Zhongxing New Village

A planned garden city on the northern edge of Nantou City, developed from 1955 to move the Taiwan Provincial Government out of Taipei under an air raid dispersal plan prompted by cross-strait tensions, and inaugurated in 1957. Modelled loosely on the British new town and neighborhood unit planning traditions by way of the Welwyn Garden City template, with curving streets, pedestrian greenways, and a strict separation of residential and civic zones, it was the second post-war new town built in Taiwan after Guangfu New Village in Wufeng. The village housed successive provincial administrations until the office was functionally suspended in 1998. Much of the village suffered extensive damage during the 921 Earthquake. After cleanup and restoration the entire site was registered as a cultural landscape in 2011.

The designation centers on one monument, the Provincial Government building, surrounded by eleven historic buildings. Most of the surviving departmental offices line Shengfu Road as quasi-International Style blocks by architect Yu Yuezhen (虞曰鎮): the departments of Personnel, Reconstruction, Communications, and Agriculture and Forestry, together with the Soil and Water Conservation Bureau. Additional historic buildings include the Provincial Government Archives with its Lotus Garden guesthouse, the civic Zhongxing Hall, the Xinsheng Daily Office, a Bank of Taiwan branch, the Telecommunications Bureau, and the Provincial Training Corps Zhongzheng Hall. Beyond the administrative core lie the Hushan Air Raid Shelter, dug into the hills for civil defense; the abandoned Chunghsing Gymnasium; and the province-built Wanling Temple, which enshrines the unclaimed dead unearthed when the site was cleared.