Green Island

Green Island is the eroded remains of an andesite volcano, lifted and fringed with coral. Amis people from the Taitung coast are recorded as its earliest inhabitants, and Austronesian communities on the mainland and on Orchid Island knew and used it. Han fishermen and farmers settled from the nineteenth century — a British survey ship found about a hundred and fifty Chinese residents in 1845 — and the island was then called Huoshaodao, Burnt Island, a name usually explained by the fires lit to guide boats home or by the look of the hills at sunset.

Life was hard and isolated: thin soil, a difficult anchorage and a crossing that could be shut for weeks. Under Japanese rule the island was administered from Taitung, the lighthouse was built in 1939 after the American liner President Hoover struck the reef in 1937, and islanders continued to fish and to raise a little livestock. The name was changed to Lüdao, Green Island, in 1949.

From 1951 the island became a place of imprisonment. A prison camp built that year held thousands of political prisoners during the White Terror, the decades of martial law under which dissidents, suspected communists and intellectuals were detained; a later compound, known as the Oasis Villa, held prisoners including the writer Bo Yang and figures from the democracy movement. Martial law was lifted in 1987, the site opened as a human rights park in 2001, and in 2018 it was renamed the Green Island White Terror Memorial Park under the National Human Rights Museum. Tourism, diving and the hot spring have since become the island's economy.

The island's culture is that of a small Hokkien-speaking fishing community, closely related to the settlements of south-western Taiwan its founders came from. Temples to Mazu and to the Earth God anchor the villages, family names repeat through the population, and almost everyone is connected to the sea by work or by kin. Deer farming, introduced in the twentieth century, left herds of sika deer that are now a familiar sight on the grassland in the south-east.

The prison history sits alongside this and is not treated lightly. For many Taiwanese families the memorial park is where a relative was held, and the site is visited as much for remembrance as for sightseeing; former prisoners return, and oral-history and art projects continue there. The island's role in the national memory is disproportionate to its size, and residents are used to visitors arriving for two different reasons on the same boat.

Day-to-day manners are Taiwanese and informal. People are direct and used to strangers, guesthouse owners double as guides and scooter agents, and the whole island knows who came in on which ferry. Conservation rules are taken seriously, because the reef is both the attraction and the livelihood: taking coral or shells, feeding fish and anchoring on reef are all discouraged or prohibited. Night-time noise in the villages is a recurring local complaint about summer crowds.

About 3,000 people are registered as living on Green Island, spread between Nanliao, Zhongliao and Gongguan, though the number actually present varies with the season and with how many have moved to Taitung or Taipei for work. In July and August visitors can outnumber residents several times over; in winter the island empties and many businesses close.

Tourism is now the main employer — guesthouses, dive shops, scooter hire, boats and restaurants — with fishing, some farming and deer rearing alongside it, and public sector jobs at the township office, the school, the clinic and the prison facilities that remain on the island. Almost all food, fuel and building material arrives by ferry, which is why prices are higher than on the mainland and why a week of bad weather is felt immediately.

The rhythm follows the boats and the wind. Mornings begin early with dive groups and fishing, afternoons are hot and slow, and evenings gather at the harbour and in the hot-spring pools, which are at their best before dawn. Water supply, waste disposal and the pressure of summer visitors on a fragile reef are the standing local issues, along with the reliability of transport to Taitung for medical care, schooling and supplies.

Eating on Green Island means seafood first. Restaurants around the harbour work with what comes in that day: reef and deep-water fish steamed or fried, squid, shellfish, sea urchin in season, and flying fish, which run in the spring and are dried on racks as they are throughout these waters. Sashimi is usual, and simple preparations — steamed fish with ginger and spring onion, fried squid, seafood noodles — are the norm rather than elaborate cooking.

The island's own products are few but distinctive. Seaweed gathered from the rocks appears in soups, omelettes and crackers; sea salt is used in snacks and, in a recent local speciality, in ice cream. Sika deer farmed on the island put venison on some menus, a rarity in Taiwan. Peanut and sesame sweets, dried fish and seaweed crackers fill the souvenir shops in Nanliao.

Everything else is Taiwanese and imported. Breakfast shops sell egg pancakes, soy milk and rice rolls; the village has beef noodle and braised pork rice counters, barbecue stalls that open in the evening and a handful of cafés serving iced coffee and fruit drinks to divers coming out of the water. Ingredients arrive by ferry, so menus shrink when the sea is rough, and many guesthouses cook for their guests as a matter of course.