Jingmei White Terror Memorial Park

April 23, 2020April 23, 2020 Taipei Expat

Safety tips for COVID-19: This museum has both indoor and outdoor sections, so we recommend you wear a mask. You may also want to bring a disinfecting wipe to ensure that the hand-held audio device is germ-free. The museum conducts temperature checks before admittance and there are several bathrooms where you can wash your hands. In our experience, it wasn't very crowded even on a weekend, so it's quite easy to keep a healthy distance from other people.

Of all the wonderful museums in Taipei, none have impressed and shocked us as much as the Jingmei White Terror Memorial Park in Xindian. Part of the National Human Rights Museum, this free museum is located on the former site of the Jingmei Military Law Detention Center of the Taiwan Garrison Command, a prison where political prisoners were held, tried, sentenced, and imprisoned en masse during the White Terror Period. It is the sister museum of the Green Island White Terror Memorial Park, an equally impressive and disturbing ex-prison that is also managed by the National Human Rights Museum. The Jingmei White Terror Memorial Park doesn’t make for a lighthearted visit but is one of those must-see sites in Taipei that is worth the feeling of deep despair and sadness as you learn of the horrific atrocities that were committed against the Taiwanese people for almost four decades.

Visiting the Jingmei White Terror Memorial Park may seem overwhelming, but it’s surprisingly accessible in a number of ways. Firstly, it’s not that hard to get to: there are buses from Taipei that will take you within a few minutes walk of the museum, or you can take the MRT to Dapinglin Station on the green line and walk for around 15 minutes. The imposing gates of the museum are hard to miss, so you’ll know when you’ve reached your destination.

The museum is also incredibly accessible to those who speak languages other than Chinese. Audioguides are available in English, Mandarin, Japanese, Taiwanese, English, Hakka, Korean, Indonesian, Vietnamese and Thai. These are free to use and hold a massive amount of information — listening to the whole thing while wondering around easily took us over an hour and a half. These guides are an absolute must for visitors, as there are places inside where the information is in Chinese only. To get one, we left our names, phone numbers, and a piece of I.D. (passports and ARCs were both fine) at the tourist service centre, which was the first building as we entered the museum. The kind man at the reception desk set them up for us to use in English, and they were surprisingly easy to use. We were given a map before we started, which we could use to track our route through the park. Each building was assigned a number, which we would then key into the guide so that we could listen to an in-depth history of the building or room.

We started off in the courthouse, where we learned how totally unjust the legal system was during the white terror period. People would disappear from their lives with no explanation and held for an indefinite period of time, during which loved ones had no way to ascertain their whereabouts. The party line at this time was “better to wrongly arrest a hundred innocent people than let one guilty person go,” and it was with this attitude that detainees were arrested, held, and tried in court. Sentencing was brutal, so bad that receiving a life sentence was something to be congratulated for because it meant you had escaped execution. Listening to this while standing in the very room where hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people saw their futures disappear with a guilty verdict was heartbreaking.

The museum did a great job of educating us on the white terror period and the history of the detention centre. The displays were extremely comprehensive and informative, although many were in Chinese only, making us even more grateful for the audioguides. One of the displays included models of other prisons around Taiwan, including the infamous prison on Green Island. We were fascinated to learn about living conditions for inmates, who had to deal with extreme overcrowding, torture, neglect, and malnourishment. Surprisingly, the Jingmei Military Detention Centre was nowhere near as bad as some of the others as it was founded later in the white terror period, which wasn’t quite as brutal as the first few decades.

Possibly the most interesting section of the museum lay in the Ren’ai Building, which was the building that the prison itself was in. This was huge and incredibly well restored, with comprehensive displays recreating life in each particular area. There were several sections to visit, like the detention zone, which included the guard station, attorney interview room, infirmary, shop, and visiting room, or the area for inmates with outdoor assignments, which included the mess hall, sewing factory, boiler room, restored library and laundry factory. Each room had its own entry in the audioguide, which went into more detail than we expected and often left us feeling sad and horrified.

The museum really has done an incredible job of painstakingly restoring the detention centre so that it closely resembles its past self — they even have some original tools and pieces of furniture, which they have carefully labelled. Walking through the cells and listening to the stories of the inmates, it was easy to put ourselves in the shoes of those who suffered or perished here so unjustly.

The last stop at the Jingmei White Terror Memorial Park was the human rights memorial, a beautiful piece of architecture that served as a sobering reminder of the human cost of the White Terror period. The high walls symbolize confinement, and it certainly evoked a feeling of powerlessness and claustrophobia as we walked through, sadly reading the names of the victims etched in the stone.

The purpose National Human Rights Museum is to shine a light on one of the darkest periods in Taiwanese history, acknowledging the past and trying to educate the current generation on the human rights abuses committed during the White Terror Period. Listening to this history –corroborated where possible by survivor’s testimonies — while walking through the very place where these atrocities were committed was harrowing at best, and made for an extremely uncomfortable but informative experience. This museum isn’t for the faint-hearted, but we would argue that it’s a necessary visit for anyone visiting or living in Taiwan so that they can truly understand how the democracy and freedom of speech Taiwan enjoys today came to be.