Military dependents' village

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Military dependents' villages (Chinese: 眷村) are communities in Taiwan built in the late 1940s and the 1950s whose original purpose was to serve as provisional housing for soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines of the Republic of China Armed Forces, along with their dependents from mainland China after the Government of the Republic of China (ROC) and the Kuomintang (KMT) retreated to Taiwan in 1949. They ended up becoming permanent settlements, forming distinct cultures as enclaves of mainlanders in Taiwanese cities. Over the years, many military dependents' villages have suffered from problems such as housing dereliction, abandonment, urban decay, and becoming slums.

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.

Following the passage of the Act for Rebuilding Old Quarters for Military Dependents in 1996,^[1][2] the government began an aggressive program of demolishing these villages and replacing them with highrises, giving the residents rights to live in the new apartments. As of 2019, there are less than 30 left out of an original number of 879, and some have been preserved as historic sites.^[3]

In a broad sense, the word can also mean the quarters for U.S. Military Advisory Group officers and their dependents in Taiwan.