The Vanishing Taipei Boho

Taipei's ghetto version of the Floating Gardens of Babylon. A PoMo mess, like the rest of the city.

I was struggling to come up with a topic to write my second travel article on, so my very bohemian coworker suggested that I check out 寶藏巖 (or Treasure Hill), a hidden and run-down artist colony next to the 新店 River and National Taiwan University. She warned me that I wouldn't be able to write a tourist recommendation that 50-year-old CEOs can safely bring their weekend wife and kids on (I am writing for a business magazine, after all) but that sounded too awesome to pass up. I read up on the little hill-side community and found out that the village has been the locus of a heated debate on city planning and gentrification. Mayor Ma brought in bulldozers to tear the place down on several occasions since the architecture is shabby and old and mostly unauthorized by the city government. The artists, students and professors of course pelted the demolition team with whatever shit they could find. The city then cut their electricity and water, but the residents were already used to that anyway. This is terribly romantic stuff.

But the conflict brought unprecedented attention onto the once-hidden village and eventually led the travel section of New York Times to recommend it as a touristy hang out, even going so far as to recommend specific cafes. The Treasure Hive cafe eventually closed because the owner got pissed off by the tourists who came to snap photos and pester him about life in the artist colony.

The college student's blog ring about Treasure Hill hasn't seen an update since 2006, so I decided to check out the place on my own.



The trail to Treasure Hill was hidden behind a water processing plant. I wouldn't have found it without these graffiti hints. Also, note that the lower one in the above picture looks very similar to the one I snapped before. I've been seeing this artist (who goes by the name 'Reach') all around town (along with Ano and Bounce, who seem to collaborate with him a lot).

So I followed the trail of scattered graffiti and eventually found a definitive sign on a crumbling wall and next to a plastic red sculpture.



Awesomeness! I went a little further down the narrow trail and came upon a small buddhist temple bearing the same name. No one was in the temple. A little park next to it had the biggest proliferation of graffiti art that I've seen in Taipei. Some pretty cool ones:



Then I finally found the village itself (!!) and there were aluminum barricades around the entire hilly building cluster.

It was closed.

A heavily-photoshopped plaque with smiling villagers and happy children promised that the city government (on behalf of the Treasure Hill community) was eager to see me again when it re-opens in 2008. The words were progressive and confident in technology and promised a better hill under government management. It will become a designated culture district.

I was reminded of a Qing-Dynasty street that I stumbled upon on my last article assignment to Taipei's oldest district. Same green barricades, same cheery words. The Qing Dynasty storefronts were to be strategically torn down and rebuilt as a Disneyfied simulacrum of itself under the city's banner of cultural management.

Not sure what to say.

[Edit] More photos of Treasure Hill.