Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park
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A site in the south of Taipei that during the “White Terror” (see under History of Taiwan) was used as a court complex and a detention centre for political prisoners. It closed in 1991. Today the former courtrooms, barracks, cell tracts, labourer workshops, etc. serve as a museum. In fact, together with the equivalent complex on Green Island, this site is the premier dark-tourism site related to Taiwan’s history of the “White Terror” and hence a must-see place in Tapei!
>Combinations with other dark destinations
More background info: for general background see the separate chapter History of Taiwan.
This site was one of the key places of the “White Terror”, the repression of political opponents and their incarceration in special detention centres, and some victims were even executed. These were the darkest chapters of the authoritarian rule under dictator Chiang Kai-shek.
The Jing-Mei (also spelled Jingmei) Detention Center started operating in 1968 at a site that was already the home of the Taiwan Garrison Command, which was basically Taiwan’s secret police and security agency (cf. Gestapo, KGB, and others). This also included the Military Justice Academy Campus. Indeed political prisoners were tried here, either at the military court or in what was called the First Court and the Second Court.
The large block of cell tracts and workshops for “day labouring inmates” is the so-called Ren-ai Building. Here political prisoners were incarcerated either in communal cells or in isolation cells. The “day labouring inmates” generally had to work in the block’s “laundry factory”, including the ironing workshops, while other prisoners produced handicrafts or worked in a sewing factory that mainly made uniforms.
Amongst the inmates held at Jing-Mei Detention Center were many prominent dissidents, whose names may not mean much to Western visitors, but are well known domestically. These include Annette Lu Hsiu-lien, who was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment following the Kaohsiung Incident (see below) in 1979, but was released in 1985 – she later served as Taiwan’s vice president from 2000 to 2008.
Another prominent former inmate was Shih Ming-teh (aka “Nori Shih), sometimes referred to as “Taiwan’s Mandela”. He spent a total of 25 years in political imprisonment, 13 years of that in solitary confinement. He was first arrested in 1962, tried and imprisoned in 1964. After his release in 1977 Shih went straight back to dissident activism, joining the Tangwai unofficial opposition organization. He was arrested again after the Kaohsiung Incident of 1979, in which he had played a leading role, and was finally released in 1990, as Taiwan slowly embarked on its road to democracy. He died in January 2024.
The 1980 trial following the so-called Kaohsiung Incident (see history) marked a turning point. Prior to this, all political court trials were held behind closed doors, but this time TV cameras and foreign media were allowed and the accused were able to give elaborate speeches, which further bolstered their status. This trial was held at the First Court at Jing-Mei (see below).
The detention centre was closed in 1991 and the Taiwan Garrison Command was disbanded in 1992. For a while the complex was turned into the Coast Patrol Command of the Military Region Detention Center (so the leaflet claimed that I picked up at the site), but in 2006 was given over to human rights education, initially under the Cultural Construction Committee. A Preparatory Office for the development of a human rights museum started in 2011.
In 2018 the National Human Rights Museum was established, which also runs the Green Island ex-prison sites. The site in Taipei was officially renamed “Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park”. It comprises the preserved former courtrooms, military barracks turned into exhibition spaces and, in particular, the former detention centre itself in the Ren-ai Building.
What there is to see: quite a lot – and much of it is quite dark in atmosphere.
On arrival it make sense to first head to the reception centre. This is located to the right of the main gate and car park. If you’re using the side entrance, first walk past the entrance to the Ren-ai Building and turn right past the auditorium building and administrative centre to get to the reception building. Inside you can pick up leaflets and a map of the site and, if you’re so inclined, an audio guide. I decided not to use an audio guide, because I find them awkward and they hinder photography and also because I reckoned there would be enough English in the written form. That was indeed the case. Since I didn’t actually use one, I cannot say anything about the audio guides and what sort of added value they may provide. Given the total running time they may well be useful for those with a seriously deep interest in the subject matter of the “White Terror” (see history).
Diagonally across the square from the reception building is a single-storey building that used to be the Military Court. Here you find preserved and/or reconstructed tribunal rooms. Text panels provide information in Chinese and English, with the English translations mostly OK, despite some little glitches and stylistic clumsiness here and there. It’s clear that refined and polished translations were not a priority … This tallies with what I heard from a fellow writer and tour guide I met in Taichung who has lived in Taiwan for decades and has been involved in clearing up translations from time to time. Apparently it can be a bit frustrating. On the other hand, I guess museums such as Jing-Mei are primarily aimed at domestic visitors, and the creators of these museums mainly want to tell their story to them.
The First Court building is directly adjacent to the reception building and contains a large courtroom reconstructed to look like it did during the trials following the Kaohsiung Incident (see above and history). There is also a scale model of the courtroom peopled by dummy judges, defendants, lawyers, journalists, etc. – you can tell that a lot of importance is attached to this particular trial.
Back outside and moving on further west you come to the central large Human Rights Memorial Monument. It’s a bold, almost “brutalist” concrete structure and features large panels with the names of inmates (in Chinese characters only) and the years of their imprisonment. It also includes a water feature (make sure to have insect repellent on you or use the bottle of insect spray available from the reception centre!) and when I visited the place there was some sort of art installation involving “symbolic” doors (see photos).
