Explore the real-world places that appear in Green Island by Shawna Yang Ryan. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Tainan Old City Center, 228 Incident Memorial Park, Green Island Prison (Lyudao), Taipei Railway Station Area (Old), Presidential Office Building and 8 more.
Tainan — Birthplace of the narrator's father, Dr. Tsai
The narrator's father, a Taiwanese intellectual and doctor, comes from Tainan, a city with deep Taiwanese roots predating Japanese colonization. His identity as a native Taiwanese — distinct from the mainland Chinese Nationalists who arrive after 1945 — shapes his political vulnerability. His sense of belonging to this island, its older culture and communities, anchors the generational tragedy that unfolds when the KMT government targets men like him.
Tainan is Taiwan's oldest city, founded as a Dutch colonial settlement in 1624 and later the capital of the Kingdom of Tungning under Koxinga. It served as the island's capital during the Qing dynasty and retains more pre-Japanese and pre-KMT historical architecture than any other Taiwanese city.
Tainan is a thriving cultural hub known for its temples, historic streets, and street food. The old city center is a major tourist destination with preserved Dutch and Qing-era ruins alongside vibrant local markets.
Visit: Tainan Historic District (historic site)
Ketagalan Boulevard, Taipei — The February 28 Massacre
The February 28, 1947 Incident — the mass uprising of native Taiwanese against KMT misrule and the brutal government crackdown that followed — is the novel's seismic originating trauma. The narrator's father is arrested in the White Terror that follows 228, taken from his family in the middle of the night. His disappearance and imprisonment define the narrator's entire childhood and the family's subsequent decades of fear, silence, and survival under martial law.
The 228 Incident began on February 28, 1947, when KMT agents beat a woman selling untaxed cigarettes in Taipei, sparking island-wide protests. Governor Chen Yi ordered a violent crackdown; mainland Chinese troops massacred an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 Taiwanese civilians and intellectuals. The event was taboo under martial law for decades.
The 228 Peace Memorial Park occupies the former Taipei New Park, site of early protest gatherings. The 228 Memorial Museum inside the park documents the massacre with photographs, testimonies, and artifacts. The park and museum are central to Taiwan's ongoing reckoning with the White Terror era.
Visit: 228 Peace Memorial Museum (museum)
Green Island (Lyudao), Taitung County — Political prisoner camp
The narrator's father is imprisoned on Green Island — the small volcanic island off Taiwan's southeastern coast — for over a decade after the 228 crackdown. Green Island is the novel's titular location and its moral center. The father endures brutal conditions, isolation from his family, and political re-education. His imprisonment warps his children's childhoods; the narrator grows up without him, shaped by his absence. When he finally returns, he is a man changed by what he has survived.
Green Island housed Taiwan's most notorious political prison during the White Terror era (1949–1987). The New Life Correction Center, built with prisoner labor, held thousands of political detainees — intellectuals, doctors, writers, labor organizers — imprisoned without fair trial under the KMT's martial law regime. Conditions were harsh and re-education coercive.
The former prison complex is now the Green Island Human Rights Memorial Park, operated by Taiwan's National Human Rights Museum. It is a UNESCO-nominated site and one of Asia's most significant memorials to political persecution. The island itself is also popular for scuba diving and its coral reefs.
Visit: Green Island Human Rights Memorial Park (museum)
Zhongzheng District, Taipei — Arrivals, departures, and surveillance
The area around Taipei's railway station serves as a hub of movement and surveillance in the novel. The narrator and her family navigate a city where informants watch public spaces and ordinary transit carries risk. Departures by train — to southern Taiwan, to ports — are shadowed by the knowledge that political suspects are monitored. The station represents the tension between mobility and the suffocating reach of the martial law security apparatus.
The original Taipei Railway Station, built during the Japanese colonial era in 1941, was the island's main rail terminus and a commanding colonial-era structure. It was demolished and replaced by the current modernist station in 1989 as Taiwan's rail network was expanded underground.
The current Taipei Main Station is one of the largest railway stations in the world by floor area, serving high-speed rail, Taiwan Rail, and the MRT. The surrounding Zhongzheng District remains a commercial and governmental center of Taipei.
Visit: Taipei Main Station (landmark)
Ketagalan Boulevard, Taipei — Seat of KMT power
The Presidential Office Building — seat of Chiang Kai-shek's government and then his son Chiang Ching-kuo's — looms over the novel as the embodiment of KMT authoritarian power. The laws and decrees that imprisoned the narrator's father, surveilled her family, and silenced a generation of Taiwanese emanate from this institution. As the novel moves toward Taiwan's democratic transition, the building's symbolic weight shifts from oppression to the contested promise of a new political order.
