Toad Mountain, elevation 128 meters, is located near the Gongguan area of Taipei City. A small settlement has been embedded on the slope for 60 years, home to a unique cultural mélange of old mainland veterans, migrants from rural Taiwanese communities, and renting students. However, many of the people have already been moved out, and the future of the buildings themselves is now uncertain, because they are located on land assigned to a university.
Internationally renowned director Hou Hsiao-hsien, who first became famous for movies like Dust in the Wind (1986) and City of Sadness (1989), has said that his main wish for this year is to take members of the younger generation of filmmakers to Toad Mountain, with each making a film on location there. Toad Mountain (Chanchushan in Chinese) was in fact the main shooting location for Hou’s 1987 film Daughter of the Nile.
Situated near the Gongguan shopping area of Taipei City, Toad Mountain has retained the rustic and artless nature of a hill community. Its tranquility stands in sharp contrast to the noise and frenetic activity of the shopping area next door.
However, this 60-year-old settlement now faces the possibility of being leveled, because the land it occupies has been rezoned for use by a university.
Toad Mountain still retains its natural beauty, and you can often see small animals around.
During the Qing Dynasty, you had to pass by Toad Mountain to get from the southern suburbs of Xindian and Jingmei to Taipei proper. One branch of the irrigation network that was developed early on to provide water to farms in Taipei runs right past the foot of the mountain.
During the Japanese occupation, most of the land around Gongguan (including what is now the National Taiwan University farm) was set aside as land for agricultural research, and a school of agriculture was founded next to Toad Mountain. After the Japanese left, the facilities were taken over by an ROC agricultural research station, which left behind more than ten residences for station employees and their families when the station relocated to Taichung in 1977.
When the ROC government came to Taiwan in 1949, the Air Force Combatant Command set up shop next to Toad Mountain, near where National Taiwan University of Science and Technology stands today. The Air Force put up the “Huanmin New Village,” totaling 39 households, to provide homes for personnel and their dependants, under the jurisdiction of the military. This was the embryo of today’s Toad Mountain community.
Later, friends and relatives of military families began moving in to the periphery of Huanmin New Village. Though these new houses were technically in violation of building laws, the government turned a blind eye, and an area of illegal structures grew up. The community expanded, absorbing the housing belonging to the agricultural research station, and later new migrants to Taipei from elsewhere in Taiwan also arrived. They built ever higher up the contour of the mountain, so that people have had to use stairs to get back and forth to their homes.
“This is the sole remaining mountain military dependents community in all of Taipei,” says 30-year-old Lin Dingjie, who, being a nature lover, moved into one of the illegal structures on Toad Mountain five years ago.
Stone stairs, old residences, and narrow alleys are the rectangles and lines that define the spatial layout of the Toad Mountain settlement.
The new Taipei urban plan that was announced in 2000 assigned the land on which stand Huanmin New Village, the illegal structures, and the former agricultural station housing, to National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST). However, the government said that the school had to first resettle the residents before proposing a plan to develop and use the land.
At the end of 2011, the Ministry of Defense moved the residents of Huanmin into a nearby public housing estate. This year the MOD began dismantling their empty former homes in preparation for turning their shells and the land over to NTUST.
Lin Dingjie says that after the residents of Huanmin New Village moved out, this April the contractor began removing doors, windows, and non-load-bearing walls. But Lin feels that the destruction of the now-empty old homes is unnecessary and inexplicable. “Even if the people have moved away, why tear down perfectly useable buildings?”
The entrance to Huanmin New Village at the foot of Toad Mountain is where the settlement begins, and residents used to gather there and socialize. As early as a year ago, when residents were moving out of the military families’ community, Lin’s girlfriend Feng Zhongtian, a writer by trade, made a film about three old veterans who have left Huanmin in body but not in spirit. All in their 80s, they return each and every day to Huanmin, no matter how far they have to travel or how difficult it is to get around at their age, to chat and reminisce with old friends still living in the illegal structures there.
In April, when he saw that demolition work was beginning on the military community, Lin Dingjie quickly contacted Kang Min-jay, a professor in the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at National Taiwan University, and asked him to come to the site. Kang suggested that they measure the structures and make architectural drawings of them, and the two of them formed a “club” to recruit people for this job; some participants are foreigners who have come from as far away as Hong Kong and Japan!
The members of the Toad Mountain Club feel that since the urban plan requires that the residents be resettled before development of the land can begin, and considering that the roughly 70 households in the illegal structures and in the housing that belonged to the agricultural research station have not yet been resettled, much less the additional people living even farther up the hill in a jurisdictional no-man’s-land beyond the zone of illegal structures, NTUST and the MOD have no reason to rush into tearing down Huanmin New Village.
