Taiwan Military Villages

Military dependents’ villages (眷村) are a unique feature of the urban and rural landscapes of Taiwan. These villages were developed during the martial law era in the 1940s and 1950s to provide provisional housing for KMT soldiers and their families retreating from China and elsewhere. This theme extends to the wider world these soldiers inhabited across their lifetimes: the veterans’ homes (榮家) that cared for ageing, often unmarried men, and the remote reclamation colonies where the Veterans Affairs Commission (退輔會) resettled them to open new farmland, from the high mountains to the Huadong Valley (花東縱谷). The government has been evicting residents of these villages in recent decades but not everyone wants to leave. Nowadays many of these villages are entirely abandoned (apart from the occasional squatter or hold-out), in an advanced state of decay, or already demolished. For more information read my post about Jiahe New Village.