Treasure Hill (Chinese: 寶藏巖; pinyin: Bǎozàng Yán; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Pó-chōng-giâm) is a formally illegal settlement in Taipei City, Taiwan. The community was founded by the Chinese Nationalist Party Kuomintang veterans in the end of 1940's and served originally as an anti aircraft position. [1]
After co-operating with NGO GAPP (Global Artivists Participation Project) [2] the Taipei City Government [3] developed the area into an example of environmentally sustainable urban community. [4] With the policy of preservation and revitalization, the old settlement unfolded a new vision of an artivist compound which would respect the existing fabric of the community while fulfilling the regeneration concept of "symbiosis" to incorporate production and ecology in communal living and ushering in the program of an international youth hostel and creative ideas of art to further cultural exchanges with broader international communities. [5]
The community has been featured in The New York Times as one of Taiwan's must-see destinations.[6]
Treasure Hill is the attic of Taipei carrying the memories, stories and traditions of the past generations. In some way it is a reflection of the Taipei mind that the industrial city is not able to reflect. For the stories to surface the industrial city must be turned over: the city must be a compost. [7]
Police closed the area in 2007 in order to guarantee safety for restoration work. [8] The restored Treasure Hill reopened as an artist village in 2010 with only 22 original families managing to move back to the settlement.[9] The restoration process has been critisized to have caused the neighbourhood to be stripped of it's prior residents and turned into a space which celebrates individual expression and artistic creativity at the expense of housing lower income families.[10]
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The Treasure Hill community is located by the Xindian River, which was an important life-line for the settlement providing drinking water, fish and gravel for construction work before the river got polluted. The community used to have extensive urban farms between the settlement and the river. "The pollution comes from the up-stream." - Missis Chen, the leader of the Treasure Hill original community. [11]
The restoration process of Treasure Hill can be viewed as an Urban Acupuncture where the energy of the settlement had been turned negative and had to be redirected positively towards construction, “like turning over the compost that has been the smelly part of the farm just to become the most fertile top soil. I was careful to manipulate these hidden energy flows and the small elements that I introduced to Treasure Hill can be compared to the needles in acupuncture.”[12]