Once Huanmin New Village is completely torn down, NTUST plans to use the land to put up a high-rise structure. Lin Dingjie is worried that even if the remaining houses up on the “pass” of the hill are not torn down, the mountain community culture that has evolved over the past six decades will disappear under the literal and figurative shadow of the stylish new high-rise.
The people have left Huanmin New Village and the houses are empty. In this photo, artists calling for preservation of Toad Mountain’s history have put canes left behind by relocated former residents on display.
Director Hou Hsiao-hsien, who filmed Daughter of the Nile on Toad Mountain 26 years ago, returned in September and called for protection of the historical value of the mountain community’s space.
Hou has already applied to the Taipei Film Commission, under the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, to make films in the area. Once he gets approval, he plans on bringing a whole group of young directors from the Golden Horse Film Academy (including filmmakers from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China) to Toad Mountain to do individual projects on location.
People who crewed on Daughter of the Nile have also returned to Toad Mountain in recent days. Long-time film worker Angelika Wang, who was assistant director on Daughter, even pulled some strings and got the Chinese Taipei Film Archive to let them show a 35-millimeter print of the film at Toad Mountain. It was screened in an open plaza at the foot of the mountain, and this was the first time most of the residents had ever seen the movie. As they watched, they continually oohed and aahed with surprise and delight, recognizing and pointing at one familiar backdrop after another.
In fact, the locale selected for filming back then is in the jurisdictional no-man’s-land, and is not incorporated into the area redrawn as NTUST land, but that makes little difference to the residents. To them Toad Mountain is an organic whole.
Kang Min-jay puts his finger on the problems that arise when a community like Toad Mountain is divided up and redistributed: “Modern urban planning relies on the drawing of mandatory boundaries, but these ignore historical attachments.” That is to say, long before part of Toad Mountain was delineated as belonging to NTUST, the whole mountain had a coherent and interconnected historical texture, yet urban planning has decreed that people living in a shared settlement will face very different fates.
But the fact remains that the plan has been drawn up “in accordance with the law,” putting a straightjacket around Toad Mountain. There is little chance at this point that Toad Mountain’s future will resemble the more hopeful model of the nearby Treasure Hill settlement.
Ironically, while the legal houses on Toad Mountain have been emptied to make way for construction of a building by National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, the illegal structures remain occupied—at least for now.
Treasure Hill, also located in the Gongguan area, looks kitty-corner across Roosevelt Road at Toad Mountain. In 2007 planning was begun to move the community toward “peaceful coexistence” among three elements: long-time residents, an artists’ village, and an international youth hostel. In 2011, it was registered as an “historic settlement” by the Taipei City government. It is considered to be a representative example of the kinds of settlement founded on the slopeland peripheries of postwar Taiwan cities by disadvantaged groups (aging veterans, migrants from rural areas, indigenous peoples) who built their homes themselves, with little regard for zoning or other legal niceties.
There is, however, an important distinction between Treasure Hill and Toad Mountain. The former belonged entirely and exclusively to Taipei City, and was zoned as municipal parkland. The latter’s situation is more complicated, because the NTUST land is only one parcel of the total.
Those who favor preservation of the Toad Mountain community argue that at the very least, with respect to Huanmin New Village, the university should move in the direction of “coexistence,” allowing the historic old houses to survive in the campus space and be put to use (perhaps as cafes, galleries, shops, etc). Hou Hsiao-hsien hopes there will be a day when he can come back here and sit in one of the old homes, with their ambience of a slower time, and sup a cup of joe as he works on a script.
Kang Min-jay suggests that the immediate priority should be to get Huanmin New Village designated as historic architecture. The structures do not meet modern building codes, so it would be easier to renovate them for re-use if they were so designated.
Meanwhile, even as its future is uncertain, Toad Mountain is drawing attention from the international cultural world. The Bi-City (Shenzhen and Hong Kong) Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture scheduled for the end of 2013 will take “urban edges” as its theme, and has listed Toad Mountain as one of four overseas satellite exhibition areas.
No plan has yet been drawn up to resettle the remaining residents of Toad Mountain. Hopefully they will be allowed to live there until one is. In the meantime, if we can just bring a little more historical and cultural imagination to bear, the future of Toad Mountain will really be something to look forward to.
In the past, many marginal people coming to Taipei built homes helter-skelter up slopeland. The last unaltered community of this kind in Taipei City is located on Toad Mountain, just next to the frenetic Gongguan shopping district.
It is heartwarming to see elderly longtime neighbors sitting and passing the time of day chatting about this and that, but their shared community is now being broken up.
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