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

At the Coalface

Industrial legacy creates international links and leverages cultural tourism.   New Taipei City’s Pingxi District was once a prosperous mining area northeast of the capital, Taipei City. A rail line was constructed in the early 1920s during the Japanese colonial era (1895-1945) to transport coal, which is now part of the state-run Taiwan Railway Corporation’s network. The Pingxi branch line connects the scenic mountainous area with mainline trains and offers access to seven historic stations along the 12.9-kilometer route. There are attractions all along the line, from the first stop’s eponymous Jingtong Mining Life Museum, which offers visitors a ride on an underground coal train and firefly watching at dusk, to Taiwan’s widest waterfall at Shifen and a stroll along the old streets lined with restaurants and gift shops. Tangible coal mining heritage draws visitors to the area and acts as a catalyst for local cultural creative businesses. David Gong (龔俊逸) owns and runs the Xinpingxi Taiwan Coal Mine Museum (TCMM) at a former mining site that operated from 1965 to 1997. The museum has received assistance from a regional revitalization initiative supported by the Cabinet-level National Development Council since 2019. The coal museum was added to a government list of model community museums in 2003 and is now part of the Cultural Routes of Taiwan (CRT) project, which was launched in 2021 by the Ministry of Culture’s Bureau of Cultural Heritage (BOCH) to continue community regeneration campaigns begun in the 1990s. CRT’s mining department aims to preserve and revive dozens of former extraction industry settlements across northern Taiwan from Keelung City to Hsinchu and Miaoli counties.   Trainee tour guides receive mentoring in Pingxi District’s Jingtong. (Courtesy of Bureau of Cultural Heritage, Ministry of Culture) BOCH Chief Secretary Chang Yu-chuang (張祐創) connected the origins of coal mining in what is now New Taipei’s coastal Jinshan District to the activities of the Dutch East India Company during the 17th century, outlining industrial extraction starting in the colonial Japanese era and continuing in the post-World War II years. “For many decades locally produced coal was a major energy source and played a pivotal role in industrial development as it was essential to electricity generation,” Chang said, noting that easy access to the fossil fuel was the driving force behind Taiwan’s economic takeoff in the 1960s and was also instrumental in weathering the emerging powerhouse through the global oil crises of the 1970s. “The industry is a repository for collective memory,” he added. Chang pointed out that the extraction industry once extended widely into what are now considered urban areas and government-managed heritage sites in northern Taiwan ranging from the Houtong Coal Mine Ecological Park (CMEP) in New Taipei’s Ruifang District to Taipei’s Dexing and Hexing sites, adjacent to upscale Xinyi District. Up until the 1960s and ‘70s, working mines were located on the outskirts of Taipei, and their traces can be found as tunnel mouths, overgrown rail tracks and abandoned machine rooms, often alongside popular hiking trails. Rich Vein The BOCH office in central Taiwan’s Taichung City operates out of a 5.6-hectare former colonial era brewery that is now a cultural heritage park. Since last October it has presented exhibitions on CRT project results from mining heritage including surveys, data collection, field studies and oral history interviews with former miners and their families. “We wanted to focus on anecdotes about their daily lives, including their spiritual beliefs, the temples they prayed at and other places they frequented,” Chang said. “These memories must be captured and recorded as soon as possible as there are fewer people left alive to tell them.”   New Taipei City Houtong Miners’ Culture and History Association Chair Ko Mao-lin talks about his experiences as a miner. (Photo by Chen Mei-ling) Some of the oral histories and tangible materials have been adapted into scripts and performed as dramas at venues like TCMM and CMEP, which produced coal for seven decades up until 1990. “We welcome activities that bring our stories to life,” said Ko Mao-lin (柯茂琳), a retired mine worker. He chairs the New Taipei City Houtong Miners’ Culture and History Association, which manages a community museum set up in 2019 at the Houtong park and is a major source of the CRT results showcased in Taichung. Last December Hsinchu-based Theater Naturally Connected’s work “A-Shan” took audiences across the Xinpingxi site as they followed the character of a young miner facing his first day in the mines and anxious about the dangerous work environment. Growing up, TCMM’s Gong had no illusions about the risks of mining, as his grandfather started a mining business in Keelung during the 1950s and his father moved to Xinpingxi to work in the family business in the 1980s. “The industry had a miserable image associated with poverty and accidents,” he said. “However, in recent years it has gradually shed some of the tragic associations and is now part of a broader focus on labor history and its role in the country’s economic success.” In its heyday Xinpingxi employed around 500 workers, who lived in Shifen and formed a thriving community, and there were 17 coal mines along the Pingxi branch line. “In addition to preservation of industrial heritage, there are hundreds of local memories from a variety of perspectives to record and be shared,” Gong said.   Houtong Coal Mine Ecological Park in New Taipei’s Ruifang District presents exhibits in a former miners’ washroom. (Photo by Chen Mei-ling) Synchronous Reevaluation For the past 22 years Xinpingxi has hosted retired miners’ annual reunions. Last November’s get-together took the form of a concert with a videolink to Japan’s Tagawa City Coal and History Museum in Fukuoka City and the Kushiro City Museum in Hokkaido prefecture, which have signed friendship agreements with TCMM. The facility’s global outreach extended to London-headquartered International Committee for the Conservation of Industrial Heritage in 2022, when Gong presented a paper on the rehabilitation of Taiwan’s mining sites during the committee’s triennial congress in Montreal, Canada. “They’re assessing a conference paper I submitted for possible inclusion in a published collection on industrial conservation,” he said. The next event will be held in August 2025 in the northern Swedish mining town Kiruna. Last December, New Taipei City Government listed TCMM as a historic building group, making it one of 173 such sites across the country with national conservation recognition in the business category under the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act. Chang pointed to similarities between management models and urban planning schemes abroad like the Coal Miners’ Museum in the U.S. state of Kentucky and a similar facility in Sawahlunto in West Sumatra, Indonesia. “These all address cultural tourism development in the post-mining era,” he said. “While mining history usually has a negative environmental image, it can also give rise to a new style of leisure combining social history and education at sites that are pleasant to visit because they have reverted to nature.” The BOCH is looking for creative solutions from public and private bodies for issues such as funding and land ownership to leverage tangible mining heritage to benefit local communities. Regional networks of legacy research and educational activities resulting from CRT projects have often emerged due to collaboration between central or local government bodies like BOCH and New Taipei’s municipal Tourism and Travel Department and civic sector organizations like the Houtong miners’ group. One example of cultural tourism benefiting the community is local residents acting as tour guides in mining towns. “They offer understanding and perspective on a vital chapter in Taiwan’s industrial development as a step on the way to the economic success we enjoy today,” Chang said. Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw