Taitung White House (臺東阿伯小白屋)
Admittedly, when I write blogs and introduce places in Taiwan, it’s rare that I write something that could be considered brief, and to the point. My writing tends to involve long-winded deep-dives into the historical and architectural aspects of all the places I visit and more importantly, take photos of.
With this one though, I’m going to do my best to keep it short.
All that’s required is to re-tell a story that has probably already been told a thousand times.
Taitung’s famed “White House” goes by quite a few different names, but one of the things you’ll usually notice being said about it is that it is one of the locations in the city with the most ‘check-in’s’.
You see, these days in Taiwan, locations around the country become popular simply for their ‘Instagrammability’ (is that a verb now?)
Back when life was a little simpler, tourist attractions around Taiwan were known simply as “destinations” (景點) and gained their popularity for reasons a little more significant than their ability to attract social media attention. These days, most of those “destinations” are likely to be ignored if they don’t fall into the all-important category of a Popular Check-in Destination (熱門打卡景點).
Local travel writing has quickly adapted to this instagram-effect and has likewise shifted from actually producing content to publishing articles simply titled: “2021 Taiwan Recommended Instagram Popular Check-in Destinations” (2020台灣IG打卡景點推薦” or “2020 Must Visit Instagram Destinations!” (2020必去IG打卡景點) and focus only on social media metrics to determine the locations that people absolutely have to visit!
I might sound like an old dude wavering my cane in the air with my condescension, but it’s not particularly a healthy way to conduct a sustainable tourism industry.
When it comes to this house in particular, not much damage is done by the massive groups of people hanging around outside taking photos for their Instagram - And since most of them are already in the area to help contribute to the local economy, I don’t really have much of a problem.
However, even though the house is a popular Instagram stop, it does have a bit of a sad back story. So even though you’ll see beautiful Instagram celebrities modeling nearby, it’s important to know why the house looks the way it does.
The Taitung White House
In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare wrote: “What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” a phrase that I think applies to this house in a few different ways.
Why? Well, for a couple of reasons.
One of them is because there isn’t actually an official name for this house, so you’ll often find it referred to by the following names whenever you see someone talking about it:
The Plain White House (白色陋屋)
Taitung Grandpa’s White House (台東阿伯小白屋)
Little White House (小白屋)
Taitung’s Howl’s Moving Castle (台東霍爾的移動城堡)
For most of the people living in the area, the patch-work house has been considered a stain on their community, but like Shakespeare said, “that which we call a rose by any other name would smell so sweet,” and what matters is not its appearance or what it is named, but that it was hand-crafted by its owner over a very long period of time and to him, it wasn’t unsightly, nor a popular tourist attraction - it was his home.
The White House has received quite a bit of attention from the local media as well as on social media over the years, but when it comes to the English media, there has been an unfortunate amount of sensationalism and misinformation about the house and its owner.
Lazy reporting has given rise to articles that claim no one knew the real name of its owner, that he was too ‘senile’ to remember important details and that there are a number of mysteries surrounding the building, all intended to make the reader feel like there’s something spooky about the building.
Nothing could be further from the truth, we actually know quite a bit about the White House and the man who constructed it.
Until 2017, the White House was home to Mr. Lee Wen-Chang (李文昌), a military veteran who came to Taiwan as a refugee of the Chinese Civil War. Born in 1928 (民國18年) in China’s Guangxi Province (廣西省), Mr. Lee first lived and worked in Tainan, but was later sent to Taitung to continue his military service. It was there where he met his wife, fathered six children, constructed his home and lived out the rest of his life.
Starting in 1966 (民國55年), Mr. Lee would spend the next few decades transforming his home from a small wooden house into the four-story home that we can see today. When the outpost where he worked was abandoned in 1970, Mr. Lee started collecting materials to recycle them for usage in the expansion of his home.
Over the next several decades, Mr. Lee went on daily excursions to scavenge for bricks, glass and waste wood, among other things to bring back to the house in order to continue its expansion.