Built by the Japanese colonial government in 1919 as the Governor-General's Office, the building is a striking red-brick baroque structure. After 1945 it became the seat of the Republic of China government. Chiang Kai-shek governed from here until his death in 1975.
The Presidential Office Building remains the official workplace of Taiwan's president. It is open for guided public tours on weekdays and is one of Taipei's most visited landmarks, with a small exhibition on Taiwan's political history inside.
Visit: Presidential Office Building (historic site)
Xindian District, New Taipei — Military court and detention site
The military courts and detention centers of the Jingmei area represent the legal machinery of White Terror repression depicted in the novel — the secret tribunals, the forced confessions, the sentences handed down without public scrutiny. Men like the narrator's father passed through such institutions before being shipped to Green Island. The novel portrays the terror of this system not through grand political statement but through the intimate devastation it visits on one family.
The Jingmei Military Detention Center was used during the White Terror to hold political prisoners awaiting military trial. Many of Taiwan's most prominent democratic activists, including future president Chen Shui-bian, were tried in facilities in this area. It operated as a detention site from the 1970s through the martial law era.
The site is now the Jingmei Human Rights Memorial and Cultural Park, operated by the National Human Rights Museum. It preserves the original cells, courtrooms, and exercise yards as a memorial to the victims of White Terror, and hosts exhibitions, oral history archives, and public education programs.
Visit: Jingmei Human Rights Memorial and Cultural Park (museum)
Dihua Street, Datong District, Taipei — Old Taipei merchant quarter
The old merchant quarter of Dadaocheng, with its Japanese-era shop-houses and traditional Taiwanese street life, represents the texture of daily existence in Taipei during the 1940s and 1950s that the novel evokes. The narrator's family navigates the rhythms of neighborhood life — buying food, maintaining appearances, managing the shame and fear that come with having an arrested family member — in streets like these, where neighbors are potential informants and ordinary commerce is shadowed by political menace.
Dadaocheng developed in the late 19th century as Taipei's premier trading district, driven by the tea and camphor export economy. Under Japanese colonial rule it retained its Taiwanese character as a commercial hub. The Dihua Street area contains some of Taipei's best-preserved early 20th-century shop-house architecture.
Dadaocheng and Dihua Street have been revitalized as a heritage tourism and artisan district. The area hosts traditional fabric and medicine shops alongside new cafes, boutiques, and cultural spaces. It is one of Taipei's most popular destinations for visitors interested in its historic urban fabric.
Visit: Dadaocheng Historic District (historic site)
Zhongzheng District, Taipei — Medicine, complicity, and survival
The narrator's father is a doctor, a profession that in the novel carries layers of meaning — the Taiwanese intellectual class was disproportionately targeted in the 228 crackdown and White Terror. Taiwan's major teaching hospitals, where educated Taiwanese men built careers under Japanese colonial education, became sites of loss when those men were arrested or killed. The medical world represents the aspirations of a generation destroyed by political violence, and later the quiet forms of complicity and survival that the novel interrogates.
National Taiwan University Hospital traces its origins to the Daiichi Hospital established by Japanese colonial authorities in 1895. It became one of Asia's leading medical institutions under Japanese rule, training Taiwanese physicians through the colonial education system. After 1945 it became the flagship hospital of National Taiwan University.
NTU Hospital remains one of Taiwan's premier medical centers and a major teaching hospital. Its original Japanese-era colonial building, a grand red-brick structure completed in 1921, still stands at the corner of Zhongshan South Road and is a protected historic monument.
Visit: National Taiwan University Hospital (Historic Building) (landmark)
Zhongzheng District, Taipei — Symbol of authoritarian rule and its contested legacy
The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, completed in 1980, represents the KMT's monumental self-mythology — the regime that imprisoned the narrator's father and silenced a generation of Taiwanese now immortalized in white marble at the heart of the capital. As the novel moves through Taiwan's democratic transition, the Memorial Hall becomes a flashpoint: pro-democracy demonstrators gather here, and debates over whether to demolish or rename it crystallize the novel's central questions about how nations reckon with the perpetrators of historical violence.
Construction of the CKS Memorial Hall began after Chiang Kai-shek's death in 1975 and was completed in 1980. The massive complex includes a grand ceremonial gate, two national theaters, and the central octagonal hall housing a bronze statue of Chiang. Under President Chen Shui-bian, it was briefly renamed Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall from 2007 to 2009.
