The Story of Green Island

Hello! I’m off of school Moday because Taiwan is celebrating the Moon Festival. During the Moon Festival, Taiwanese families get together, barbeque sausages and corn on the cob, and watch the moon. They exchange the traditional holiday snacks of pomelos (green fruits that kind of taste like grapefruit) and mooncakes (round cakes filled with red bean paste and egg yolk). The holiday is based upon traditional legends about a woman who lives in the moon.

Since we had a long weekend, the other Hualien English Teaching Assistants and I took a train to Taitung City on the southeast coast of Taiwan. We spent the first day exploring the city and its nature parks on bicycles, but on the second day, we took a ferry out to Green Island.

We arrived on the small island around 8:30 am. From the harbor, we booked a short snorkeling trip. The guide took us to a coral reef right offshore. We floated along for about an hour and a half, watching parrot fish and angel fish pick their way through the coral and clown fish defend their anemones.

Scooter photos by Jenna Salisbury (Insta: @jssalisbury73)

Back on shore, we rented scooters and rode all the way around the coast of the island. Our scooters climbed up and down the mountainous terrain, the road snaking around miles of uninterrupted lush green forest. We frequently stopped to observe the incredible landscapes of the coast. On the northwest point of the island, a white lighthouse guards over the sea between Green Island and Taiwan. Green Island is a volcanic island, and black igneous rock outcroppings boarder the impossibly blue water and white sand beaches. Rock outcroppings with names like “Sleeping Beauty Rock” and “Pekinese Rock” rise out of the ocean just offshore. At one point, we stopped and walked across the “Little Great Wall,” a boardwalk that cut through the green shrubbery toward pavilions that offered expansive views of the ocean. It was the most beautiful view I had ever seen.

But there’s a darkness to this island. The Taiwanese government used Green Island as a penal colony for political prisoners between the late 1940s and the late 1980s. Under martial law, the government imprisoned on the island suspected Communist sympathizers, political dissidents, and ordinary Taiwanese citizens accused of one way or another being an enemy to the state. The government condemned prisoners to isolation and reeducation through hard labor on the island, with the prisoners never knowing when or if they would ever leave. This period in Taiwanese history is known as the White Terror and only ended in the nineties with the advent of progressive democracy in Taiwan.

The experience is surreal, to arrive on the ferry with a crowd of tourists excited for a day of sightseeing, knowing that prisoners once arrived with hearts filled with dread. These prisoners looked out upon the same sprawling coastal landscapes as I did and wondered if they would ever see their homes and families again. Locals refer to one of the natural rock formations tourists merrily take pictures as the “Gate of Hell,” because prisoners would pass through it on the way to the prison complex, not knowing if on the other end they would live or die.

The concrete prison complex still rises out of the wild overgrown green forest, serving as a memorial to all those who suffered there. One can now walk through the tiny cells of plaster walls and wooden floors where men and women spent years and even decades awaiting their fate.

It’s difficult to comprehend how a tiny island can represent both beauty and brutality, wonder and oppression, paradise and suffering. Green Island shows how much Taiwan has transformed in the last 30 years. It’s important to enjoy the natural beauty of Taiwan while also remembering the complicated and difficult context of the nation’s history. If you are ever in Taiwan, I would recommend you take the ferry out to Green Island to see both the landscapes of Taiwan’s present and the memorials to Taiwan’s past.