Lights sparkle on Taipei's Treasure Hill, located in the foothills in the city's Kungkuan district. (Chuang Kung-ju)

Treasure Hill is a maze of mottled old illegal struc-tures packed together on the slopes of a hill in Taipei's Kungkuan district. In highly developed urban Taipei, the village is an anachronism, a fossilized relic of the city's past.

In Taipei, "illegal structure" used to be synonymous with "dirty" and "backward." Historical Treasure Hill, however, appears to have escaped that fate. In the wake of the last few years' debate over whether to tear it down, the community has been featured in The New York Times as one of Taiwan's must-see destinations and visited by a crew from Lonely Planet Television. Suddenly, this long-forgotten community has become the focus of a great deal of positive attention.

Most importantly, the community is to be preserved at its present location, its "disadvantaged residences" developed and integrated into an "arts village." These plans have granted Treasure Hill a new lease on life, and mark the start of a new chapter in Taipei's city planning.

Most of Taipei's residents have never heard of Treasure Hill. Without property rights and without urban planning disadvantaged groups have, over the last 50 years, built and shaped this place into a community through their own efforts.

Some of those who do know it refer to it as "Little Chiufen" because its low houses and winding streets recall those of the better-known tourist destination. Its demographics have led others to call it "Taiwan's Rennie's Mill." Like the Hong Kong enclave where many KMT soldiers settled following the Nationalist government's relocation to Taiwan, the bulk of Treasure Hill's residents are single, elderly veterans.

Treasure Hill's four hectares rise to a height of about 80 meters above the banks of the Hsintien River. Its approximately 150 residents live in about 70 of the 100-odd structures on the hill. These residents include old soldiers from the mainland, their foreign brides, emigres from central and southern Taiwan, and students leasing flats. Each group tends to occupy its own corner of the hill, and, because their backgrounds are so different and their struggles to make ends meet so time-consuming, they rarely interact.