Ketagalan Boulevard runs just 400 meters through Zhongzheng District, connecting the Presidential Office Building to the East Gate. Five lanes in each direction, no median -- a wide, ceremonial corridor designed for the movement of state authority. Along its brief length sit the Taipei Guest House, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 228 Peace Memorial Park, and Jieshou Park, dedicated to Lin Sen, who served as President of the Republic of China from 1931 to 1943. For a road so short, its density of political landmarks is extraordinary. Every building along it carries the weight of a contested history.

On May 19, 1989, pro-democracy activist Chan I-hua set himself on fire on this road. He was protesting the authorities' decision to block the funeral procession of Cheng Nan-jung, a magazine publisher who had himself self-immolated weeks earlier to resist arrest for publishing a proposed constitution for Taiwan. The street was still called Chieh-shou Road then, still named for the man whose authoritarian legacy these activists were challenging with their bodies. Seven years later, in 1996, Taipei Mayor Chen Shui-bian renamed it Ketagalan Boulevard, after the Ketagalan people. The traffic signs banning motorcycles and bicycles were removed -- a change residents compared to the lifting of martial law itself. Officials were careful to announce that no disrespect to Chiang Kai-shek was intended. The gesture spoke for itself.

Since the renaming, Ketagalan Boulevard has become Taiwan's default venue for mass political expression. After the contested 2004 presidential election, supporters of the Pan-Blue Coalition occupied the boulevard for an entire week, protesting the result. When the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall was renamed the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall by the DPP administration, Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-pin proposed renaming a section of the boulevard "Anticorruption Democracy Square" after the 2006 anti-corruption protests. The proposal went nowhere, but it illustrated the boulevard's unique status: everyone wants to claim it, rename it, or march on it, because whoever controls the narrative of Ketagalan Boulevard shapes the story of Taiwanese democracy.

In February 2017, Taiwan's indigenous peoples pitched tents on the boulevard named for their ancestors, the Ketagalan. They were protesting government regulations that recognized only 800,000 of the estimated 1.8 million hectares of their traditional territories. The activists -- led by singer Panai Kusui, her husband Nabu, and filmmaker Mayaw Biho -- camped for over a hundred days before police cleared the site. The image was striking: indigenous people protesting on a road the government had named in their honor, demanding that the symbolic gesture translate into actual recognition. The boulevard that was supposed to commemorate them instead became the stage for their grievance. This is the paradox Ketagalan Boulevard embodies. It is a road built for authority that keeps being seized by dissent, a memorial to indigenous presence that doubles as evidence of indigenous erasure, a stretch of pavement that has absorbed self-immolation, occupation, and celebration, and still runs the same 400 meters it always has.