Green Island swaps prisoners for tourists

[dArKeR]

It isn't exactly Devil's Island, but a verdant speck of land off the Taiwanese coast shares a good measure of the former French penal colony's dark notoriety -- and that is boosting its cachet as a budding tourist resort.
From 1951 until the end of martial law in 1987, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government sent more than 20,000 political prisoners to Green Island, a tropical mixture of pristine beaches and dense vegetation atop a mountainous dollop of volcanic rock.

Today, except for a small contingent of hardcore criminals, the prisoners are gone, and the KMT is a full participant in Taiwan's vibrant democracy, a counterpoint to the communist administration in China, 300km to the west.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2005/06/02/2003257582

I've been here a bunch of times.