Just to the west of the memorial monument is the special jail quarter for Wang Hsi-ling, which has its own separate gate. Wang was the highest-ranking officer of the Taiwanese military ever court-martialled, namely in 1985 for his (alleged) involvement in the 1984 murder of dissident journalist Chiang Nan (aka Henry Liu) on foreign soil, namely in California, USA. Wang was sentenced to life imprisonment by a military tribunal, but was released in 1991. His imprisonment was markedly different from that of “ordinary” political prisoners in the main detention centre (see below). He was held in a multi-room compound containing a comparatively comfortable bedroom, a study, a fully equipped kitchen and bathroom and apparently his family were allowed not only to visit but even stay with him. It was certainly a privileged kind of detention.
South of this special compound you can see one of the guard watchtowers of the complex, but the path south was blocked when I was there. Instead I headed to the rows of low barracks in the centre of the compound. These were used as staff quarters back in the day. Today they house a series of exhibitions.
When I visited in December 2023, only three of the six barracks had exhibitions inside them. These were thematically subdivided thus: 1.) The history of the authoritarian regime in Taiwan, 2.) Political prisoners and Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park, and 3.) Transitional justice in Taiwan.
Again there are text panels with OK-ish translations into English. Documents, drawings and photos, however, are often labelled in Chinese only. The exhibitions go into some depth about the origins and development of political repression during the “White Terror”, beginning with the end of WWII and Japanese colonial rule, the retreat of the KMT to Taiwan, the 2-28 Incident and establishment of martial law and the creation of the Taiwan Garrison Command (see above and generally under history). The nature of political repression, special trials and detention at places like Jing-Mei or Green Island are described in detail as well.
There are only few artefacts on display. One is a mock prison cell made of bamboo, and a corresponding couple of scale models with little dummy prisoners illustrating how overcrowded such detention centres often were. There’s also a scale model of the New Life Correction Center on Green Island as it would have been in the 1950s and 60s. Drawings of various methods of torture are the most gruesome element here – no English necessary …
The exhibition in the third barrack provides an overview of how Taiwan embarked on a path towards democracy and the role of dissidents and the newly founded DPP in this, with the first free presidential elections in the 1990s a key turning point. While these exhibitions provide lots of information, they are a bit on the dull side and I found myself skim-reading a lot.
In another single-storey building at the south-west corner of this part of the compound is a café, library and museum shop – but I did not go in to check it out. Nor was there any access to a section in the far westernmost corner of the complex labelled “Detention Unit of Military Intelligence Bureau”, which was cordoned off.
Instead, I proceeded to the nearby boiler room attached to the western end of the Ren-ai Building. From here you can also get a first glimpse of the laundry workshop inside the latter.
But to enter the Ren-ai Building properly you have to proceed to the main entrance in the centre of the front façade. This is the main Detention Center Building. It’s suitably grey and forbidding looking. The two storeys do not have any proper windows, only openings with concrete grates in them. Once inside there’s a scale model giving an overview of the layout of the building and maps provide further details of its different sections.
Proceeding in a south-easterly direction along the inside of the main courtyard the visitor’s route first comes to the guardhouse. Here new arrivals would have been checked in and fingerprinted. Adjacent is a lawyer meeting room. This is followed by a medical room, a dental surgery and a dispensary.
Adjacent is a recording room, with a few tables with old-fashioned tape reel recorders on them. Here the conversations of prisoners with visiting family members were monitored – and, if deemed inappropriate, cut off.
In the related visiting room, there are stools in front of a barred window and vintage analogue telephones placed on a counter-like board. These were for the inmates. On the other side of the barred window separating the room the corresponding seats and telephones are located that visitors used to speak to imprisoned relatives.
Also still in this wing on the ground floor is a commissary, where “day labouring inmates” could spend their meagre earnings on some essential goods such as soap, brushes, snacks, canned food, etc.; a special section was for cooked food that these day labourers were allowed to sell too.
And then it’s into the dark core of the detention centre: the cell blocks. There’s a reconstructed warder’s room and several different types of cells can be seen. Most are bare, but a couple also have basic reconstructions in them giving an impression of how dire life in this prison was (see photos). Some cells are larger and were for communal custody, but there are also solitary confinement cells and a couple of padded cells too.
The cell doors come in different forms as well, some more modern and a shiny silver chrome, older ones painted the same dreary turquoise-green that is the only colour here other than the white of the walls. The doors to some of the communal cells are very low, so inmates would have had to stoop down in order to enter them – just another element of humiliation and dehumanization … The exercise yard is also accessible. It’s not very big and in one corner stands another guard watchtower.
You then come to the “day labourer inmates” section. This was the term given to prisoners who were “allowed” to work to earn a trivially low wage, but it was probably better than just languishing in the cells. They worked long hours in the workshops by day but slept in their cells at night.
