A Touch of Green | Xingcun, Gangshan — The Village Named After the One They Left

A Touch of Green is about air force wives, and this is where air force families actually lived. Kaohsiung's own heritage service names the drama on its page for Xingcun, and Tsao Jui-yuan shot here.

Read the name first, because the name is the whole story. Under Japanese rule this was housing for the 61st Air Arsenal — the largest aircraft manufacturing and repair works in Taiwan, employing something like ten thousand Taiwanese at its peak. After the war the Gangshan base passed to the ROC, and in 1949 the Air Force Academy and its sister schools re-established themselves here as the mainland fell. The flight instructors who arrived moved into these quarters and called them Xingcun, after the dormitory at the Central Aviation School at Jianqiao in Hangzhou. They gave their new housing the name of the housing they had lost. Note that local news reports say the name came from Chengdu; the national heritage register says Jianqiao, and the register is the better authority.

The pilots' accents were Sichuanese and Yunnanese, and when they shopped at the market next door the Gangshan locals could not follow a word. They decided the newcomers were speaking something Russian-sounding and nicknamed the whole village accordingly. That misunderstanding, from both directions at once, is the drama in miniature.

Xingcun was the smart one. A wall around it, sentries at the gate, no casual entry. A basketball court inside the entrance under a vine trellis planted by a residents' association head in the early fifties. A co-op shop, a barber, a community office, and an auditorium where at weekends there were shows and the pilots brought their wives to dance. There was a bar, and American servicemen came to it. Ordinary Gangshan people got in only if a resident brought them.

Check before you travel. The whole site closed on 1 March 2023 for a full heritage restoration funded at three hundred million NT, with completion and reopening targeted for 2026; recent visitors still report perimeter fencing and no access, and the city was still tendering site works for 2026. Treat it as opening soon rather than open.

Stand at the fence and look at the two-storey blocks with the arched verandas. Those are the rooms where the women in the drama waited to be told.

Cover photo: 嘎布, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Photographed before restoration.