In order to preserve the identity of Treasure Hill as a historical quarter, and give new purpose to its old buildings, the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs has planned the division of this neighborhood into three areas: Treasure Hill Artist Village, Treasure Hill Community, and Treasure Hill Traveler's Hostel. The third area, Treasure Hill Traveler's Hostel, offers a realistic experience of life in the community, its historical development process, and its unique "spirit of place" expressed through its location, spatial arrangement and distinctive character.

Treasure Hill Traveler's Hostel encompasses the internal meaning of this historical settlement, as well as the external meaning of the new world. At the level of the spirit of place, it can be viewed as an addition, a supplement. We therefore hope to engage in a dialogue with the world, with the historical context of Treasure Hill serving as its axis and based on the locality's special character of constant change – revealing the marks of time in the spatial dimension of a traveler's hostel, manifesting a "living" place, a human habitation. And by opening it up to the world to experience as a place of accommodation, we seek to bring together the spirit of place evoked by nature and the spirit of place evoked by living. In other words, we have made this hostel to integrate the states of short-term boarding and long-term residence, allowing living and lodging to co-exist symbiotically, as an outgrowth of a search to understand the meaning inherent in these environs.

Without a doubt, Treasure Hill Traveler's Hostel is a path of exploration. Memories connect many small, subtle things, either familiar or unfamiliar, and these things are all full of meaning, forming clues that allow us to read the rich historical texture of Treasure Hill, and its spatial composition with multiple implications.

In Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea (Harvill Press, 1999), Claudio Magris delineates a multitude of accommodation types: luxury, bourgeois, simple, proletariat, local-style, harbor district, "welcoming large tour groups," cottage-style, estates, monasteries, charitable organizations, gentrified guest houses, as well as business hotels, customs houses, and union halls for postmen or truck drivers. Treasure Hill has gone through countless hybridizations, mutations and amalgamations, and through these transformations it has found its own completeness and conclusion. To what category of lodging should our hostel belong?

The hotel's setting hints at images of settlers erecting walls and raising roofs. Though we may only catch a few brief glimpses, in certain details we see the simple yet solemn memories of this community set on a hill. When Kublai Khan asked Marco Polo to tell him about Venice, he said: "Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased." (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Harcourt Brace & Company, p. 87, 1974). Memory is like a dense, plodding fog, wreathing this hilltop village. The outline of distant things hints at a different panorama: filling this settlement with the past, the present and the future, a neighborhood composed of only memories, a neighborhood without image or likeness, forgotten amidst the city.

Perhaps for us today, surrounded by countless memories, this hostel on Treasure Hill centers on the source of endless life, the never-ending flow of travelers, flowing like life itself, reflecting back upon itself. What kind of lodging is this hostel in this place? It harkens back to the most primitive meaning of a settlement. In all the little houses with their slanting walls, among the rising and falling steps, we can clearly see the reality and the essence of things. If travelers are truly seeking something different, this hostel surely leads a person to become lost in a daydream and not want to awaken.。

If it stood in a different locality, this hostel would not exist. When one climbs the staircase, the little house with its roof sloping off in two directions is not out of the ordinary. Yet travelers possess a certain sharp perception of things. What have they discovered? The reality is, the house is old, old enough to tell stories. If you wander around, exploring inside and out, searching carefully, a breeze arriving from the real world or a breath rushes in, attesting to the true state of the hostel's existence.

But the village won't speak of its past or how it arrived at its present. It only leaves behind the traces of time and space in each nook and cranny, because what changes are not the words to describe it, but the things that happen here. People's identities are constructed from the places we have lived. Treasure Hill is also such a place. It causes us to discover familiar things in it, becoming ever fresher with time.

This is why we refer to our hostel as an "attic." This attic has become a storeroom of memories, where this place's past and its present realities are saved. It is a home for what has vanished and what has remained. All things that gather here, dissipate here as well. Everything comes to an end in an impermanent state of life. On the day a traveler arrives at this little hostel, he or she encounters all that has happened here, creating life with the ineluctable ticking of time, sealed in the cluster of houses like a beehive, and travelers can store the things they wish to remember here too. Thus, the memories of this place extend one after another without end, resting in the memories of travelers one by one, building up a system that records the memories of Treasure Hill, comparable or contrasting: how the houses of this settlement were built, the names of the residents and all the stories that transpired behind each of the windows. Finally, the memories become impossible to rub out, and a likeness emerges.

Attic Hostel is different from other hostels and hotels. According to Paragraph 3 of Article 24 of the Act for the Development of Tourism: "Lodging without profit-taking nature and available only to specific groups of guests shall be governed under regulations on safety and management to be promulgated by the competent authority for the related matters" ,concludes the "Regulations on the Management of Treasure Hill Traveler's Hostel".

The regulations specified that accommodation will be offered only to all practitioners of the cultural and creative industries as specified in the Law for the Development of the Cultural and Creative Industries and to those participants in the Treasure Hill organized art and culture related education and training, studies, exhibitions, academic exchanges, conferences, camps and other related activities. Applicants shall provide relevant information when apply. Attic Hostel will review your application and applicants should receive a response within 3-5 business days.

Attic Hostel offers our guests a great opportunity to deeply explore the Treasure Hill settlement during their stay, and to interact with local residents, the resident artists of Treasure Hill and the general public.

> Regulations on the Management of Treasure Hill Traveler's Hostel