The site's history accumulated like sediment. During Japan's colonial rule of Taiwan, the area served as a shelter zone. When the Republic of China declared martial law in May 1949, Green Island became a destination for political dissidents, and Taiwan Lyudao Prison was constructed in 1951. Over time, the prison became a symbol of political suppression itself. In February 1970, the Taiyuan Incident - an attempted uprising linked to the Taiwan independence movement - prompted the Ministry of National Defense to build a second prison. All political prisoners across Taiwan were consolidated into this new facility, named the Institute of Reform and Training and later renamed Oasis Villa. The euphemistic name masked a grim reality: these were people imprisoned for their beliefs, their writings, their associations.

When martial law was lifted in July 1987 after thirty-eight years, the political prisoners walked free, but the buildings remained. The site passed through several incarnations - Green Island Prison under the Ministry of Justice, a moral training center for military offenders, a reform institute. Each transition layered new uses onto old architecture. In 2001, the Taiwan government took the decisive step of transforming the site into the Green Island Human Rights Culture Park, dedicating it to those who had fought for freedom, democracy, and human rights. The Taitung County Government registered the park as a recognized cultural landscape in 2014, and in 2018, ownership transferred to the newly established National Human Rights Museum, which renamed it the Green Island White Terror Memorial Park.

Architect Han Pao-teh designed the Human Rights Monument that anchors the park - a structure meant to honor the victims rather than the system that victimized them. But the most powerful architectural element is the prison itself. Oasis Villa's hexagonal design was functional brutalism: high walls surrounding a central observation point from which guards could monitor all four wing corridors simultaneously. The 52 cells in eight sections held prisoners who were academics, journalists, artists, labor organizers, and ordinary citizens whose political views had been deemed dangerous. The administrative building, with its bureaucratic office and reception area, reminds visitors that repression operates through paperwork as much as through walls - forms filed, sentences recorded, people reduced to case numbers.

Oasis Village has been converted into an exhibition hall where historical films and displays reconstruct the experience of political imprisonment. The exhibitions do not sanitize. They document the isolation, the interrogations, the years of confinement on an island from which escape was impossible. They also document resistance - the ways prisoners maintained their dignity, educated each other, formed bonds that would later become the foundation of Taiwan's democratic movement. Many of the inmates held between the 1940s and 1980s went on to establish the Democratic Progressive Party, which would eventually win Taiwan's presidency. The memorial park exists to ensure that the cost of that democracy is not forgotten - that the cells remain visible, the names remain spoken, and the story remains uncomfortable.

The White Terror was not an aberration but a policy. During nearly four decades of martial law, tens of thousands of Taiwanese citizens were arrested, imprisoned, or executed for political offenses. Many were held on Green Island, chosen for its isolation - 33 kilometers of open ocean separating prisoners from the world they had been removed from. The memorial park forces a reckoning with that history. Located on Taiwan's National Human Rights Museum network, it stands alongside the Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park near Taipei as part of a deliberate national effort to preserve the physical evidence of state repression. For visitors who make the ferry crossing from Taitung, the park's message is inseparable from its location: democracy was won by people who were sent to the most remote place their government could find.