White Terror — Walking Through Hell (2): Injustice Site, Investigation Bureau Headquarters

This tour covered three locations: the Dalongdong Detention Room, the Investigation Bureau Headquarters, and the Ankang Reception Room.

Investigation Bureau Headquarters

Another vanished injustice site. It stood at No. 77, Section 1, Huanhe South Road in Wanhua District — today replaced by a hotel. Before modernization, this location would have been a first-row riverfront property.

During the Japanese colonial period, the building was a modernist private villa notable enough to appear in an architecture magazine — which is actually how researchers were able to reconstruct what it looked like. The house was built in 1933 and belonged to a Japanese resident named Takahashi Inosuke. You can view the original architectural photos on the Injustice Sites website; this article even has the original floor plans.

After 1949, agents took possession of the building. The exact process puzzles researchers — it doesn’t appear to have followed standard requisition procedures — but the building became the headquarters of the Ministry of Interior’s Investigation Bureau. While it was not the primary detention facility, some survivors mention being brought here for special interrogation. One of them, Lu Tongxin (an NTU Forestry alumnus), described it:

After I was arrested in my dormitory, I was taken to the Investigation Bureau at No. 77 Huanhe North Road for a prolonged interrogation focused on my relationship with Yu Kai. Then they transferred me to a makeshift detention house in Dalongdong — a civilian residence, three rooms holding more than a dozen people.

In 1962, the property changed hands. The original building was demolished in 1970 and replaced with a twelve-story hotel. The address didn’t change — but this is precisely what makes injustice site research so difficult: how do you make a vanished place visible again? An interpretive sign on the existing building’s façade could inform passers-by; but securing that kind of action isn’t simple. Anyone currently associated with a property doesn’t generally want visitors thinking about the tragedies that happened there. If we don’t preserve through physical markers, what’s left?

The other two stops: Walking Through Hell (1): Dalongdong Detention Room Walking Through Hell (3): Ankang Reception Room

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