Qualla: Cijin Memorial Park for Women Laborers

Cijin Memorial Park for Women Laborers: Introduction

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the morning of September 3, 1973, a small ferry set out from Cijin Island across the harbor channel to Kaohsiung City. It was carrying more than 70 passengers — more than five times its safe capacity of 13 — and most of them were young women heading to their jobs in the export processing zone. The ferry capsized. Twenty-five of the women drowned. They were unmarried daughters of working families, many of them barely out of middle school, who had gone to work in the factories because their families needed the income. Their names are now inscribed on plaques in this park on Cijin Island. That the plaques exist at all — that the site is called a memorial park for women laborers rather than what it was called for decades before — is a story of what it took to insist on their dignity.

Cijin Memorial Park for Women Laborers: The Morning of September 3

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The ferry that sank in 1973 was a private vessel operating on the crossing between Cijin Island and Kaohsiung City. By 1973, the expansion of the Kaohsiung port in 1967 had reduced the transportation options for Cijin residents, leaving them dependent on government and private fe...

Cijin Memorial Park for Women Laborers: Who They Were

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The young women who died were not exceptional in any way that their society recognized at the time — and that is part of what makes their story worth understanding. Taiwan's economic development in the early 1970s created manufacturing jobs at the export processing zones, includi...

Cijin Memorial Park for Women Laborers: Decades Without Dignity

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For years after the accident, the burial site on Cijin Island was known as the Twenty-five Ladies' Tomb. What should have been a place of quiet mourning became something else. Urban legends accumulated around it — stories of stalled cars and vengeful spirits, of a woman in white ...

Cijin Memorial Park for Women Laborers: The Work of Remembering Properly

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The change came through sustained advocacy. Feminist organizations and the Kaohsiung Association for the Promotion of Women's Rights pushed the city government to act — to recognize the women not as tragic or supernatural figures but as workers who died because of unsafe conditio...

Cijin Memorial Park for Women Laborers: The Park Today

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every spring, the Kaohsiung City government's Department of Labor hosts a commemorative service at the park — honoring the twenty-five women and raising awareness for gender-related labor issues that did not begin or end with the events of September 1973. The memorial stands on C...