Jiufen and Jinguashi: Gold Mining Towns on Taiwan’s Northeast Coast

Before dawn breaks over Jiufen, the hillside village is quiet: shuttered teahouses, mist caught in the stepped lanes, red lanterns still lit from the night before. By mid-morning the same lanes are threaded with day-trippers from Taipei, drawn by a view that has become one of Taiwan’s most photographed. Few of them know they are walking through what was, in the 1930s, one of the most productive gold mines in the Japanese empire. On the Taiwan Lantern Festival small group tour, the hillside villages of Chiufen — the spelling used in this itinerary — and neighbouring Jinguashi are a deliberate pause on the road to a very different kind of spectacle: the sky lantern release at Pingxi later the same day.

A Gold Rush in the Mountains

The gold that built Jiufen was found almost by accident. In 1890, workmen building the Taipei-Keelung railway line found flecks of gold in the gravel of the Keelung River. Within three years, prospectors had traced the source uphill into the surrounding mountains, where a rich seam of gold-bearing quartz turned a scattering of hillside households into a boomtown. The village took its name, Jiufen — “nine portions” — from an old habit of nine founding families requesting nine shares of any goods delivered from town; the name stuck long after the reason for it had passed into folklore.

When Japan took control of Taiwan in 1895, colonial administrators moved quickly to bring the mines under centralised control. The Fujita-gumi company, which also operated the Iwami Ginzan silver mine in Japan, took over the Jiufen claim and brought in updated mining technology and experienced engineers. Mining rights over the richer seams at neighbouring Jinguashi passed to what became the Kinkaseki mine, and by 1935 it was generating up to 2.6 tonnes of gold a year, making it the most productive gold mine in the Japanese empire at the time. Jinguashi grew into a purpose-built company town of dormitories, offices and a hillside Shinto shrine, while Jiufen kept its older, more organic shape: houses stacked tightly along the contours of the slope, connected by stepped lanes too narrow for a cart.

The Kinkaseki Prisoner-of-War Camp

The mines’ most difficult chapter belongs to the Second World War. In 1942, the Japanese established a prisoner-of-war camp at Jinguashi, known to its inmates as Kinkaseki, and put Allied soldiers captured largely at the fall of Singapore — many of them British — to work underground. Conditions were severe: narrow tunnels, heat, and forced labour with minimal food or medical care. Of the roughly 430 Allied prisoners who died across Taiwan’s fourteen wartime POW camps, the majority died at Kinkaseki. The Gold Museum at the Gold Ecological Park today sets aside a memorial to the men who were held there, a quiet counterpoint to the picturesque lanes a short walk away.

How much walking and how many stairs does a visit to Jiufen and Jinguashi involve?

Expect a good deal of both. This stop falls within the tour’s Level 2 (Moderate) activity rating, which allows for three to five hours of walking a day, at times over uneven ground and the equivalent of up to eight kilometres. Jiufen’s Old Street is a covered, stepped lane with no vehicle access, and the connecting alleys running off it are narrower still, with irregular stone steps and no consistent handrail. Jinguashi’s Gold Ecological Park is more forgiving underfoot, with graded paths linking the museum buildings, though the hillside site still involves a steady, gradual climb.

From Boomtown to Ghost Town, and Back

Gold mining at Jiufen wound down through the 1960s and stopped in 1971; the larger Kinkaseki operation at Jinguashi held on until 1987, by which point falling copper prices had made the whole operation unviable. Without the mines, both towns lost their reason for being. Jiufen in particular fell quiet for the better part of two decades, its teahouses shuttered and its population dwindling.

The town’s revival began in 1989, when director Hou Hsiao-hsien shot much of A City of Sadness — a film about a Taiwanese family caught in the political violence following the Second World War — on Jiufen’s streets. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and the attention it brought to Jiufen’s steep lanes and lantern-lit teahouses started a slow return of visitors that has, in the decades since, turned into one of the busiest day-trip destinations near Taipei.

Did Jiufen really inspire the film Spirited Away?

Almost certainly not, despite how often the claim is repeated. Hayao Miyazaki has said publicly that the film’s setting draws on a number of places rather than any single one, and there’s no record of him visiting Jiufen before making the film. What’s true is the resemblance: the layered rooftops, the covered lane strung with lanterns, and the hillside teahouses do genuinely echo the film’s bathhouse town, which is reason enough that the comparison isn’t going away. Visitors drawn by the association tend to leave just as interested in the older, harder history the town is actually built on.

