The Taipei County Government on Monday moved to preserve Losheng Sanatorium, the nation’s oldest facility built to treat and house sufferers of Hansen’s Disease, or leprosy.
The county government declared the site a “cultural landscape” with “historic architecture.”
In line with the proclamation, 40 buildings at the sanatorium compound in Sinjhuang (新莊) will be fully preserved, the county’s Cultural Affairs Bureau said yesterday.
The bureau said the compound, which was built in 1930 to quarantine patients with Hansen’s disease, stands witness to a period of history when the disease was thought to be highly contagious and patients were forcibly isolated from society.
The sanatorium was designed to be a self-sufficient community, with markets, food stalls, communal bath houses, canteens and temples, the bureau said.
The barbed-wire fences that locked in the compound’s residents can still be seen today, it said.
The question of whether to preserve the site arose in 2003, when part of the sanatorium was demolished to make way for the construction of an MRT maintenance depot.
Some elderly residents who had lived at the compound for most of their lives were forced to relocate.
A group of cultural and human rights activists later launched a campaign to demand that the government scrap the project.
Campaigners said the site was historic and its residents had a right to continue to live there if they so wished.
The movement prompted the government to adopt a compromise policy to preserve most of the complex while allowing the construction to continue.
Forty buildings will be fully preserved, while nine will be dismantled and reassembled at other locations.
After the completion of the construction, the sanatorium’s original gate will be reinstalled.
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