Gold Leaf | Taiwan New Cultural Movement Memorial Museum — The Cell Where Jissang Gives Her Away

In episodes seven and eight, the fertiliser plant deal turns into a frame-up, and Jissang and KK end up behind bars. Jissang, unsure he will get out, uses the cell to hand his daughter's future to a man he barely trusts. It is the hinge of the whole series, and it was shot in a building that held real prisoners.

This is the second Taipei North Police Station, finished in April 1933. Under Japanese rule the city's three market districts — the walled city, Dadaocheng and Bangka — each had their own police headquarters. This is the only one still standing.

Inside is the last Japanese-era fan-shaped detention block in Taiwan: cells arranged so a single guard at the pivot can see into every one at once. Next to it is a low chamber usually described as a water cell. It is a hundred and twenty centimetres high, so an adult can neither stand up nor lie down, with a small hole in the ceiling above it. The museum is careful here, and so is this note: the filling theory is inference, not documentation. No records survive that say how the room was used. A cement company's name is still legible on the ceiling.

The building held vagrants, thieves, gamblers, opium users and political prisoners. Chiang Wei-shui, who led the Taiwan Cultural Association and the Taiwan People's Party, was a frequent guest of the North Police Station — but of the first one, on what is now a supermarket site, long demolished. He wrote a mocking account of his detentions as though reviewing a hotel, describing being welcomed into room number one by the men already inside.

The police moved out in 2012 and the building opened as this museum in 2018. Entry is free, Tuesday to Sunday, closed Monday, three minutes from Ningxia Night Market.

The production needed a cell that would make an unjust imprisonment feel real. They filmed inside a museum built to remember the people who were unjustly imprisoned there. Stand at the pivot of the fan and both things are visible at once.

Cover photo: 寺人孟子, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.