The Gold Ecological Park and Jinguashi’s Industrial Ruins

Jinguashi’s mining-era buildings have been preserved as the Gold Ecological Park, a hillside site linking 1930s offices, workers’ dormitories and the Gold Museum by a network of walking paths. The museum’s centrepiece exhibit is a large gold bar, reputedly one of the largest on public display anywhere, alongside displays on the mine’s Japanese-era operations. The Benshan Fifth Tunnel, a short section of the original mine reconstructed for visitors, gives a sense of the cramped, dimly lit conditions underground — the same conditions endured by the POW labourers held here during the war. Above the park, the ruined stone gateways of a Japanese Shinto shrine sit half-reclaimed by the hillside, and the Crown Prince Chalet — built in 1922, reportedly to host the future Emperor Hirohito on an inspection tour that in the end never happened — remains as a garden villa with sweeping views to the coast.

Further down the hill, near Shuinandong, the Remains of the Thirteen Levels mark where ore from both Jiufen and Jinguashi was once smelted. Built in 1933 and abandoned when the mines closed, the tiered concrete structure climbs the hillside above the coast in a stack of ruined platforms, visible from several lookout points along the coastal road but no longer open to the public. The Golden Waterfall nearby, and the Yin-Yang Sea where mineral runoff colours the water a distinctive turquoise against the deep blue of the open ocean, complete what is now one of Taiwan’s more striking stretches of industrial-era landscape.

Is the Gold Ecological Park’s mine tunnel included in the tour visit?

This is one to confirm with your Tour Specialist before you travel. The published itinerary describes Day 2 as a pause in the hillside villages of Chiufen on the way to Pingxi, rather than a scheduled museum stop, so whether entry to the Gold Ecological Park and the Benshan Fifth Tunnel is included, optional, or better suited to free time on the day is worth checking directly against the current itinerary.

Jiufen’s Old Street and Its Teahouses

Jiufen’s main thoroughfare, Jishan Street, is nicknamed the “Dark Street” for how little daylight reaches its covered, narrow run — a legacy of the town’s cramped, mountainside construction rather than any deliberate design. Stalls along it sell the food Jiufen has become known for: taro balls in sweet syrup, fish ball soup, and stewed tea eggs kept warm in large vats near the entrance. Steep, narrow staircases branch off the main street to reach the upper and lower parts of the village, connecting a warren of teahouses, guesthouses and family homes that still function as a working town, not just a tourist set.

The best known of the teahouses, the century-old A-Mei Teahouse, occupies a wooden building carved with traditional masks, its balcony looking out over layered rooftops toward the coast. A pot of Chinese tea and a plate of pineapple cake here, taken at a table with that view, is as close as Jiufen comes to a signature experience — quieter and more contemplative than the crowded lane below it. Odyssey’s article on the sky lantern release at Pingxi picks up the day’s story from here, as the tour continues on to the afternoon’s main event.

When is the best time to see Jiufen without the weekend crowds?

Weekday mornings are the quietest window. Jiufen draws large numbers of day-trippers from Taipei on weekends in particular, when tour coaches and the narrow lane combine to slow movement along the Old Street to a shuffle. An early arrival, before the bulk of independent day-trippers reach the village, gives a genuinely different experience of the same streets — quiet enough to hear the lanterns creak in the wind rather than the crowd beneath them.

Two Towns, One Route East

On the tour itself, Chiufen and Jinguashi are the first stop in a day that ends in the mountains at Pingxi, but the wider route keeps returning to the same themes of industry, landscape and quiet coastal towns for several days afterward. Two days later, the route runs along the coast past the marble cliffs of Qingshui, and pauses inland at the Lanyang Museum’s landscape architecture, another building shaped directly by the coastline it sits beside. Odyssey’s Taiwan Lantern Festival journey ties these stops together as a single arc, from the old gold towns of the northeast to the lantern festivals that give the tour its name.

Are Jiufen’s steep lanes manageable if you’re travelling on your own?

Yes, with the same caveats that apply to anyone walking Jiufen’s Old Street. The lanes are busy but well used, with a steady flow of other visitors rather than isolated stretches, and travelling as part of a small group means there’s always someone nearby and a fixed meeting point to return to. The uneven stone steps and occasional crowding are the main practical concerns rather than anything specific to travelling solo — worth factoring in regardless of who you’re travelling with, particularly if stairs are a consideration for you.

Jiufen and Jinguashi reward the kind of slower, curious travel this tour is built around: a morning spent in towns that were, within living memory, both immensely profitable and genuinely brutal to work in, before the afternoon turns to something lighter at Pingxi. For general planning questions on visas, currency or getting around once you’re in Taiwan, Odyssey’s guide to travelling in Taiwan covers the practical groundwork; this stop is where the tour’s own story really begins.