Memorial Park for Women Laborers

On the morning of September 3rd, 1973, an overloaded private ferry bound from Qijin to Qianzhen capsized after a mechanical failure, drowning 25 passengers. All were young unmarried women from Zhongzhou (中洲) on their way to work in the Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone (高雄加工出口區), and several were younger than the legal working age of 16. Traditional funerary practices bar unmarried women from family graves and ancestral halls so the city government arranged a common burial known as the Tomb of the Twenty-Five Ladies (二十五淑女墓), which was later moved to this site to make way for harbour container facilities. After four years of lobbying by the Kaohsiung Association for the Promotion of Women’s Rights (高雄女性權益促進會), the city renamed it on Workers’ Memorial Day in 2008, recasting a grave long associated with ghost stories as a memorial to the labour of women in Taiwan’s economic growth.