Maroc - TAIWANTODAY.TW - Taiwan Review - 01/Feb 00:00

New Alchemy

Dramatic coastal landscapes studded with relics of an industrial past entice visitors. The celebratory atmosphere at the Gold Museum in Jinguashi, a mountain town in northeastern Taiwan that overlooks the sea, was palpable on Nov. 4 last year. The municipal museum in New Taipei City’s Ruifang District was marking both its 20th anniversary and the strengthening of ties with Japan’s Iwami Ginzan Silver Mine, a UNESCO World Heritage site, through a sister agreement born out of the two locations’ common history.   Mining activity in Jinguashi ended in the mid-1980s and today the area relies on tourism. (Courtesy of the Gold Museum) The mining towns of Jinguashi and Jiufen developed after 1890, when workers building railways between Taipei and Keelung cities found gold in the Keelung River. This sparked a gold rush and led to discovery of the origin: seams of the precious metal upstream in Ruifang. Systematic mining for gold did not commence until 1897, two years after the Treaty of Shimonoseki ceded Taiwan to Imperial Japan. Copper, a metal crucial to both industrial machinery and the arms industry, was discovered in Shuinandong in 1904. The colonial Taiwan Governor-General’s Office divided the mining region into two zones, Jinguashi and Jiufen, each managed by a Japanese corporate group that brought mining expertise and equipment to Taiwan. In 1920 the Jiufen mines were sold to a private citizen, and in 1933 a huge and highly productive ore smelting facility was built on the mountainside next to Lianxin Village at Shuinandong to process the output from nearby mines. As the industry accelerated in the late 1890s, people from around northern Taiwan flocked to the district. Wu Chao-tan (吳朝潭), a senior guide at the Gold Museum, has personal knowledge of the industry through his father and grandfather. Wu said that a miner could earn much more than a farmer, with his father’s wages sufficient to support a family with four children, although the profession came with risks such as accidents and chronic lung disease. Wu recalled that as a child, he often waited at the mine exit in the afternoon for his father to emerge after a day’s work. “It was a relief every time,” he said. Thanks to memories his father shared of his decades of labor underground, Wu, now 61, is a major source of information on the area’s extraction legacy and miners’ experience.   The smelting facility at Ruifang District’s Shuinandong is part of a bid for World Heritage Site status. (Courtesy of the Gold Museum.) According to the museum, Jinguashi’s output reached a peak in 1938 when it produced 2.6 tons of gold, winning a reputation as Asia’s top precious metal mine, and together with the burgeoning industry, local communities thrived. Around the same time, Jiufen, with residents numbering between 30,000 and 40,000, also enjoyed a new level of prosperity, offering hotels, restaurants and jewelry stores. The mountain town’s economy thrived so much that it was dubbed both Little Shanghai and Little Hong Kong, and a popular saying from the boom era boasted that premium goods went to Jiufen and Jinguashi, while second-grade commodities were sold in the capital, Taipei City. Bust and Boom The district’s mining industry grew steadily in the first decades of the 20th century, continued to flourish after the Japanese withdrew in 1945 and ultimately came to an end as the metal ore seams petered out in Jiufen in the early 1970s and in Jinguashi in the mid-1980s. This led to a population exodus that left structures built over almost a century, including mine tunnels, offices, shops and residences, to fall into ruin. The associated memories of physical hardship combined with the presence of a World War II prisoner camp at Jinguashi to render Ruifang little more than a footnote overlooked by history.   A sculpture in Jinguashi Memorial Park is dedicated to World War II prisoners who toiled as slave labor in the copper mines. (Photo by Chin Hung-hao) Although the economies of Jiufen, Jinguashi and Shuinandong declined throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, the area saw something of a cultural renaissance in the ‘90s due to films by various directors that examined social change against the historical backdrop of the mining industry. Director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s (侯孝賢) 1989 masterpiece “A City of Sadness,” set in Jiufen against the political, social, cultural and economic turmoil of the immediate post-war years, won the Golden Lion at that year’s Venice Film Festival. This was followed in 1992 by 29th Golden Horse best director winner Wang Tong’s (王童) “Hill of No Return,” set in Jinguashi with protagonists working in the gold mine in the late 1920s. These raised the cultural profile of the northeast coast in general and Jiufen in particular, which, with its stock of buildings dating from the boom years, had ample provision for new teahouses, restaurants and antique shops to cater to a new wave of visitors. When Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 animated feature “Spirited Away” was rumored to have been inspired by Jiufen, the town’s reputation