As mentioned above, the building has four floors, but from the outside you’d be hard pressed to see how that’s possible - This is because the height of each of them differs in size and from what I’ve read forces adults to have to bend over while walking through the maze of corridors within.
First Floor: Living room, kitchen, bathroom.
Second Floor: Bedrooms.
Third Floor: Green house with vegetables grown by the owner.
Fourth Floor: Private bridal chamber for the son of the owner
One of the things that confuses most people about the house is how it could actually be considered a legal residence in Taiwan, given the amount of governmental bureaucracy and building standards that are strictly enforced by the Household Registration Office.
The simple answer is that when Mr. Lee started expanding the house, the laws that dealt with construction (建築法) had yet to be implemented, which has kept it free from legal hassles.
There’s a local joke that for buildings to be considered “legal residences”, all they really need are four walls, a roof, a place to sleep and a place to shower - and since this building covers all those bases, it’s fine.
Ironically, even though the house looks like it has been haphazardly put together with random pieces of garbage, it has bravely withstood the constant barrage of earthquakes and typhoon seasons that wreak havoc on Taiwan’s east coast on a yearly basis.
You might look at the house from the outside and come to the conclusion that it’s likely to suddenly collapse, but Mr. Lee’s decades of hard work, in addition to his experience as a military engineer ensure that considerable effort would be required to tear it down!
Dispelling the rumors of his senility in his later years, as the White House became an internet sensation, Mr. Lee was visited by several reporters from local newspapers and magazines. He happily gave them tours and discussed with them the process of constructing the house, and even made jokes about how he never really considered the house to be complete.
Presented with the opportunity to sell it on several occasions, Mr. Lee refused and only responded by saying that it was his intention to leave the home to his children, who could then decide what to do with it.
Unfortunately in 2017, after not being seen for several days, the local Veteran Affairs Office telephoned the daughter of Mr. Lee to inform her that he hadn’t appeared on his daily rounds for a few days. When she went to see if something was wrong, she found her father’s lifeless body on the first floor of the house.
He was 89 years old.
Since his death, the house has remained pretty much the same and it’s still a popular tourist attraction, but it’s hard to say how much longer it will last as the family is likely to sell it.
Until that day comes, I’m sure the Little White House will remain a popular tourist attraction.
Getting There
Address: No. 1, Zhongzheng Road, Taitung City (台東市中正路1號)
GPS: 22.7512595 121.1590818
The Taitung White House is located along the road next to the city’s Haibin Park (白濱公園), which is a popular tourist attraction in itself. How you get there though really depends on what means of transportation you are relying on to get around Taitung.
If you’ve got a car, scooter or even a bicycle, you should be able to easily input the address above into your GPS or Google Maps to get directions.
If you don’t have access to any of those, you’ll have to either walk, take a taxi or a bus.
Walking through downtown Taitung isn’t all that terrible, so if you’re staying in the downtown core of the city, you shouldn’t have any problem walking to the house from wherever you’re staying.
However if you’d like to save some time, you might just want to take a taxi.
If you’d like to take the bus, the area is only serviced by the Taitung City Bus City Tour Line that departs from the tourist bureau near the Taitung Bus Station (台東客運站), which you’ll ride until you reach the Seashore Park stop where you’ll get off and walk from there.
It should be noted however that (depending on the time of the year) there are only a few buses everyday, and the lack of frequency makes a visit difficult to time.
No matter how you get there, it won’t really take you very long to check the house out.
There’s not much you can do apart from taking a couple of photos, so I highly recommend taking some time to walk through the beautiful Seashore Park nearby to enjoy views of the coast (and the wetlands) as well as sampling some of the popular stalls selling food nearby. If you see a line, it’ll probably be people waiting for the famed scallion pancakes (蔥油餅) that the area is known for!
Footnotes
Moving Castle | 白色陋屋 (Wiki)
Mystery of man in weird White House arouses curiosity (Taipei Times)
海邊小白屋：台版霍爾的移動城堡 (台東製造)
深入台東「霍爾的移動城堡」(天下雜誌)