Walking with her Chihuahua caged in a small grocery cart yesterday afternoon, Mrs Liu slowly made her way to the compound where she lived and worked for 50 years in Taipei City's Hsinyi District.
"My heart sank when I saw it worn and torn like this," said the 86-year-old Liu, who moved out of the village about three years ago. She began making military uniforms at the compound shortly after leaving her hometown of Chingtao, China in 1948.
PHOTO: CHIANG YING-YING, TAIPEI TIMES
Liu is a member of one of the 30 families who used to live in Four Four South Village, the nation's first military residential compound. She came back to catch a glimpse of the area yesterday.
The city government plans to turn the village into a community park. Only four buildings will remain and they will be converted into a community center, a museum, a library and an education center. Over half of the village has been reduced to rubble and about 70 buildings remain.
It was the first time in two years that the public has been allowed to legally enter the grounds. Previously, people had to go through the guarded gate at Hsinyi Elementary School, which is next to the compound.
In a bid to raise awareness of the village and other historic buildings in the city, the Alliance to Preserve Four Four South Village as a National Relic (
Curtis Smith, a Canadian who lives close to the village and is a member of the alliance, said that the alliance has to come up with various activities and promote them to try to keep people interested in the issue.
"The city government is waiting for this issue to become boring. What'll happen is that they'll come in one night and knock everything down," he said. "Next time I'm planning to have a mass bicycle ride for relics."
Yesterday's event consisted of two parts: a flea market and a gathering of NGOs. While about 20 booths sold items such as hair pieces and mirrors on one end of the street, about 15 NGO booths offered information on environmental protection and cultural conservation.
Fifty leaf hats painted with green Chinese characters reading "Save Four Four South Village" were also handed out to participants.
"What we're trying to do here is to bring these NGOs together so they're not just talking to themselves but actually talking to each other, exchanging ideas and taking their ideas to the people," Smith said.
Michael Hurst, director of the Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society, said that he participated in the event because his society and the alliance share a similar agenda.
"As they have a good history of helping to preserve Taiwanese culture and old buildings, our society is also trying to preserve a part of Taiwanese history," he said.
Two of the major missions of the society is to search Japanese prisoner of war camps in Taiwan and to find survivors of the camps.
Another theme of the event, Smith said, was to show the potential of the village.
"We want to illustrate that you can build your future from history. The event is a sample model of the village in the future and we can make it even better," he said.
In addition, they wanted to underscore the fact that there is still a big discrepancy between the decision made by the city government and the alliance's request.
"Most people thought that the question was resolved when the city announced to make the compound into a park, but it was not resolved. They've completely cheated us and gone back on their word about preserving and restoring this area for cultural and historic use," he said.
The alliance has made many attempts to restore an evaluation panel's original recommendation that the village be made into a historic preservation area.
The evaluation panel's recommendation was the result of a design contest in March 1999 by the city's 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 the part of the village that had already been demolished to the nearby elementary school while turning the rest of the village into a community park.
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