as an international and domestic tourist destination was secured. Artist Hung Chih-sheng (洪志勝) is enamored of the local landscape, which inspired him to transform the derelict century-old residence of Wong Shan-ying (翁山英), a high-ranking mine official, into the Jioufen Teahouse in 1991, the first in the town. “The history of Jiufen and the surrounding area was so appealing that I felt the need to buy the property and breathe life back into it,” Hung said of the wood and stone building. After renovation and maintenance, its historic architecture stands out as a visitor site and a tangible slice of local history. Hung decorated the interior with products like his own teaware designs, along with other gift items. In 2004 the structure was one of the first in the district to be designated a historic building by the New Taipei City Government. More than 10 other structures and sites related to the region’s mining history have been accorded official designation to date, including a Japanese-style chalet in Jinguashi built in 1922 in anticipation of–but never used for–the visit of Japanese Imperial Crown Prince Hirohito. Another historic building is the Shuinandong smelting factory, also known as the Remains of 13 Levels. Completed in 1935, it was once the largest of its kind in East Asia, with equipment for refining and smelting metal ore actually extending over 18 levels of terraced mountainside. It has long been an iconic site for wedding photos, music videos and content creators looking for a dystopian industrial backdrop.   Hung Chih-sheng poses at a dilapidated historic residence in Jiufen in 1991, which he later transformed into a teahouse and gift shop (right). (Courtesy of Hung Chih-sheng／Photo by Chin Hung-hao) Tunnel Vision The Gold Museum, which comprises a complex of renovated structures dating from the Japanese era, was opened in 2004. The museum houses permanent exhibitions, introducing the mining and processing history of Jinguashi, Jiufen and Shuinandong, and displays items from the facility’s collection of approximately 900 pieces including mining implements and various types of ore. Special exhibitions include one on mineral pigments running until March 23 in a structure originally used for gold storage. Located next to the Gold Building and integral to the museum experience is a walk through the No. 5 Tunnel, which enables visitors to imagine the mine as it was decades ago. It is the best maintained of nine interconnected tunnels totaling hundreds of kilometers in length excavated beneath Jinguashi, with the highest tunnel situated at an altitude of approximately 580 meters and the lowest at 160 meters below sea level. The museum offers ad hoc courses taught by researchers and other experts on subjects like local history, geology and the natural environment. Since 2021 the museum has produced “Mine Story,” an annual publication on the area’s cultural, religious and ecological aspects with contributions from residents including Wu. The most recent issue, published in November 2024, tells the stories of locals working in various trades outside mining. Material for academic research abounds in Ruifang, with projects on architectural vestiges of the industrial past and surveys of vegetation around mine tunnels underway to enhance understanding of historical development.   Built in 2004, the Gold Museum is a top tourist attraction in Jinguashi, with exhibits ranging from goldsmith tools to gold ore. (Photo by Chin Hung-hao) Over the past 35 years the mountain mining towns of the northeast coast have welcomed significant numbers of visitors to their unique cultural landscape. In 2024 approximately one million people visited the Gold Museum, and Jiufen’s old streets attracted more than 3.2 million tourists. With an application pending to be designated as a geopark by the local government, the towns are sure to maintain their positions on visitor itineraries. According to Wu, more than half of his teahouse’s patrons hail from outside Taiwan. “Jinguashi and Jiufen, set in spectacular rugged landscape, are truly unique and worth exploring for industrial history buffs and casual visitors alike,” said Gold Museum Director Lin Wen-chung (林文中). The former mining towns of Jiufen and Jinguashi, together with the smelting site at Shuinandong, are on a Ministry of Culture application for potential world heritage site status. According to the World Heritage Convention, sites must be of outstanding universal value and meet at least one of ten selection criteria. Jiufen, Jinguashi and Shuinandong have been nominated as a group according to criteria two and five: to exhibit an important interchange of human values, over a span of time, on developments in architecture or technology, monumental arts, town-planning or landscape design; and to be an outstanding example of a traditional human land use representative of a culture, or of human interaction with the environment that has become vulnerable under the impact of irreversible change. “Ruifang’s gold and copper mining history deserves international recognition, as it had a profound impact on many people’s lives far beyond the area,” Lin said. Write to Oscar Chung at mhchung@mofa.gov.tw