The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and its surrounding Liberty Square remain among Taipei's most visited public spaces, attracting both tourists and political demonstrators. The changing of the guard ceremony draws large crowds. Ongoing public debate about the hall's meaning and the fate of authoritarian-era monuments continues in Taiwan.
Visit: Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (monument)
Central Valley, California — The narrator's American chapter
The novel's narrative extends across the Pacific to California, where the narrator and her husband build their American life. The diaspora experience — navigating a Taiwanese-American identity, maintaining family ties across an ocean, and carrying the weight of Taiwan's traumatic history into a new country — forms a crucial counterpoint to the Taiwan chapters. The narrator's life in California is shadowed by the secrets she carries and the political entanglements that reach across continents, including her involvement with Taiwanese dissident networks operating in the United States.
The Sacramento region became home to a significant Taiwanese immigrant community from the 1960s onward, as Taiwan's economic development and US immigration reform opened pathways for educated professionals. The University of California, Davis, drew many Taiwanese graduate students and academics who became part of the overseas Taiwanese community.
Sacramento and Davis remain home to a substantial Taiwanese-American community with cultural organizations, Taiwanese churches, and community centers. The University of California, Davis, continues to attract students and researchers from Taiwan. The region is part of the broader Bay Area Taiwanese-American diaspora network.
Northern tip of Green Island — Isolation and longing
The lighthouse at the northern tip of Green Island appears in the novel as a symbol of the island's isolation — the point from which prisoners and their keepers alike could look out toward the mainland of Taiwan, so close and yet unreachable. For the narrator's father, the sight of the Taiwanese coast across the water represents everything taken from him: his family, his practice, his freedom, his place in society. The lighthouse embodies the cruel geography of political exile.
The Green Island Lighthouse was first built in 1939 during the Japanese colonial period to guide shipping through the dangerous waters between Green Island and the Taitung coast. It was rebuilt and expanded after World War II. The island's position on major shipping lanes made the lighthouse strategically important.
The Green Island Lighthouse remains operational and is one of the island's most photographed landmarks. It sits near the northern Zhaori Hot Springs area, a popular tourist destination. Visitors to Green Island regularly walk or cycle to the lighthouse as part of touring the island's perimeter road.
Visit: Green Island Lighthouse (landmark)
Wanhua District, Taipei — Working-class Taipei and the underside of survival
Wanhua, Taipei's oldest district and historically its roughest quarter, represents in the novel the world of those who survive at the margins — the families of the politically tainted, the working poor of Taipei who must navigate daily life under martial law without the resources or connections to protect themselves. The narrator's family's reduced circumstances after her father's arrest place them in proximity to this world, where ordinary survival requires its own forms of compromise and complicity.
Wanhua (historically called Bangka or Monga) was the original settlement of Taipei, founded in the early 18th century by Fujian immigrants. It was the city's commercial center before Dadaocheng rose to prominence. By the Japanese era and after, it became associated with Taipei's older, poorer working-class communities and the Longshan Temple area.
Wanhua remains one of Taipei's most historically layered districts. Longshan Temple is one of Taiwan's most important religious sites. The district also contains Huaxi Street Night Market and the Bopiliao Historic Block, a preserved Qing and Japanese-era streetscape now used as a cultural space.
Visit: Longshan Temple (historic site)
Taitung, southeastern Taiwan — Gateway to Green Island
Taitung is the jumping-off point for Green Island — the port from which boats carry prisoners and, in later years, family members attempting to visit their imprisoned relatives. In the novel, the physical journey from Taipei to Taitung and then across the choppy waters to Green Island dramatizes the distance the family must cross to reach the father: geographically modest, emotionally immense, bureaucratically treacherous under a government that controls access to its own prison island.
Taitung developed as an administrative center under both Qing and Japanese colonial rule as the main gateway to Taiwan's rugged eastern coast and outlying islands. The Japanese built the port and rail infrastructure that made the region accessible. Taitung remained relatively underdeveloped compared to western Taiwan through much of the 20th century.
Taitung City is now a popular ecotourism base for visiting Green Island, Orchid Island (Lanyu), and the scenic East Rift Valley. Ferries and small planes connect Taitung to Green Island year-round. The Taitung Forest Park and National Museum of Prehistory are major local attractions.
Visit: Taitung Ferry Terminal (to Green Island) (landmark)
More by Shawna Yang Ryan: All Shawna Yang Ryan books