In 1994, the Department of Taipei Rapid Transit System announced plans to build a maintenance depot on the Losheng Sanatorium site for the Zhonghe-Xinlu metro line. The sanatorium's director, Chen Ching-chuan, opposed the decision. He conducted three surveys among the patients to understand their needs and preferences. For his trouble, he was demoted and reprimanded. After that, patients had no access to construction plans or any role in the discussions that would determine their future. The depot had originally been planned for a different location near Fu Jen Catholic University, where the land was flat and the station was designated O1 -- first station of the Orange Line. Local politicians redirected it to Losheng's hillside site, a choice that would require flattening the terrain at a cost of ninety million US dollars and building a ten-story retaining wall. The cheaper, flatter site was abandoned. The one that required demolishing a historical community was chosen.

By 2006, a survey found 165 former patients living in a new hospital building the government had constructed nearby, and 52 still residing in the old compound. The new building, Huei Long Hospital, had been promised as houses but delivered as a pair of high-rise hospital towers designed for short-term patients. Residents could not bring personal belongings. Cooking was forbidden. Movement between buildings was restricted. The policies reflected a medical institution's priorities, not a home's. For people who had spent decades in the sanatorium's low-slung hillside buildings -- with gardens, a convenience shop, dormitories, and the rhythms of a community they had built within their confinement -- the new towers were not an upgrade. They were a different kind of imprisonment, traded for the convenience of a subway system that most of them would never ride.

Beginning in 2001, students, urban planners, and NGOs rallied to the sanatorium's defense. Scholars and the former director argued that the compound was historically significant, and in 2004, Professor John K.C. Liu proposed a "symbiosis plan" that would preserve the sanatorium alongside the depot. The Council for Cultural Affairs designated Losheng a historical site, pressuring the transit department to consider preservation. In January 2007, the Council announced that a 90-percent preservation plan would add only four months to the construction timeline, contradicting claims by the transit authority of two-to-three-year delays. The battle spilled into the streets. On March 11, 2007, activists staged a sit-in at the home of Premier Su Tseng-chang. Police forced the protesters -- students alongside elderly patients -- onto buses and drove them to remote mountainous areas outside Taipei, ordering them not to return. In 2009, the sanatorium was named a potential World Heritage Site, recognized as a witness to the development of politics, medicine, public health, and human rights in Taiwan.

On May 30, 2007, the Public Construction Commission ruled that 39 of Losheng's buildings should be preserved, 10 reconstructed in new locations, and 6 demolished. The budget would increase by 670 million New Taiwan dollars. It was a compromise -- more than the transit authority wanted, less than the preservationists demanded. The ruling did not satisfy either side, but it acknowledged something that had been denied for over a decade: that the people who lived at Losheng, and the buildings they lived in, mattered. The sanatorium's story is uncomfortable because it offers no clean villain. The patients who had leprosy were first isolated by colonial public health policy, then abandoned by the political calculations of urban transit planning. Their defenders invoked heritage, human rights, and environmental responsibility. Their opponents invoked public infrastructure and fiscal reality. What made Losheng different from other preservation battles was the presence of living people whose bodies bore the cost of every decision. The name still means "Happy Life." Whether anyone there experienced it depends on when you ask.