The Finnish Missionary Society began sending workers to Taiwan in 1956. By 1963, the first Finnish child in the mission field had reached school age and enrolled at Morrison Academy, an American school founded in 1952 that would later be described by mission board members as "the best school in Asia." The question of where Finnish children would live — and how they would remain Finnish — was debated seriously from 1965 onward. Should the Society establish its own Finnish school on the island? Or should the children attend Morrison, with a separate Finnish dormitory providing cultural continuity? The debate was thorough. A Finnish school would let children stay near their parents and be taught in their native language, but it would be small, lacking competitive standards, and unable to provide high school education. Morrison offered English fluency, academic rigor, and a path to university. The board eventually chose Morrison — and a Finnish dormitory. The dormitory opened in the autumn of 1968, beginning nearly three decades of operation.

Getting a permanent building in place took years of wrangling. The mission board in Taiwan purchased a triangular lot from Morrison, located on the so-called Faculty Row of the campus. For design consultation, the Finnish missionaries wrote to the headmaster of the Finnish private school in Swakopmund, Namibia — the kind of lateral connection that scattered Finnish mission networks had learned to maintain. The building plans went through multiple rounds of revision: the first design was too large for the lot, the number of entrances caused internal disagreements (there were at least five, which struck some as excessive), and city zoning regulations imposed a hard deadline — only buildings with a roof by July 1973 would be permitted to be completed. The mission headquarters approved construction on April 25, 1973; the walls went up starting May 7. When the building was finally finished on December 15, 1973, it included a Finnish sauna, separate bathrooms for boys and girls, and a children's playroom. In 1976, the boys' bathroom was converted into a soundproofed piano room. The building had a distinctly homelike character: textiles on the walls, flowers in the corners, and — as one observer noted — no written rules whatsoever.

Seppo and Marja-Liisa Salko arrived in Taiwan in 1971 and began running the dormitory in 1972, remaining its longest-serving employees. Their approach was deliberate warmth: Marjatta Raulamo, Marja-Liisa's mother, came for extended visits — three months in 1974, then the entire school year of 1976–1977 — serving as a surrogate grandmother for the children in residence. The academic supplementation the dormitory provided was substantial. Finnish history, language, geography, and civics were taught alongside Morrison's American curriculum. High schoolers could substitute a Finnish history course for one of Morrison's required American history classes, with exams sent by correspondence to Kauriala High School in Hämeenlinna, Finland. By 1978, fourteen of the dormitory's students played piano, and at times three pianos occupied the practice room simultaneously. The children formed an orchestra, performed at Christmas festivities, hiked in Taiwan's mountains, and in 1978 traveled to Taipei to cheer for a Finnish women's soccer team competing in an international tournament. By 1987, seventeen Finnish students had graduated from Morrison; six went on to Finnish universities.

In 1999, the Finnish Missionary Society announced that it had commissioned an independent investigation into the dormitory in Taiwan. The inquiry was prompted by reports that many former wards — children who had lived at the dormitory — were experiencing serious psychological difficulties in adulthood. The investigation was conducted by a firm called Metodi Team Inc., which interviewed more than 100 people, roughly a third of whom had lived at the dormitory and roughly half of whom had worked for the Finnish Missionary Society in Taiwan. The study's findings were unambiguous: many of the children who had lived at the dormitory had been sexually abused. The Finnish newsmagazine Suomen Kuvalehti published extensive coverage in 2001, including a reporter's visit to the 350-square-meter brick building, with its labyrinthine layout and its attic space where an adult could stand unseen above the rooms where children slept. The magazine published pointed questions to Finnish police about why the scene had never been inspected, why witnesses had not all been interviewed, and why key evidence had gone missing. The case was never fully resolved through judicial process. The children who lived there carried what happened long after the music stopped at 9 p.m.

The Finnish dormitory in Taichung operated for twenty-nine years. At its best, it was exactly what its founders intended: a warm, structured home-away-from-home where Finnish children could grow up bilingual, musically accomplished, rooted in their own cultural identity while also becoming, as the mission board had hoped, "world citizens." The Salkos built something real here. The Finnish Independence Day was marked with blue-and-white candles. Midsummer was celebrated with the wider Finnish community in Taichung. An orchestra performed at Christmas. The dormitory and its neighboring Norwegian dormitory maintained a quiet mutual-aid relationship that felt, in retrospect, like the kind of expatriate solidarity that sustains people far from home. That the institution also failed, profoundly, in its most basic duty of care to the children in its keeping is part of the same history. The brick building on Faculty Row held both things at once.