What It Is

彩虹眷村 (Rainbow Village) is what remains of a military dependents' village (眷村) in Nantun District — a postwar housing compound built for Nationalist military families who arrived from mainland China after 1949. By the 2000s, most residents had relocated and the compound was scheduled for demolition to make way for apartment development. Huang Yung-Fu (黃永阜), a military veteran who was born in 1924 and had lived in the village for decades, began painting the walls of the remaining buildings in 2008 — first his own home, then the surrounding structures, then the ground, then the entire compound — in order to draw attention and prevent erasure.

Huang painted using house paint and brushes, without formal art training, covering walls, floors, rooftops, and lanes with human figures, animals, traditional patterns, and abstract forms in primary colours against white backgrounds. When students from a nearby university publicized his work online in 2010, the response was sufficient to halt demolition. Taichung City Government designated the site for cultural preservation. The village that had housed hundreds of families was reduced to a handful of buildings, which now stand painted top to bottom in a cleared lot — surrounded by apartment towers that replaced everything else.

Where

Address: No. 56, Lane 11, Chun'an Road (春安路56巷11弄), Nantun District, Taichung
From city centre (Miyahara / 中山路): 15-minute taxi ride south (~NTD$150–180); no convenient direct bus from the Central District.
From National Taichung Theater: 10-minute taxi ride southeast (~NTD$100–130).
Parking: Small car park adjacent; accessible by scooter/car.

Hours

Always open — outdoor site, no gate. Huang Yung-Fu has continued to add to the paintings and, as of 2025, remained resident on-site, often visible in the mornings. No admission fee. A small souvenir stall operated by the site sells prints and postcards.

How Long to Allow

The paintable surface area is limited to the surviving buildings — the site takes 20–30 minutes to walk through thoroughly. The draw is the specificity of the paintings at close range: individual figures, faces, and animals at ground level and up the walls. Early morning gives better light for photography; midday is harsh with the white-painted ground reflecting heat. The correct allocation is 30 minutes: long enough to cover the site, short enough that the visit doesn't compete with other afternoon stops.

Context: The 眷村 System

Military dependents' villages (眷村) were a distinct social institution in postwar Taiwan — insular, Mandarin-speaking communities within a Hokkien-speaking society, with their own dialects, foods, and internal culture. By the 2000s, government urban renewal programmes had demolished most 眷村 islandwide. The Rainbow Village is one of a small number of surviving examples; its survival is entirely due to Huang Yung-Fu's intervention. This context — the preservation of a social and architectural form through an individual act of aesthetic resistance — is the reason the village appears on syllabi in architecture schools internationally, beyond the visual appeal of the paintings themselves.

Visitor note: 彩虹眷村 is on every Taichung tour bus route and is heavily photographed. The site is small; on weekend afternoons it can be crowded. Visiting on a weekday morning or late afternoon reduces density.