There’s a Mess Hall, where day labourers received their meals. This is lovingly reconstructed, complete with plastic models of the sort of food they were given: mostly plain rice with salt eggs, pieces of fish, pickles and some unidentifiable gruel. At the far end is a kind of stage with a microphone stand and two old-fashioned tube TVs. One showed some interview footage featuring, presumably, a former inmate.
There was supposed to be a prison library as well, but somehow I managed to miss that, likewise the art workshop and garment factory. Instead I found a temporary exhibition (about particular individual stories) – but this ended shortly after I visited the site. What’s in this space now I don’t know.
In the final wing of the Ren-ai Building are the large workshops of the laundry and associated ironing room. A clever feature in both of them are transparent panels with images of working inmates on them that, when viewed from the correct angle, give a fairly convincing impression of what these workshops would have looked like when they were in use.
There are a few more rooms associated with the laundry, including one containing a big mangle for bed sheets and another with a bizarre washing machine that looked like something out of a Terry Gilliam steampunk movie.
And that’s basically it. You exit the Ren-ai Building through the main entrance and make your way across the square with the fountain and past the auditorium room back to the main gate. Of course if you’ve used an audio guide you first have to return that to the reception centre.
All in all, I found this place one of the most worthy dark-tourism sites in the whole of Taiwan, perhaps together with Green Island and the 9-21 Earthquake Museum. All of them are must-see dark attractions for any dark-tourism-inclined visitor to this country! Within Taipei, the Jing-Mei site is most definitely the premier dark visitor attraction. Not to be missed!
Location: far in the south of Taipei, in fact already across the border in New Taipei City, in the Xindian District, on the corner of Fuxing Rd. and Zhongzheng Rd.
Google Maps locators:
Main gate: [24.98795, 121.53338]
Side entrance: [24.9867, 121.5329]
Visitor reception centre: [24.9879, 121.5327]
Military Court: [24.9878, 121.5324]
First Court: [24.9880, 121.5325]
Human Rights Memorial Monument: [24.9880, 121.5321]
Wang Hsi-ling special jail quarters: [24.9880, 121.5317]
Exhibition barracks: [24.9877, 121.5319]
Café and shop: [24.9876, 121.5316]
Entrance to Ren-ai Building: [24.98723, 121.53203]
Cell tracts: [24.9867 121.5324]
Exercise yard: [24.9868, 121.5322]
Mess hall: [24.9867, 121.5319]
Day labourers’ workshops: [24.9872, 121.5315]
Access and costs: quite far from Taipei city centre, but not too difficult to get to by public transport; free.
Details: Given the location far away from central Taipei, transport will be required for most visitors. If you have a car, you can find parking right at the site. But for most visitors public transport will be the only option. Luckily it’s not too tricky: just get on the metro’s Green Line (e.g. at Taipei Main Station) and go all the way to Dapinglin MTR station. From there you could in theory walk it – it’s less than a mile (ca. 1.2 km) but it’s not a pleasant walk along busy streets. From the metro you can also get buses, e.g. line 982 from exit 1, get out at Zhuangjing High School and find the memorial park a three-minute walk away, crossing Fuxing Rd. and then Zhongzheng Rd. heading west towards the main gate. Or go to exit 4 of Dapinglin station and walk ca. 200 yards to the bus stop for line 793 and get off at the other Zhuangjing High School stop at the side entrance to the Jing-Mei compound. You could also first walk north from the metro along Bao’an St. and catch any of the buses going west on Fuxing Rd. (e.g. line 933).
Opening times: Tuesday to Sunday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Mondays.
Admission free.
Audio guides are available from the reception centre in a range of languages, mostly Asian ones, but also including English – total running time is 95 minutes. What these are like and whether there’s a fee or deposit required I don’t know as I chose to do without an audio guide (I find they get in the way of photography and are rarely so good as to be of unmissable added value). Since most text panels and labels come with English translations, the audio guide is not essential anyway, unless you are hungry for as much detail as can be had.
The museum also offers proper tours with a live guide, twice daily at 10.30 a.m. and at 2.30 p.m., but in Mandarin Chinese only. Group tours in English are also available, but only by prior arrangement and from ten participants (see nhrm.gov.tw). The website does not specify any costs or how long such tours would last.
Time required: I spent a good two hours at this site but I only skimmed parts of the exhibitions in the barracks outside the detention centre proper. So if you are prepared to take in absolutely everything here, you could probably spend a lot longer at the site, perhaps half a day.
Combinations with other dark destinations: nothing else in the immediate vicinity, but those with a keen interest in Taiwan’s dark history could combine a visit to Jing-Mei with a trip to the National 228 Museum (get back on the metro, Green Line, and get out at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and walk west on Nanhai Rd.); in fact, in order to honour the historical chronology I visited the National 228 Museum first, as that is about the events that can be seen as the starting gun for the “White Terror”. I would suggest you do the same.
From the end of February 2025, the other museum about the same events, the 2-28 Memorial Museum, will reopen and offer yet more on this topic.
See also under Taipei in general.
Combinations with non-dark destinations: The site’s location is in a decidedly untouristy part of Taipei. Better head back into the centre by means of the Green Line metro …
