Taipei’s Losheng Sanatorium to be Renovated

More good preservation news from Taiwan (which comes in almost inverse proportion to preservation news from mainland China!!) – Taipei’s Losheng Sanatorium is to be renovated. The 1930s building was constructed as a leper colony originally under the Japanese colonial administration. It was a site of compulsory quarantine but quite pleasant it seems (though reportedly overcrowded). After the Japanese left the KMT kept it in operation as a sanatorium. Despite a cure for leprosy being introduced in Taiwan in 1954 many inmates could not easily readjust to normal life, were simply too scarred or had been isolated too long and so remained at the site. Since 1994 the Taipei MRT has been trying to bulldoze the buildings for a storage shed. However Taiwan’s Cultural Affairs Department has now announced that it will restore the site. There’s more here on the long-running preservation campaign.

The entrance…

the former sanatorium shop

patient huts

view across the sanatorium