eleven hectares, open daily except the arena's midweek closure, with horse feeding, riding, a circus show and old trees. The heritage buildings were restored for the 2018 World Flora Expo, which also added a full-size equestrian arena.

Find the two memorial stones before you find the horses. A Touch of Green spends thirty-one episodes on the arithmetic of men in uniform who do not come back, and the ranch worked that arithmetic out in stone twice, under two governments, without changing the wording much.

Cover photo: Pbdragonwang, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The restored ranch headquarters building.