Black & White | Dome of Light, Formosa Boulevard — Harbour City's First Handover

Black & White renamed Kaohsiung. In the series the city is Harbour City, a place with its own police districts and its own corruption, and the first episode's handover is staged under the coloured glass at Formosa Boulevard. Take the escalator down and look up. The Dome of Light is thirty metres across and about six hundred and sixty square metres of glass — some four and a half thousand panels, designed by the Italian artist Narcissus Quagliata and made in Germany over years. It reads as four movements around the circle: water and birth, earth and growth, light and glory, fire and destruction. Free, open from six in the morning until midnight, and you do not need a ticket or even to enter the paid area to stand under it. The station is worth knowing about for a reason that has nothing to do with television. It sits at the junction the drama's own politics gesture at. In December 1979 a human rights rally organised around Formosa Magazine ended in mass arrests here, and the trials that followed put much of Taiwan's future democratic leadership in prison. The station was named for it. So the glass is not decoration dropped into a transit hub — it is a memorial that people walk through on the way to the night market, and Kaohsiung chose beauty rather than solemnity as the way to mark the spot. That is the tension worth carrying up the escalator. A show about a city where power is bought and covered up, filmed inside a monument to people who were jailed for saying so. A note on sourcing: the scene attribution for this location comes from fan-compiled location guides, not from the production or the city. The station itself is unmistakable and unchanged; the specific episode claim is worth treating as reported rather than confirmed. Cover photo: Dosibot, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.