Wang Sheng-yuan (
"The standard of living is much higher now than it was back in the early days," said Wang, 69, a native of Shantung Province.
His was just one of the 380 households in the south village that were displaced from the compound in 1998 to make room for the city's Hsinyi development scheme.
Since the evacuation of the village, media attention has focused on the future of the remaining 1.3 hectares of the Four Four South Village which may be absorbed by the adjacent Hsinyi Elementary School.
This part of the project is controversial as cultural conservationists have been fighting to turn the land into a heritage site.
After taking their case to the Commission for Examining Petitions and Appeals under the Ministry of the Interior, cultural conservationists again took aim at the central government on Thursday to try to halt the Hsinyi project.
The conservationists filed a petition with the ministry's Urban Development Committee which requested that the committee adhere to the original recommendations of the first evaluation panel.
The panel had said that the land should be made into an historic preservation area, and that special attention should be paid to the preservation of the culture of the former compound.
Chairman of the committee meeting, Lin Wei-i (
The evaluation panel's recommendation was the result of a design contest in March, 1999 by the Urban Development Bureau. The public was asked to submit concepts for the use and development of the Hsinyi area.
While the top three contest winners all favored keeping what remained of the village as a cultural site, the city subsequently decided to hand over that part of the village that had already been demolished to the nearby elementary school, thereby expanding the size of its campus to 2.8 hectares.
Cultural and historical meaning
Cultural conservationists argue that the Four Four South Village has rich cultural and historical importance which deserves preservation.
Built in 1930 during the Japanese colonial period -- near where the Taipei World Trade Center now stands -- the Four Four Arsenal, as it was then called, was surrounded by three villages to the east and west and covered an area of five hectares. The area in front of the arsenal was once used as a runway for Japanese fighter jets.
The area was later handed over to KMT forces in 1947.
A transportation railway connected the arsenal with the railroad from Taipei to Keelung. The rail track passed through the area occupied today by the Taipei City Hall, Taipei City Council and the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall.
The Four Four Cemetery was northeast of the arsenal and contained 400 graves.
The Hsinyi development scheme, however, forced all the residents to leave the Four Four South compound. The people of the east village were relocated to the vicinity of the Youth Park in the eastern part of the city, while the west villagers were moved to the neighborhood of the Taipei City Hall. The south villagers moved to a 12-story, 100-household building near the Taipei World Trade Center.
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