Gold Leaf | Yin Hai-kuang's House — KK's Quiet Room in Taipei

KK lodges here. Liu Kun-kai — the American-trained engineer, former prisoner of war, special assistant at White Engineering — needs one room in Taipei that is not a ministry office or a tea warehouse, and Gold Leaf gives him this house at the dead end of an alley off Wenzhou Street. It is where his politics start to cost him something.

The production did not choose it at random. This was the home of Yin Hai-kuang, the philosopher who lost his university post and his access to print for writing what he wrote, and who kept writing here anyway until he died in 1969. The Taipei Cultural Affairs Bureau records the traffic on this lane plainly: students came to talk philosophy, and military police came to watch. That is the same era, the same fear, and very nearly the same character.

The house is small — a single-storey Japanese timber building from 1945 on a triangular plot, in the old National Taiwan University staff housing cluster, reached through deep tree shade. The garden is Yin's own work with a shovel. He cut a channel and named it the Foolish Old Man's River, ending it in a lily pond. He piled the spoil into a mound he named Lone Phoenix Hill and put a table and chairs on top under a pine. He planted azalea, pomegranate, bougainvillea. The osmanthus outside the study is still there.

Entry is free but the hours are narrow and shifting, and you should telephone before you come. Groups need a week's notice.

Climb Lone Phoenix Hill. It takes four steps. A man under house arrest in his own life built himself a hill so he would have somewhere to go, and the whole of it fits in a suburban back garden.

Location data: Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs. Taipei municipal historic monument, designated 2003.