Military dependents' village

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A military dependents' village (Chinese: 眷村; Hanyu Pinyin: juàn cūn) is a community in Taiwan built in the late 1940s and the 1950s whose original purpose was to serve as provisional housing for Nationalist soldiers and their dependents from mainland China after the KMT retreated to Taiwan. They ended up becoming permanent settlements, forming distinct cultures as enclaves of mainlanders in Taiwanese cities.

The houses in these villages were often haphazardly and poorly constructed, having been built hastily and with limited funding. The residents had no private land ownership rights for the houses they lived in, as the land was government property.

In the 1990s, the government began an aggressive program of demolishing the villages and replacing them with highrises, giving the residents rights to live in the new apartments. As of late 2006, there are around 170 left out of an original number of 879, and there are efforts to preserve some as historic sites.