Jiufen

Jiufen clings to a steep mountainside above the north-east coast of Taiwan, a dense stack of houses, teahouses and stairways looking down to the sea. Its lanes are so narrow and so crowded with buildings that an American diplomat who passed through in the early 1900s wrote that some houses seemed to be pushing their neighbours aside to find room. At dusk, when the red lanterns along the stepped alleys are lit, the town becomes one of the most recognisable scenes on the island.

The name means "nine portions". According to the usual explanation, in the early Qing period the isolated village held only nine families, who asked for nine shares of every delivery brought up from town. Its fortunes changed with gold. In 1890 workers building the railway between Taipei and Keelung came across flakes of gold, and in 1893 a rich placer field was discovered in the hills around the village, producing kilograms of gold a day. The rush turned the hamlet into a town, and it reached its height during the Japanese period, when Japanese companies mined gold-bearing quartz here; many of the old inns and houses date from that era. During the Second World War the Kinkaseki prisoner-of-war camp in nearby Jinguashi held Allied soldiers, many of them British, who were forced to work in the mines.

After the war mining declined, the mine closed in 1971 and the town was nearly forgotten. It was revived by cinema: Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness, set in Jiufen and the first film to address the February 28 Incident, won international acclaim in 1989 and drew visitors to the town's hillside lanes. In the 1990s teahouses, cafés and shops filled the old street, Jiufen Old Street, and after 2001 many visitors came because the town reminded them of the setting of Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away, although Hayao Miyazaki has said it was not the model for the film. Today about 1,600 people live in Jiufen, which is part of Ruifang District in New Taipei City.

Getting there

Jiufen lies in Ruifang District, New Taipei City, about 11 km from the port city of Keelung. The nearest railway station is Ruifang on the TR Yilan Line, about 15 minutes away by bus. The nearest airport is Taipei Songshan (TSA), about 30 km away; the main international gateway, Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport (TPE), lies on the far side of Taipei. The roads up to the town are steep and winding.