White Terror — Walking Through Hell (1): Injustice Site, Dalongdong Detention Room

Every time I’ve visited a site of historical injustice, it’s been a sunny day. Once it was Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin. Other times it was the Jingmei Human Rights Memorial Park in Xindian — for an escape room, or a lecture. Each time, the sky was impossibly blue, and that beauty made the contrast with what those places once carried all the more stark.

The days before this trip, Facebook feeds were full of rain forecasts. Luckily, the day we went out was clear sky and white clouds. This time, we joined a guided field tour organized by the Transitional Justice Commission — tracing the injustice sites connected to the Investigation Bureau.

What Is an “Injustice Site”?

The term 文化資產 (cultural heritage) is familiar to most people, but 不義遺址 (injustice site) is less so. An injustice site is always a place — but one with historical weight. When a space was once “the physical site where the state systematically violated human rights through improper means and institutions”, it becomes an injustice site.

Thanks to recent transitional justice efforts, researchers have identified many of these places. There’s now a Injustice Sites Database worth exploring. Depending on their current state, injustice sites fall into three types:

1. Completely gone: The old Higashi Honganji temple became a detention facility after 1945; the current Sheraton Taipei Hotel on Qingdao East Road was once the Ministry of National Defense military court detention center. Both buildings have been demolished and repurposed. The only way to preserve the history is through interpretive signs and written records.
2. Space survives, partially altered: Machangding, a popular park, was once a major execution ground for political prisoners. Interpretive signage is again the main tool.
3. Fully intact: The Jingmei Human Rights Memorial Park (formerly the Taiwan Garrison Command military detention center) and the Green Island Human Rights Memorial Park (formerly the Taiwan Province Security Command New Life Retraining Center) have been preserved on-site — giving people the chance to experience something of what those times felt like.

It was through this kind of engagement that I started realizing how many ordinary places I’d walked past were once injustice sites. Opening up those histories makes you acutely aware of how fortunate the present is.

Field Tour: Investigation Bureau Route

In recent years, both the Transitional Justice Commission (TJC) and the National Human Rights Museum have organized events and tours, including these field trips — which typically sell out immediately. This kind of travel can be called Dark Tourism: visiting places associated with tragedy and suffering. When thoughtfully designed, these trips offer a different kind of understanding from ordinary tourism.

The event I joined was the 2020 “Walking Through Hell”: Injustice Site Guided Field Tour. It ran three routes — Taiwan Garrison Command, Bureau of Secrecy, and Investigation Bureau — and I took the last. One thing I particularly appreciated: participants weren’t just invited to show up on the day. We were required to attend a pre-tour lecture first, to build the historical context before arriving. This also prevents people from approaching these sites with the wrong mindset.

The pre-tour lecture was excellent — a presentation by Lin Kuo-ming and Wang Hung-lun on political surveillance of university students in the 1980s. I’ll write up my thoughts on that separately.

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

Dalongdong Detention Room

The first stop — and already a completely vanished site. The Investigation Bureau has historically been reluctant to make its past injustices public (let alone acknowledge them), and since the original building no longer exists, researchers could only reconstruct the location through fragmentary records and survivor accounts.

The word 留質 was only confirmed through investigation — 質 here refers to “hostage.” This detention space was used to hold prisoners, operating from around 1950 to 1958. According to records, when the Investigation Bureau first relocated to Taiwan, they urgently needed both offices and detention rooms — which tells us how central this function was to their operations. Given the urgency, they requisitioned residential buildings near Baoan Temple in Dalongdong as an improvised detention space.

The detention room was the most important stage in the processing of political prisoners. Interrogations — and torture — happened here. Prisoners had no contact with the outside world.

Despite being located inside a residential neighborhood, nothing from the outside suggested it was a prison. One survivor recalled being able to hear women chatting while doing their shopping, the distant sounds of gezaixi opera from the temple, and seeing chimneys in the distance — placing the location near Baoan Temple.

According to the Injustice Sites database, survivor Guo Zhenkun described it:

I was held in an old house in Dalongdong near Baoan Temple — from the outside it looked like an ordinary residence, nothing like a prison. It was the Investigation Bureau’s torture house… mainly sleep deprivation. Keep a person awake for a week and they can’t take it anymore.

The site was later relocated when Kulun Street was developed. In July 1958 it moved to the “First Detention Room” on Wuxing Street in Taipei (later renamed the Sanzhang Li Reception House). In January 1974, it moved again to the Ankang district of Xindian — the Ankang Reception Room, the most important stop on this tour.

The other two stops: Walking Through Hell (2): Investigation Bureau Headquarters Walking Through Hell (3): Ankang Reception Room

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